HWA wins parking reprieve

Council “regrets error” over parking consultation.

Following HWA intervention, council admits representations from public were not included in its report.

Council withdraws decision and will fully consider all feedback from residents in a new report.

The council recently published their decision to press ahead with significant changes to our local CPZ parking zone following a consultation which took place earlier in the year. The HWA had protested that the consultation was not fit for purpose, being unclear and in parts misleading. The council officials did not agree and carried on with the consultation.

On 29th July, they published their decision to go ahead with all their proposed changes, leading to significant loss of overnight / off-peak parking in Hampton Wick. They had made no amendments at all to their original proposals, and they stated that they had received only seven responses to the consultation.

We were very surprised at the apparent low response rate and we asked local people if they recognised their submissions in the seven cited. We very quickly heard from 13 residents whose responses were “missing” from the council’s report. Something was clearly very wrong.

HWA intervenes
The HWA wrote to the council to say that in the light of these “missing responses” the report and the decision based on it should both be withdrawn. We gave them a deadline of 5pm on 14th August to respond, failing which we would issue a Pre-Action Protocol letter preceding an application to the High Court for a judicial review.

This was not an idle threat, nor one that we made lightly. We prepared the Pre-Action Protocol letter, with supporting evidence, so that we would be ready to take action.

At 4.27pm on 14th August the council responded to our letter!

Council admits error
They said: “Following an investigation, we identified that responses submitted through the new online consultation form were not included in the published report.”

They have committed that “all responses received to this consultation, including those not included in the original report, will be reviewed and an updated report published which will include consideration of all feedback received.”

Value of local knowledge
We hope that the council will realise the value of the informed local feedback provided by residents, which can differentiate between areas where, for instance, double-yellow lines may indeed be needed for safety reasons versus areas where no problems are caused by having single-yellow lines which provide valuable overnight and off-peak parking for residents and businesses. We trust that this will result in a more carefully thought-through set of proposals rather than the blanket, one-size-fits-all approach of the current plan.

We have written back to the council listing all the consultation responses that we know about which we hope will be helpful to them as they track down all of the rest of them. There must be many more residents whose responses were missed beyond those whom we managed to reach directly.

We do not know whether any other consultations may have been affected by the council’s faulty online form.

The council say the new CPZ report will be published within 7-10 days.

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Click here for more background to this story.
Click here to read the response from the Council to the HWA. LBRuT response to HWA re CPZ
Click here for the HWA’s latest letter to the Council. HWA email to Council re CPZ 16 August 2026