The introduction of the car parking charges a couple of years ago felt like a pay cut but this new scheme [as reported in the Bulletin on 16 December] just adds insult to injury for staff in the £12,000-£22,000 pay bracket.
Please can you tell me how you can justify a new parking system in which those on lower pay have an increased payment of approximately £80 a year and those on higher pay see a decrease in their payment by approximately £70 a year? Why should we lower paid staff subsidise higher paid staff because the University is incapable of policing its own system?
- Maria Brook, Technician, Physics & Astronomy
David Kirkwood, Director of Estates, replies:
I can understand why staff would not welcome any increase in costs for parking on campus. However, we are moving to a simple pay-and-display system that charges £1 a day for those staff earning £12,000 a year or more. We do not think this is unreasonable, even if it is unwelcome.
The current charging system - which differentiates between different salary bands, and across numbers of hours worked, with different rates out of term time - is a well-intentioned but complex compromise. It has in practice been difficult for new users to understand and very expensive to police.
This has meant a lot of the money raised has gone on running the parking system, rather than supporting University investment in other forms of transport - buses, cycling, walking and so on.
By moving towards single-rate pay-and-display, we hope to reasonably encourage drivers to consider other forms of travel - whether public transport or car sharing - and ensure we can invest more of the money raised in supporting this.
I must congratulate the University on modernising the toilets in Pevensey 1 and hope that others will follow, as they are desperately needed. The old '60s facilities must be very embarrassing for our visitors to see and use.
I am sure the workmen will do a brilliant job, but I did enquire how much it might cost for this work. Well, £40,000 seems a lot for a loo ... so maybe I could enquire through your pages if this figure is correct and if we included gold bath taps in the shower?
I do not wish to be unkind, but it does seem an awful lot of money for a university that isn't exactly flush for cash!
- Mick Henry, Chemistry
Kenneth Illsley, Projects Manager in Estates, replies:
Mick is correct that the toilets (which dated from 1962) were in desperate need of modernisation. But I am happy to put him right on the price: rather than costing £40,000 of University money, the works have cost £28,000 (90% of which came from HEFCE via its Science Research Investment Fund (SRIF)).
Although gold taps are not part of the new facilities, they do include a shower (with disabled access) and a disabled toilet, as well as modern unisex toilets that are fit for the 21st century.