Harlow Alliance Party leader expresses concerns over disabled parking in town centre
News / Mon 27th Oct 2025 at 10:24am
A HARLOW Alliance Party member has expressed his concerns over temporary parking in the town centre whilst improvements are being made.
Alan Leverett asked council leader Dan Swords a number of questions at a recent council meeting.
Alan Leverett to Councillor Dan Swords (Leader of the Council):
Many people with disabilities have become concerned that with the temporary use of the Post Office Road carpark for a bus station, a number of free disabled parking spaces have been lost and that might turn out to be the case when work starts in front of the Playhouse.
Bearing in mind the timescale involved, in the meantime the Council may have concluded its purchase of Terminus House and car Park. Will the council give a commitment to provide a number of new, free disabled parking spaces in the Terminus Street car park?
Reply from Councillor Dan Swords (Leader of the Council):
The council is committed to ensuring Harlow Town Centre is an inclusive and accessibly destination to all. Disabled parking provision has been reviewed as part of the Sustainable Transport Hub & Interchange project, and across the town centre there will be ample provision.
The regenerated town centre will provide significantly improved disabled parking provision, ensuring spaces meet British Standards, the Council supported the operator at Terminus House to improve and expand their disabled parking provision and will continue to improve provision across the town centre as part of the regeneration programme.
Brian Ashton
2025-10-28 08:29:01
As a disabled person with a blue badge, while I applaud any effort to ensure that there is adequate blue badge parking in our town, I would rather see a bigger effort on the enforcement of the existing spaces. To often all of the spaces are taken up, with very few cars showing a blue badge. The worst places are, granted, usually private lands, such as supermarket carparks. As a for instance, Sainsbury's, where the disabled spaces near the Starbucks in store are usually all taken up by people "just popping in for a quick coffee". Or at Doctor's surgeries where spaces are also taken up by non-blue badge holders. Or how about the streets around Harlow, where cars and vans are parked half on the pavement, effectively blocking the way for wheelchair users. Grandstanding and making political points is one thing, but the reality is that unless these things are enforced, we could have 1000 disabled parking spaces, but it wouldn't make any difference.
Ian McNaught
2025-10-28 10:57:14
I fully agree and worry about the situation as my wife has a Blue Badge and often we cannot find a Blue Badge car parking space around Harlow town centre.
Tony
2025-10-30 12:44:29
You tell them Brian. when are we going to see the councils have powers to sort out kerb parking. all Essex council want to do is make red routes. which will affect every person with blue badge. they say to in prove bus routes but buses very rarely come down the roads they want to make red routes. and l watched a women pull into a disabled parking space in potter street without even attempting to put a blue badge in her car. my wife says don't say anything because off confrontation it pisses me off. 😒😒😒
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