Consultations - Home - Wandsworth Council

How the consultation process works

Introduction
Parking is an emotive subject and none more so than when residents are suspicious about a council's motive for introducing parking controls. No one likes to pay to park and Wandsworth has always taken the view that parking controls will only be introduced where residents and businesses ask for them.

Our policy of responding to demand from residents and businesses, and of carrying out a detailed consultation before proposing the implementation of parking controls, helped us to achieve a Charter Mark award in 1999, and to successfully retain it in 2002 and 2005.

Consultation process
We produce a leaflet and questionnaire that we deliver to every property in the consultation area. In this document we set out the arguments for and against having parking controls, what it will cost and ask a series of questions that will help us design a scheme if residents and businesses want it.

We aim to obtain a minimum 25% response rate to our consultations, and try to make it easy and convenient for everyone to respond by providing postage paid questionnaires. We produce spreadsheets of the results that show the individual responses from each household and business.These enable us to accurately define the areas where there is support for the introduction of controls and those areas where the proposals will not be progressed.

Getting businesses to respond to the consultation in sufficient numbers can be a problem. We try to deliver consultation documents to businesses during their opening hours, to ensure they are received.

The analysis of the questionnaire and comments also helps us to ensure that the design of a proposed zone most accurately reflects the desires of the community, be it one-hour zones, controls on Saturday or any other local factor to the area.

The results of parking consultations are reported to the Planning and Transportation Overview and Scrutiny Committee, or, if previously approved by the Committee and Executive, submitted to the Cabinet Member for Planning and Transportation for consideration.

Parking controls will only be introduced if there is a sufficient response rate to the consultation, a clear majority are in favour of parking controls, and approval to implement controls is obtained.

Residents and businesses are informed of the results by letter. The results of the consultation can also be found on our website.

Order making
We implement most of our new zones under experimental traffic management orders so that we can provide the protection that residents want from commuter parking quickly.

The complete process, from consultation to zone implementation, generally takes us about three to six months. The process takes time as we are required to consult the police and emergency services about our proposals, make and advertise the traffic management order, and manufacture and install parking signs, as well as road markings

After a new zone has been operational for six months, we carry out a review consultation to find out if the controls are working properly.