A £15,000-PROJECT to block dangerous parking at a protected and ecologically sensitive area of St Ouen’s Bay is a ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’, a heritage campaigner has said.
Alastair Layzell described the planned installation of bollards – which are set to be placed between El Tico and Le Braye – as ‘beyond appalling’, calling the move an urbanisation of the Island’s Coastal National Park.
However, St Peter’s honorary police have defended the move and said that during the summer vehicles had been parked illegally, forcing pedestrians to walk into the 40mph road, risking their safety.
Infrastructure Minister Kevin Lewis has signed a ministerial decision allocating £15,000 to the project, which will be overseen by government staff.
Mr Layzell said: ‘The public do not seem to have been consulted on this in any way at all and, from an email I have seen, I understand that work could be starting as early as next week.
‘This is an SSI [site of special interest] and it is also in the Coastal National Park and here we are urbanising it with kerbs and bollards. Parking is not a problem there in the winter – it is only during the summer, when it is a very hot day and the tides are high. It is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.’
He added: ‘I am 63 and I have seen the Island being urbanised over the years. St Ouen was an area where I sought refuge, but they now seem to be having a go at that too. It is beyond appalling. We need a bit of common sense.’
Mr Layzell questioned whether planning permission needed to be sought for the work and asked why the painting of a yellow line would not address issues.
Environmentalist John Pinel agreed and stated that the department should ‘reconsider’ the plans.
He said: ‘When there are significant changes taking place in the Coastal National Park, which is a hugely important landscape area, without any scrutiny, it seems rather unfair.
‘I appreciate it is an exempt development under the terms of the law, but there has been a lot of talk of the coastline recently in the Bridging Island Plan and inspectors have recommended that a potential extension to the line of the Coastal National Park is accepted.
‘Why, then, do we go and do a car-parking development in the Coastal National Park, which is something that should be protected? I think it is reasonable to ask the department to reconsider.’
But St Peter Chef de Police Joao Camara said that an accident would happen if something was not done.
‘St Brelade, St Peter and St Ouen have all been contacted by IHE, Jersey Parks – because there is an SSI there – along with a whole bunch of other agencies. Between El Tico and Le Braye there have been problems with vehicles parking on the verge.
A lot of people are not aware that that area was bought through compulsory purchase by the States for a footpath.
‘We have had a complaint from a man who was walking his daughter in a wheelchair along there and had to go into the road, which is 40mph, because of cars parking there. Since then, we have been actively engaging with different agencies to ask what can be done to make parking more formalised.
‘I used to go down to the Splash all the time 30 years ago and people used to park on the road then, but cars were a lot smaller back then. We did not have these big trucks that have destroyed the verge. We also have an issue with cars coming out of El Tico not being able to see cars coming.’
Mr Camara added that there were around 30 official car parks along the Five Mile Road and urged visitors to St Ouen’s Bay to use one of those instead.
‘We welcome the plans. Our number-one priority is public safety. We were worried that because of the volume of cars along there that there would inevitably be an accident.
‘We want to nip the problem in the bud before it gets to that point,’ he said.
It is not the first time parking issues have plagued St Ouen’s Bay.
Complaints of antisocial behaviour in 2019 at Le Port, a car park which had grown in popularity with campervan users, led to a ministerial decision preventing parking there for more than 12 hours in a day. Since then, alternative arrangements for campervans have been discussed but have failed to establish any new sites.
