These car parking spaces are not 'additional' at all

From M M Keeping.

LAST week, we were treated to a masterpiece of political cynicism, the like of which I have not witnessed in many a year.

I refer to the unveiling of Deputy Kevin Lewis’s plan to provide 90 additional car parking spaces at Snow Hill. Now, under normal circumstances a proposal to provide additional parking in or around town should be broadly welcomed.

However, the operative word here is ‘additional’, for if it were not for the proposal to locate the new police headquarters on Green Street car park which, if approved, would result in the loss of 91 car parking spaces, it would indeed be additional, but it isn’t.

This proposal is designed purely to placate the strong opposition that the new police HQ proposal is receiving from both the public and from a growing number of States Members, due to the impact that it will have on traffic in the area and the loss of the 91 parking spaces.

Here we have Deputy Lewis on the one hand proposing the introduction, in these austere times, of an increase in parking charges, which he tells us is due to the mounting costs of maintaining the Island’s present stock of car parks and who, on the other, suddenly, as if by magic, reveals that he has found an additional £4.8m to build 90 spaces at Snow Hill.

Without doubt, this proposal has been hastily cobbled together in order to be announced just before the States are due to debate on 19 February Deputy Judy Martin’s proposition to abandon the new police HQ proposal altogether. I say hastily because if it had been carefully thought-out, no one in their right mind would recommend paying £53,000 per car space which, by any standards, represents extremely poor value for money.

Where, one might ask, did this £4.8m come from? The answer – from the Treasury, the minister for which just so happens to beSenator Ozouf, the driving force behind the new police HQ proposal and who also masterminded the original Lime Grove fiasco that resulted in this ridiculous proposal being put forward in the first place.

Now, I do not usually engage in conspiracy theories so I will leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions, but this is shabby politics in the extreme and I sincerely hope that States Members view it as such when voting on 19 February.