Tories are urged to abandon disabled parking charges   After a quiet spell since the initial uproar, the plan to charge disabled Blue Badge holders to park in Boston has been raised yet again.
The borough council’s Labour group has been looking at the approach by a couple of other local authorities towards parking charges for blue badge holders,  and come up with some worrying figures - which make nonsense of our Conservative leadership claims that the idea will be a money raiser.
The Tories say that charging the disabled will raise £80,000 of vital income, and one of them – town centre portfolio jefe Councillor Derek Richmond - even concocted the ludicrous argument: “If an able bodied person pays for a parking space, why shouldn’t a disabled person? They have a disability – 99% of them do not have a financial problem.
“Disabled people do not like to be discriminated against.”
And let’s not forget that in the same breath Councillor Richmond defended the decision to continue to allow councillors and staff to park free of charge – which creates a potential revenue loss to the council of more than £100,000.
Staff had been let off “as it was thought they had faced enough hardship recently, accepting a two year pay freeze and dealing with other restrictions” – the suggestion apparently being that the rest of us ...  aka the riff-raff ... have somehow escaped any similar treatment.
During the discussions about the plan - which eventually allowed the concession of an hour’s extra free parking for  blue badge holders  to hobble back to their cars - it was pointed out that current parking ticket dispensers are not disabled user friendly, and that more easily accessible machines will need to be installed.
The cost of this to taxpayers has now been highlighted by Labour, who say that installing 56 disability-  friendly parking meters in Lincoln was almost £200,000.
And although new meters were brought in after complaints that some disabled motorists could not use existing parking meters, there is still a question mark over their suitability - with Disabled Motoring UK, the charity for disabled drivers, passengers and blue badge holders, asserting that none of the meters presently being sold as “DDA” compliant actually are.
On its website, Labour says: “We have always been opposed to the idea of removing free disabled parking in Boston. We find £199,000 for these machines in Lincoln to be an incredible amount of money, especially as Boston Borough Council is now set to follow suit in its car parks.
“We have argued that the cash spent on these machines would have been better spent on keeping free services for disabled drivers, rather than installing machines that weren’t wanted.
“Boston’s Conservative administration is expecting the disabled parking charges to generate significant revenue every year.
“But records of how many disabled people use Boston’s car parks have never been kept, making the projections a “shot in the dark”.
The cost of new meters in Lincoln is around £3,600 per machine – and Boston Eye reckons that the number of machines will be little different than Boston, which operates 24 car parks - many which have more than one ticket machine.
Nearby Peterborough has abandoned charging the disabled. Their meters were also not disability friendly – but they took the more sensible view than rather waste a fortune on new machines, to continue free parking for blue badge holders.
“All that will happen in Boston is that blue badge holders will legitimately park on our streets causing potential blockages in our town,” says Labour.
“We have also been made aware of two firms of lawyers who specialise in supporting disabled people in making claims against organisations who discriminate against them. They work on a no-win, no-fee basis … with successful claims normally being settled in the range of £2,000 to £3,000 - potentially more cost to the council.
“Can the cost of each meter really be worth the cost of charging disabled people for blue badge parking in Boston?
“We would urge our Conservative councillors to do a U-turn on this ill thought out plan to charge blue badge holders.”

You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com   Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.
Our former blog is archived at: http://bostoneyelincolnshire.blogspot.com