Councils Are Spending Millions to Save the High Street While Charging You £4 an Hour to Park on It

Three stops on the high street costs you £12 before you've touched a door handle. That is the maths councils have built, apparently without noticing.

I find this genuinely baffling. Local authorities across Britain are running programmes, funding initiatives, commissioning reports, all aimed at saving the high street. Millions of pounds a year pointed at the problem. Then the same council charges you £4 an hour to park while you do your bit.

Three errands. Coffee shop, butcher, maybe a gift. That is three hours minimum if you're being realistic about queues and a quick chat. Twelve pounds spent before you've spent a penny with an independent. That is the entry fee the council has set for supporting local business.

Now look at what the retail park offers. Free parking. Easy access. No clock ticking in your head while you browse. The biggest brands in the world, and it costs you nothing to get through the door. The incentive structure could not be clearer if someone had designed it deliberately to hurt the independents.

I am not blaming anyone. I am just reading the system as it sits. When you make one behaviour cheap and another behaviour expensive, people choose the cheap one. That is not a moral failing in the shopper. That is how incentives work.

What baffles me most is that the fix is obvious. You do not even need to scrap parking charges entirely. Run an independent scheme: shop at an independent business and your parking is validated, or free for the first hour, or capped. Locate the independents near the cheaper or the free bays and make that legible to people. Something. Anything that does not actively punish the behaviour you are supposedly spending millions to encourage.

Instead, councils spend on the programmes and undermine them at the first point of contact. The consumer hits the parking charge before they've set foot in a single shop. The retail park is already winning before the independent has even had a chance.

If you have watched a local independent close, or if parking charges are the reason you now drive past one you used to love, send your story to keepthemopen.com.