Illegal Parking Issues Leave Brighton Residents Frustrated On Estates

People living on housing estates in Brighton are having their lives blighted by illegal parking and blocked pavements.

Tenant and leaseholder reps from the Bates Estate, Coldean, North Moulsecoomb and Hollingdean urged Brighton and Hove City Council to take action.

They called for better enforcement at a meeting of a council housing management panel yesterday (Tuesday 10 June).

And they asked for Labour councillor Trevor Muten, the cabinet member for transport and parking, to come to their next meeting.

In Hollingdean, one of the few areas of Brighton and Hove with no resident parking restrictions, ambulances have struggled to reach patients because of cars parked illegally on double yellow lines.

Hollingdean Residents’ Association secretary Ian Beck said:

“There is no enforcement whatsoever in Hollingdean at the moment. I’ve reported at least a dozen times the five or six streets off Horton Road which at night time it’s impossible to get into them.

“With the aid of the council, we got double yellow lines put around each of these closes.

“But an ambulance tried to get into my street a few days ago for an emergency with a 92-year-old woman but the ambulance could not get in because a van was parked on the double yellow lines.

“After 8pm, no one seems to enforce these at all. Why are we still having to go through this again?”

The meeting was told that vehicles blocking Southmount, off Davey Drive, also delayed an ambulance – and it took 25 minutes to leave the road due to parked cars.

Earlier this year, two separate parking consultations were carried out for north and south Hollingdean to establish whether residents wanted a resident parking scheme.

The results have not yet been published but the council said that the indications were that people living south of Hollingbury Place, also known as The Dip, were in favour.

People living on the Bates Estate and in North Moulsecoomb and Coldean had issues with cars parked across dropped kerbs, restricting access for people in wheelchairs and parents with children in pushchairs.

Parking restrictions applied on the estates closest to the Amex stadium on Brighton and Hove Albion match days but parking issues were described as “massively increasing” on those days across the area.

Yet, on football match days, almost a quarter of the parking enforcement team were deployed in Coldean and Moulsecoomb.

Since last September, Coldean, which is zone B, had received 528 visits, lasting for 137 patrol hours, resulting in 450 penalty charge notices (PCNs) being issued.

In the same period, Moulsecoomb – a larger area – received 528 visits, lasting for 223 patrol hours, with 715 PCNs being issued.

Twelve of the parking tickets on the north Brighton estates were issued because vehicles were blocking a dropped kerb.

Residents were asked to share dates and locations if they believed that there was no enforcement so that the council’s parking team could check whether an area had been overlooked.

The meeting was told that the enforcement officers carried handheld devices which tracked them using global positioning system (GPS) data.