Norwich car parks to cost more from March
Fees for parking in facilities including St Andrews, St Giles and Rose Lane will go up
Car parking charges are set to increase across Norwich as City Hall seeks to raise extra cash.
Fees for parking in the city’s surface and multi-storey facilities including St Andrews, St Giles and Rose Lane will go up at the end of March.
These prices were frozen in Norwich for five years until 2022 when they saw a hefty increase, and rose again last January.
The latest hikes will see charges increase by as much as 9pc with customers paying up to £22.40 to park in the city centre for five hours.
Norwich City Council says the new fees will generate an extra £300,000 income.
It says this will help it avoid making cuts to services such as bin collections.
However, it comes at a time when the authority is making huge spending commitments, such as £740,000 on paying consultants to redesign Norwich market and £750,000 for consultants to come up with designs for a hotel and flat complex behind City Hall.
The authority also needs to make more than £3m in savings over the coming year and hopes to achieve this through increased government funding and restructuring.
The new fees will result in most parking stays of between one and two hours go up by 10p or 20p.
The changes to multi-storey charges are:
St Andrews, going from between £2.20 (one hour) and £10.80 (over five hours) to £2.30 and £11.
Rose Lane, going from between £2.20 and £8.10 to £2.20 and £8.70.
St Giles, going from between £2.20 and £16.10 to £2.30 and £16.40.
The increases across pay and display car parks vary in scale.
The largest hike will be in Westwick Street, where the charge for more than five hours of parking will go from £7 to £7.60 – an increase of nearly 9pc.
It will also cost £22.40 to stay for more than five hours in the Chantry, Chapelfield East, Monastery Court and Pottergate car parks.
Season ticket prices will also increase, but on-street residential parking permits will remail unchanged.
Emma Hampton, deputy leader of the council, said increasing car park fees was a “last resort”.
She added: “With funding from central government dwindling, and the cost of things like energy and materials going up due to inflation, we are under financial pressure to do more with less – like all local councils up and down the country.”