CIRENCESTER Chamber of Commerce conducted a survey among the 700 businesses on its database in the GL7 area in October 2014 and the number one issue affecting businesses was the lack of adequate car parking in Cirencester.

The chamber members put their heads together to come up with a number of suggestions to help.

We wrote to Cotswold District Council officers in January 2015 — we met three times eventually with Frank Wilson, your most senior officer.

The initial tone of the conversations from CDC was dismissive: “There is not a problem, go away.”

Eventually, councillors and officers accepted there was an issue and in September 2015 you and I attended a stakeholder event at Trinity Road where it was most clearly stated that there is a problem of insufficient car parking capacity and that CDC has a stranglehold over car park provision in the town.

I stated that there was an urgent need to increase capacity, which was noted and widely accepted.

Here we are nearly six months later and you write a long, laborious letter of apology in the Wilts and Glos Standard, twice referring to working with the Chamber and trying to convince the people of Cirencester that it is a difficult problem and you need to undertake complicated studies that take time.

The problem is very clear for all to see — there is not enough car parking capacity in the town.

Twenty-five years ago St James’s Place was a small start-up company employing three people in the town, there were no houses built at Kingshill and no notion of a development at Chesterton. At that time there were over 1,300 public access spaces in CDC car parks.

In 2016 St James’s Place employs 800 people and, following their current development, will employ many more. There are more than 500 new homes at Kingshill and it seems likely that there will be development at Chesterton. However, the number of parking spaces in CDC car parks has fallen to around 1,200.

CDC planning authority has presided over and promoted these changes, granted the consents that have allowed our town to grow and to prosper, which many of us think is a good thing. But I would suggest that as an authority you have badly fallen down in your duty to balance the needs of a prospering town with the need to develop the infrastructure, most notably the provision of car parking.

You may need to have expert advice about long-term solutions for inclusion in the Local Plan, but you and your administration has had long enough to formulate a strategy and a plan for more parking provision.

The town needs greater car parking capacity now; business is being lost and retailers are closing down.

The answers are staring us all in the face: 1. Build one or more multi-storey car parks 2. Release the CDC stranglehold on parking provision 3. Allow pay on exit parking 4. Allow contract parking solutions 5. Create diverse car parking options for the town Businesses, residents and visitors all say the same thing – “lovely town but a shame we cannot park.”

The next stage is also very clear: “we cannot park, we are going elsewhere.”

This is a seven-day-a-week problem, not an occasional one as you suggest.

At the Chamber of Commerce we invest a lot of our time and effort in building relationships throughout the town, believing that working together we can achieve a lot more than on our own.

Right now CDC is very strongly viewed as the problem whereas they should be serving the people and businesses in helping to be part of the solution.

The parking situation has reached crisis point, our members are losing business and visitors are deserting our town. Your immediate action is required.

SIMON LARGE

President, Cirencester Chamber of Commerce