Stockton Council to review of Yarm parking charges

Paddy Morton, manager of the 170-year-old Strickland & Holt family business on Yarm High Street and chair of Yarm Business Forum, presented a petition on behalf of Stockton West MP Matt Vickers to Stockton Council in May.

He said the loss of one hour’s free parking – replaced with a £1.50 charge for three hours in Stockton and Yarm town centres – was “the wrong decision”.

Impassioned pleas from businesspeople, who said the new charges since February were driving away customers and threatening livelihoods, with the petition and a Conservative motion, led to a unanimous vote from councillors to call on leaders to reverse the parking policy. Now the council’s leadership is being asked to review the charges.

High Street in Stockton (Image: LDRS)

The authority says it has monitored the impact of the removal of the first free hour between February and May 2025, and “provisional data shows footfall in Yarm and Stockton is higher every month than it was in 2024 and 2023”. However Mr Morton said this did not match businesspeople’s experience.

The council says it took the decision to remove the first hour free last October to balance the costs of maintaining and managing car parks with the desire to make town centres attractive to shoppers. It was to review the arrangements and their impact on the two towns after a year, with data including car park occupancy, footfall and “dwell time” collected.

Now, after just five months, the council’s cabinet will be asked to agree the scope of a review, and consider the type of data to be collected, on Thursday, July 17. It is also asked to commit to consulting with businesses and people affected by the changes in both towns, to capture information about trading and anecdotal feedback.

Councillor Paul Rowling, the council’s cabinet member for resources and transport, said: “We made a commitment to review the changes agreed in October to fully assess the impact they are having across Yarm and Stockton town centre on residents and businesses. This is why we’re asking cabinet to agree the scope of the review, to get this detailed work underway.

Councillor Paul Rowling from Stockton Council (Image: LDRS)

“While initial data collected in the first four months is showing that footfall is up in our town centres, we want to delve deeper and analyse the information and trends.

“This will allow us to get the full picture of what removing the first hour of free parking has done to change residents and visitors’ habits and how this may be affecting our town centre businesses.

“We also want to engage with those affected and listen to what they have to say. The thorough review will be undertaken, and we’ll report the findings back to cabinet as soon we can.”

The council’s report says GPS coordinate data from devices like phones, Fitbits and smart watches showed footfall on Yarm High Street rose to over 600,000 by May, some 100,000 or more over the same periods in 2023 and 2024, while “dwell time” was around two hours, mostly lower than the previous two years. In Stockton footfall rose to around 2.4m by May, higher than the previous years, while dwell time was between 100 and 120 minutes, a drop from 2023 and 2024.

The data says just over 197,000 car parking tickets were issued in Stockton town centre in February to May, up almost 10,000 on the same period in 2024. In Yarm, over 101,000 tickets were issued, a rise of over 26,000 from last year.

The report says: “This would appear to undermine any connection between the removal of the free first hour and town centre footfall as the towns that did not experience any changes in parking charges experienced similar growth in visitor numbers as those in which the free first hour was removed.”

Mr Morton said: “I think the first reaction is to welcome the fact that they want to engage with town centre businesses and collect proper data, which should have been what happened in the first place before they took this decision. In my opinion it was a knee-jerk decision, there was no consultation and no advice was taken, I don’t know what it was based on either.”

“I don’t know how they collect their data, I don’t know how reliable it is. It’s difficult to judge how useful it is.

“Certainly for the first part of the year that doesn’t correlate with what I’ve been hearing from businesses, or from my own experience for footfall. But I welcome any engagement from the council and definitely a review.”