The parking row was never really about parking

You've read this one already. Maybe five times since June. Council puts in meters. Traders say the tills have gone quiet. Someone takes a hammer to a ticket machine. A councillor says the town will die without the money. And then everybody piles into a Facebook group at half eleven at night to explain, at length, in capitals, why everyone else is an idiot.

Monday it goes back to the council. Same room, same faces, probably the same arguments.

But there's a bit of this that hasn't had much attention. The charges came in on 1 June. Councillors wouldn't pause them, but they did order an early review, and until that review reports, nobody else in East Lothian gets charges. Not Dunbar. Not Haddington, Musselburgh or Tranent. They're all waiting to see what happens to us.

So we're the experiment. Which makes it worth being careful about what we're actually arguing over, because I don't think it's parking.

About those numbers

Councillor Jeremy Findlay walked the High Street and came back with takings down 20% to 60% on last year, one business reckoning they were £1,000 a day light. There's also a survey of 507 people, 18% of whom said they wouldn't come back, 87% of those blaming the charges.

Now. I'd quite like these numbers to be true, because they'd settle things. But they're self-reported, they were collected by people who already knew what answer they wanted, and "I'm never coming back" is roughly the least reliable sentence a human being can produce on a clipboard in July. I've said it about an Ikea car park. I went back a fortnight later.

That doesn't make them nothing. A shopkeeper telling you the till's down 40% knows their till. But you can't hang a policy on it.

The number that would actually settle it doesn't seem to exist. Footfall counts. Card spend. How full the bays actually are, before and after. The council has the parking data sitting in a machine. The banks have the spending data. Nobody has put the two next to each other, so all any of us are doing is describing our own summer and calling it evidence.

Three rows, one row

Here's what I keep coming back to. In eight weeks this town has managed three separate arguments, and I'm no longer sure they're separate.

There's parking. There's the visitor levy, 5% on paid overnight stays, about £1.2 million a year, consultation open until 18 September, which the community council has already resolved to object to on the grounds that it's a tax on a tax. And underneath both, grinding away for years now, there's holiday lets: 232 of them in town at the last count, 538 bedrooms, something like a third of the town centre, maybe half of certain streets, let out rather than lived in.

Three coats. One issue underneath.

Because a parking space, a flat above a shop and a bed for the night are all the same thing when you squint. A bit of a town centre that isn't getting any bigger, wanted by more people than can have it. And the council only owns one tool. Put a price on it. See who's still standing.

The objection is fair enough: the people who live here end up paying a charge that was designed with day-trippers in mind. Nobody's really answered that.

But there's a trap in it, and I'd rather say so out loud. Argue against pricing in all three at once and what you're defending is the way things are. And the way things are is a town where a two-bed flat is worth more empty in February than it is with a family in it.

The question I'd want asked

Buried in that local research is a figure that went almost entirely unnoticed. A two-bed short-term let is reckoned to generate about £11,600 of local economic value a year. The same flat, lived in, generates about £17,600.

Sit with that for a second. The whole case for visitor accommodation is that tourists spend money and the money is good for us. If those numbers are even in the right postcode, the holiday let is worse on both counts. Fewer neighbours and less money. That's not a trade-off, that's just losing twice.

Which brings me to Monday, and the question I'd want asked. It isn't "will you scrap the charges", because they won't, and everyone in the room knows they won't.

It's: where's the money going?

A parking charge that pays for a summer bus, or a park-and-ride, or keeping the seafront that people are driving here to look at in decent nick, is a completely different animal from a parking charge that vanishes into the general fund and is never spoken of again. And I genuinely don't know which one this is. Ask around the High Street and nobody else does either. That gap, I think, is where most of the anger actually lives. Not in the tariff.

If you just want to know what your street costs and where you can still park for nothing, that's a different job and somebody's already done it: the live parking map (opens in a new tab) has every street in the zone, the free options, and how busy the car parks are.

Ask anyone whether they fancy paying to park outside their own butcher and you'll get a short answer. Ask whether they'd wear it if it visibly paid for the bus, and you're having a different conversation entirely. As far as I can tell nobody's put it to us that way. If I've missed it, tell me, and I'll say so next week.

Diary

Review goes to council Monday 25 August. Levy consultation shuts 18 September, and even if it goes ahead the earliest it'd start is spring 2028, so there's rather more time to shape it than the shouting suggests.

Meetings are open, papers go up beforehand. If there's a question you think is worth putting, reply to this and tell me. And if you're there on Monday, I'd like to hear what you made of it.