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‘School-run mothers should be given Asbos’
Call to get tough on mums searching for parking spaces
SCHOOL-RUN mums should be slapped with Asbos for repeated nuisance behaviour, the Town Hall has been told.
Jo Konrad, representing six different Hampstead residents associations, said parents who circle schools every morning waiting for a parking space should be taken to court and hit with behaviour orders.
She said: “This is anti-social behaviour and it beggars belief that people act like this. The idea of parents in cars, circling slowly round schools, is awful.”
Ms Konrad was speaking at a council scrutiny meeting on school-run congestion and on behalf of associations covering Belsize Park, Redington and Frognal, Fitzjohns Avenue, Maresfield Road and Netherhall Road and Wedderburn Road.
She said that there were strong feelings among their 9,000 members about the effect of traffic caused by schools in Hampstead.
Ms Konrad added: “The council should remove parking dispensations and have rigorous enforcement of the parking laws.”
Councillors considered a report by environment officers reviewing the Town Hall’s school-run policy and the gradual phasing out of parking permits which allow them to drop children off at schools in Hampstead.
A five-year plan has seen the number of permits decrease by 20 per cent each year. Parents represented by the School Travel Action Group, whose children attend a cluster of private schools, said they want a paid-for scratchcard system introduced, with money raised going towards a subsidised bus service to replace the current permits.
Ms Konrad’s views were supported by Helen Marcus, of the Heath and Hampstead Society. She said that private schools – run for profit as private businesses – were enticing parents with the cachet of having an NW3 address, but being subsidised by council tax payers.
She said: “It is hard to see any moral or legal justification for these schemes. We have to pay for our parking permits, so why should they invade the streets for free? We would like to see the controlled parking zones in Hampstead start earlier to make it illegal to park in residents spaces.”
Hampstead’s Safer Neighbourhood panel chairman, Rupert Terry, said he feared the response times for emergency services were hampered by hordes of children being driven to private schools.
He said: “This congestion is dangerous.”
Speaking on behalf of the pro-permit Travel Working Group, Jane Simmonds said if parents could buy parking vouchers, the money raised – estimated to be a gross figure of £750,000 before any administration is paid for – should go towards providing school buses. She said: “Parents will continue to drive until other options are put in place.”
She added that the accusation that schools had turned a blind eye to the problem was unfair. Ms Simmonds added: “There have been five bus schemes established in the past three years.”
The scrutiny panel, a committee of backbenchers that monitor Town Hall policy, will report back to the council’s Lib Dem and Conservative coalition in two weeks. |
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