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Sparks goes to the seaside and learns the new meaning of 'foreign'by Bill Blakemore - 00:20 on 06 June 2009  On the hottest day of the year so far I headed this week to Lancashire. The British Parking Association North West region had invited me to speak to a group of parking managers representing some of England's biggest cities and remotest rural areas.I decided to go by rail which meant getting off the high speed service at Wigan and changing to the Southport train. Southport was the end of the line and my destination, and I looked forward to my night away in the little Lancashire town with mixed feelings.
 But Southport is different. It has definitely NOT given up. It has a new pier, fine Victorian architecture, great food and (at least while I was there) amazing weather. And it still has the best of the British seaside holiday, with donkey rides and ice-cream and sailing boats.The sea was a different matter: I never found out how warm the water was. As I stood at the far end of Britain's second longest pier, the Irish Sea was still more than a mile away. No wonder they put telescopes on the pier - you haven't a hope at low tide of spotting even a puddle without assistance. But you can see Blackpool Tower eleven miles up the coast. It's a view Southport is famous for.  The parking managers gave me a warm northern welcome at West Lancashire Yacht Club and listened hard when I talked about what SPARKS is trying to achieve. They also told me about some of the challenges they face in these uncertain times. Lancashire County Council is reorganising parking enforcement so that from the autumn the responsibility will move from the district councils to the county. Some staff will transfer across; others may lose their jobs. Local council officers are not immune to layoffs. The real surprise however concerned how they see foreign registered vehicles. To some, foreign registered vehicles mean cars and lorries owned by the Scots! Tony Smith, Allerdale Borough Council parking manager, highlighted to me how road haulage companies based north of the border give English councils a headache. For once the problem is not that these vehicles cannot be identified. They can be, and DVLA has the details. However, when an English local authority wishes to take a Scots vehicle owner to court the differences between the two legal systems quickly make life problematic. I have come across this issue before in London. The collective knowledge of SPARKS Network members may turn up some solutions, perhaps with additional lobbying activity needed to get better integration of English and Scottish debt recovery law. It’s quite likely, I suppose, that the problem is felt in reverse by authorities in Scotland, when trying to get English vehicles to comply. I intend to look at this problem from both sides of the border in more detail in future months and will report back in due course.
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Are headcams the answer?What ever happened to Sleeping Beauty - the cross-border enforcement directive?Sparks travels to Newcastle and spends a morning with a bailiffSparks goes to the seaside and learns the new meaning of 'foreign'SPARKS heads east to win new membersMaltese visit highlights traffic challenges in one of Europe's smallest countriesForeign vehicles are invisible on the roads |
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So many British seaside resorts appear to have given up the fight of competing with their continental cousins for holiday business. Not enough new money has been put into modernizing their facilities and many now survive in a faded style, oblivious to the fact that many British tourists expect good food, good weather and warm swimming in clear seas.
