I would like to start by congratulating Pedal People - a local charity that provides piloted bike rides for elders living in care - for attaining the MBE Kings award for voluntary service. Even the Republican in me can appreciate this achievement and I want to thank them for all their amazing work. If you need a deserving organisation to donate your time or money to, here’s your group.

It might not come as a shock to hear that I care quite a lot about the environment and transforming our society to be one which protects the health of our planet and its people. I also dearly love our city and want it to thrive in a way which benefits everyone who lives and works here. Imagine my delight, then, when a report came to Cabinet last week saying that - despite car journeys into the city being down - our visitor numbers have been going up.

It seems almost too good to be true – not only are more people visiting Brighton and Hove, benefitting our local shops, restaurants, and hotels, but they’re clearly using more sustainable methods of transport to do so. Win win right? Fewer cars mean less air pollution damaging our lungs, a better experience for those walking, wheeling, and cycling round our city, and more efficient public transport that’s not being held up by traffic jams full of cars. All this, while our visitor economy is thriving. Who on earth could be upset by that!?

As it turns out, the Labour cabinet is apparently quite upset by that.

Despite the report itself saying visitor numbers are up while parking revenue is down, the recommendations it made were to reduce parking charges across the board, to boost the number of cars in our car parks. Labour councillors voted for this short-sighted decision, which they hope will see more cars making their way through our city, bringing their pollution with them. All this in the hopes that it might make a few extra quid, even if that’s at the expense of our health and the environment.

To add insult to injury, the announcement that parking charges would be reduced was made on the council website the day before the cabinet meeting even took place, dispelling any illusion that cabinet members would be making any actual decisions at the meeting itself. Aside from being antithetical to how one of the most significant decision-making bodies in our council should operate, it’s incredibly disrespectful to opposition councillors and members of the public who took the time to come to the meeting and raise points and questions. Labour made it clear before the meeting that they weren’t going to even pretend to take any of that on board.

The thing is, our city isn’t even remotely built for these levels of car usage. We have a city centre that – prior to the Georgian developments of 1780 onwards – was a sleepy fishing village. The likes of John Nash, Wilds, and Busby (the architects of our beautiful grand city) couldn’t possibly have envisaged the relentless tide of motor traffic. What we should really be exploring is a car-free city centre – something which Greens pushed for in our last administration and which Labour actually promised to look into in their 2023 manifesto. We’ll add that one to the ever-growing list of broken pledges.

At the meeting last Thursday, Cllr Muton derided the previous administration’s decision to raise parking charges, as making the motorist a “cash cow” - decisions I will add that Labour councillors (including the current leader of the council) almost all voted for at budget council. If parking revenue wasn’t ringfenced to improve local transport infrastructure, Cllr Muten might have some semblance of a point, but the Transport Management Act of 2004 explicitly bars money being used for anything else. Labour’s great big budget black hole is not going to be plugged by the parking revenue, and they no longer have a Conservative government to blame for the chronic underfunding of local councils.

This is an incredibly regressive policy change and will only result in more pollution, more congestion, more pot-holes, more road danger, and slower buses. We need those who rely on their cars the most to be able to traverse the city as best they can, but this Labour administration seems hell-bent on clogging our city up as much as possible. Moments like this deserve long-term thinking and a proper vision for what we want our city to be in the future. Sadly, we’re not getting any of that as far from being the “listening” council that Labour promised to be it is obvious that all major decisions are being made behind closed doors, with very little care for public engagement.

Steve Davis is Leader of the Opposition and Green Group Convenor