At a meeting of Thame Town Council on 10 August 2021, Officers from Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) presented their draft plans to regularise parking arrangements in the Town Centre. The vision is to ensure the restrictions are right for their location and appropriately enforced, and OCC will be working with the Town Council to achieve this. The plans, which can be viewed on our website, will be subject to a full public consultation in September prior to implementation in November 2021.
The Town Council would like to reassure the public that parking in the two town centre car parks will remain free. Residents with permits in these car parks will be contacted in due course to explain the changes once they have been subject to consultation and formally agreed.
OCC are proposing that there will be an element of pay-and-display introduced in town centre (in sections along Upper High Street, Cornmarket and High Street where on-street parking is currently managed by the Police) in order to make the scheme viable and increase the turnover of vehicles parking. OCC reassured the Town Council that the scheme would be cost-neutral and OCC were not legally able to set targets for the providers.
The proposals will see all parking in Thame (and across the county) be managed by a contractor through OCC. Whilst the proposals will apply to all parking restrictions in Thame, OCC advised that it would be slow to start with to see how the scheme worked and the plans as presented were focused on the Town Centre.
In the longer term, there was a possibility for other parking areas within the town (such as Lower High Street and Park Street) to have residents’ parking schemes. Again, OCC would keep the Town Council involved in these discussions.
Full details of the discussions will be available in our council minutes which will be published on our website when available and in next week’s newsletter. The Town Council will publicise the consultation when it opens, and will keep residents and businesses informed.
We hope this provides reassurance and clarifies some matters, but if you have any questions, please email [email protected] or feed them into the consultation when it launches, as the Town Council is only a consultee on this matter.
