Business declares war on the Workplace Parking Levy

Just when the City Council thought it was safe to downgrade the threat to their plans for a Workplace Parking Levy, along comes a bombshell.
Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce, the CBI and other big companies are meeting at Boots to form what can only be described as a council of war.
We’ll find out sometime this week how they plan to fight the WPL, but the early signs are that the council will now have to increase its WPL threat level to maximum.
Why? The businesses have threatened to make the levy an election issue.
Let’s recap. The council wants to introduce a WPL mainly to raise money to help fund extension of the tram system.
An independent inquiry concluded that while a WPL was far from ideal, it was the only option if the council wanted to meet its deadline.
That deadline is essentially political: the council is probably worried that if it doesn’t get the scheme signed off before the next election, an incoming (and possibly Conservative) government might stop the plan in its tracks.
Business has been opposed to the WPL from the start because they don’t see why business alone should pay for something everyone uses.
They’ve also suggested it would make Nottingham a less attractive place for would-be inward investors and encourage some firms to move out of the WPL zone.
Ominously, the British Chambers of Commerce – the umbrella organisation for Chambers across the country – says it will be holding Nottingham up as an example of a city where the relationship between the council and business isn’t working.
There may be some brinkmanship in all this.
But the council must know that it now has a fight on its hands, and that its hopes of a reasonably straightforward run-in to what would perhaps be a grudging acceptance of the WPL are in jeopardy.
We should not lose sight of the fact that by national standards Nottingham has a first-rate integrated transport system of which the tram has become a popular and accepted part.
But the council is going to have to work much, much harder to explain why it is employing a flawed, short-term tactic to achieve long-term strategic improvement.
Not for the first time, Nottingham City Council’s weak relationship with business is in the spotlight.