Misuse of disabled parking spaces at a Co Armagh leisure centre has been causing great inconvenience for a wheelchair basketball team – while staff are being abused when they try to intervene.
And now there have been calls for some sort of enforcement – or an investigation into options – after one local councillor counted no fewer than seven cars parked in disabled bays at South Lake Leisure Centre in Craigavon without displaying the necessary Blue Badge.
Alliance Councillor Robbie Alexander raised the matter at Monday’s Community and Wellbeing Committee, when he highlighted the positive benefits of wheelchair basketball – but the difficulties experienced by players trying to park at and access the Craigavon venue.
He said the team “can’t speak highly enough of all the staff at the centre and the facilities”, adding: “As a whole package, South Lake is really just knocking it out of the park.”
But he described one area of feedback from the team as “slightly worrying”, and it centred around the car park.
He said between 10 and 15 players could attend South Lake at a time, where there is a car park with between 25 and 30 disabled parking spaces.
Councillor Alexander said he did a “quick walk around” the car park at the leisure centre, confirming: “I think I found seven cars that didn’t have Blue Badges, parking in spaces that they shouldn’t have.”
Looking to how council addresses the matter, he sought options and guidance.
“I understand there’s maybe some limitations as to what we can do with the current state of play, and we can’t put leaflets or anything like that on people’s cars,” said Councillor Alexander. “I think actually, in the past, we’ve used the tannoy to call out registration plates where maybe people have parked incorrectly. And actually that has led to staff getting some abuse, which is obviously completely unacceptable.”
He felt it was “maybe unfair” to expect staff working at the centre to have to deal with the issue, and was of the opinion “there’s potentially other options that we could look at”.
“I understand it’s around a designation of the car park in terms of what we can enforce and what we can’t, but I would like to look at options here in terms of how we curb this a bit, and how we try and get these spaces back for people who actually need to use them,” said the Alliance representative.
Councillor Alexander explained that all of the spaces may not be needed for training, but when the wheelchair basketball team play matches, that brings “potentially another 15 people”, leading to the number of spaces being exceeded, even if they are all not being used – “which, in reality, they’re not going to be”.
“Obviously they need a little bit more room, because they can’t take the risk to park in a normal space, because they need to get their wheelchair out of the car. They often have a second wheelchair that they use while they’re playing basketball, these sorts of things,” he said.
“I would just like to explore what our options are in terms of redesignating the car park, or finding a way that we could potentially fine people, or something like this, for people who park in these spaces whenever they don’t have Blue Badges.
“We’ve talked about enforcement on a number of things – around parking, around dog fouling, and all these types of issues. And we don’t have a great track record when it comes to enforcing a lot of these things. But I feel like, if we were able to do something, one or two fines and all of a sudden attitudes change to this type of thing, and a scary sign here, a fine there, and all of a sudden the problem’s not quite as bad as it once was.”
Councillor Alexander asked that the committee be presented with “some options as to how we can try and improve this in the car park at South Lake”.
Director of Development and Community and Wellbeing, Paul Tamati, said that, as with any group, there tended to be “influxes into our car park when there are larger bookings like that”.
While council was “a bit restricted in terms of any enforcement” that could be put in place around Blue Badge holders, they could maybe look at updating notifications on council apps and “stuff like that that we may look at going forward”.
“We’re happy to take that as an action and bring something back to a future committee,” Mr Tamati assured.
