Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 21 June 2018

Private firms will issue parking tickets as car owners cavort in the undergrowth

Every day in every way we are paying for more and more. I realise this increasingly. Things we took for granted as free are added inexorably to the list of things we are charged for.

And now we have rural parking charges, by which I don’t mean we are going to be charged for parking outside a village shop. Sleepy little One Stops have been on viciously policed meters for years now, as we all know. I mean parking outside a deserted wooded area while you walk your dog.

Very soon, there will be no such thing as a free walk, or a free picnic.

In Surrey, where I reside, Chobham Common, Newlands Corner, Ockham Common and Whitmoor Common are just a few of the reasonably deserted places where you now can’t pull up in your car without a parking warden appearing to ticket you.

Wooded areas in particular have gone ‘Pay by phone’.

From July, Ockham and Wisley Commons, where I walk and ride, will be £1.30 for up to an hour, £2.60 for one to two hours, £3.90 for two to three hours or £5 for three hours and over. It’s £6 if you want to take your horse there in a horse box. Luckily,I can park at the field where I keep my horses, but for the rest of you, I’m afraid, a breath of fresh air costs money.

It’s an interesting legal point, because access to common land should be free. Oh, I’m sure the council makes the point that it has not actually locked the common land behind a gate with a kiosk. There are no entry barriers. But as these wooded areas are on busy main roads, they know full well that there is no other way to get to them for 99 per cent of people who visit other than to drive.

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