Crown Glass Shopping Centre at Nailsea is introducing a tough new parking enforcement system from Monday, July 1, in time for the summer opening of its multi-million pound refurbishment of its Colliers Walk shops.

It has installed an ANPR system (automatic number plate recognition) at its car park on Stockway South.

This will be managed by G24, a company which specialises in providing car park management solutions to retailers, retail parks and other corporate and independent organisations, throughout the UK.

ANPR technology is used by police forces around the world for law enforcement purposes, including to check if a vehicle is registered or licensed.
The cameras will be able to monitor the time vehicles enter and leave the car park.

Centre manager Martin Nelmes said: “If drivers stay more than three hours it will automatically send out a parking enforcement fine.”

Drivers will be fined £100 for exceeding the time limit which is reduced to £60 if they pay within 14 days.

The system will operate seven days a week from 8.30am-6pm.

Mr Nelmes said: “We have had put these measures in to ensure that customers will always be able to find a space in our free car park when coming here to shop.

“It has been noticed that during the past few months that the car park is full when our shopping centre has very few customers in and for that reason, we needed to put this new system in.

“We don’t want to be issuing parking fines to our customers, but we do want to ensure that there is always access to free parking and easy access to our shops.”

The measures apply to the main car park with the public toilets and Towerhouse medical centre.

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Parking permits

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Other parking bays will be limited to 15 minutes dropping off time and this affects customers going to the Post Office, Iceland supermarket and the Kebab Kitchen takeaway.

Unlimited free parking to these areas and the service yards will be for permit holders only, added Mr Nelmes.

Elderly residents of the newly-built Sapphire Lodge have been complaining of motorbikes roaring up and down this car park late at night.

When Tesco had a similar problem it was forced to install barriers.

North Somerset Council is currently carrying out a review of its car parking charges.

Two weeks ago, it announced it was going to take a fresh look at parking to create ‘a fair and affordable parking policy’ and it was ‘keen to involve residents and businesses in this process’.

The district council owns the Clevedon Road car park and the Station Road car park which stretches from the High Street one-way system roundabout towards Brockway medical centre.

The Station Road car park is in dire need of resurfacing which would cost thousands of pounds.

Two town centre supermarkets have their own free car parks with a two hour wait restriction at Tesco and three hours at Waitrose.

In total Nailsea has nearly 1,000 free car parking spaces.

There was uproar four years ago when it was proposed to build a Lidl supermarket in the Stockway South car park because it involved the loss of 28 car parking spaces.

Planning permission was refused despite the budget supermarket offering to commit to a legal Section 106 agreement to pay £400,000 to resurfacing and redesign of the Station Road car park.