Resident criticises council as controversial EV parking bay approved after consultation error

A Portsmouth resident has accused the city council of "poor governance" before councillors approved an Electric Vehicle (EV) parking bay following a consultation blunder.

The EV-only parking bay, at the end of Exeter Road near its junction with Festing Grove, has already been installed and is in use.

However, the bay could not be legally enforced because the original consultation contained an error after council officers mixed up the names of Exeter Road and Festing Grove.

A fresh consultation was carried out between February 20 and March 13. Six representations were received in total, including two submitted during the original consultation and four during the second.

Addressing the meeting, resident Ben Sharp said: "In my eyes this process has been defined by a total failure of procedural transparency and a total disregard for the voices of those who actually live in the area."

He said the original consultation had been "fundamentally flawed" because the location had been advertised incorrectly and questioned how the proposal could have been approved after he raised the mistake in a formal objection.

Mr Sharp said residents had been promised the chargepoint would not be installed until after a lawful re-consultation, but claimed "that promise was broken" when work went ahead last December.

He said every response received during the second consultation objected to the scheme and claimed the council had been unable to produce evidence that local residents had requested the chargepoint.

Mr Sharp told councillors: "You're imposing infrastructure that the community does not want supported by councillors who do not live with the consequences."

He argued the council had rushed the installation to meet a funding deadline, putting this ahead of "the democratic requirement for a fair consultation".

Mr Sharp also criticised a report recommending the scheme be approved because the infrastructure was already in place.

"You're using your own previous procedural breaches as a justification for why it should be allowed to stay, that's circular and in my opinion, poor governance," he said.

Transport cabinet member Cllr Peter Candlish accepted that "a mistake was made in the original documentation" and said it was "an open question" how much confusion this had caused or whether it had prevented people from responding.

"There is infrastructure on the road," he said. "That is not ideal but it's where we are at the moment."

Cllr Candlish said he believed it was "a suitable place to put an EV chargepoint" and added that "the evidence is that the site is already being used".