A proposal to harmonise Sunday parking charges in car parks across Somerset will be deferred following the results of a public consultation.
Somerset Council was proposing to introduce charges at car parks in Somerset which are currently free on a Sunday, to ensure consistency across the county.
A recent public consultation on introducing Sunday parking charges revealed significant opposition to the proposal, and this was followed by the Council’s Climate and
Place Scrutiny Committee recommending the charges were not implemented.
Councillors at Somerset Council’s Executive Committee this week agreed to listen to the feedback and defer any changes until a wider policy setting out guiding principles for parking across the County has been developed and approved.
The policy will look at all elements of parking including amongst other things, the role and function of on and off-street parking in Somersets towns, simplified tariff structures, payment mechanisms and accessibility.
Somerset Council’s Lead Member for Transport and Waste Services, Councillor Richard Wilkins said:
We have listened to the concerns of residents and businesses in the affected areas, and the results of the consultation clearly show how strongly people feel about this.
There are significant inconsistencies in our approach to parking that do need to be considered now we are a single council. However, we need to look at the wider implications of any changes and work out what is best for the whole of Somerset.
We will now go away and develop a county-wide parking policy principles document that we anticipate will be considered initially by our Climate and Place Scrutiny Committee in January 2026.
There are currently different charging principles applied across the county’s 200 Council-run car parks, and the system has not been reviewed since Somerset Council came into being in 2023. The aim of the policy will be to provide a comprehensive and integrated framework for managing parking across the authority providing a more consistent basis to support social, environmental and economic outcomes in Somerset’s towns.
