01/10/07 -� Research reveals reasons behind the abuse of parking reserved for use by disabled people in off-street car parks in Scotland

Research commissioned by the Scottish Executive has reviewed current evidence for the effectiveness of a range of intervention measures for tackling the abuse of off-street parking facilities intended for use by disabled people.

The focus of the work was on enforcement measures that can be used to combat the abuse of parking bays intended for use by disabled people, in off-street locations in Scotland. Off-street parking refers to both public car parks provided and managed by municipal authorities, and privately owned car parks that are provided for customers, clients and patients by providers of a given core service. The provision of off-street parking facilities for disabled people has the dual purpose of fulfilling certain statutory obligations, and enabling disabled people to gain access to the core service more easily by providing parking spaces close to their destination.

The problem of parking abuse in Scotland and the UK was highlighted in 2004 by campaign group Baywatch who monitored parking at more than 800 stores owned by the four major supermarket chains across the UK. The results show that almost 21% of parking spaces for disabled people were occupied by cars without a blue parking badge - which compared with 18.5% at the same time the previous year (Baywatch, 2004). It was found that in more than one third of stores, disabled people were unable to park in a designated space because of abuse by non-badge holders. The problem of abuse in off-street car parks has also been identified by a survey by the Access Committee for England on the Blue Badge scheme. Of a sample of 15,000 disabled, 71% of people responded to the survey of which 90% believed that the scheme was being abused and 76% thought that private car parks were unsupervised and no action was taken against abusers. Research conducted for the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee ( DPTAC) in 2002 revealed that a specific concern for disabled people was finding a suitable place to park when reaching their destination. Eighty per cent of a sample of nearly 1000 disabled people stated that they did not feel that there is adequate enforcement of parking restrictions. ( DPTAC 2002).

The full report is published on the Scottish Executive website - Research into reasons behind the abuse of parking reserved for use by disabled people in off-street car parks in Scotland and measures to tackle the problem.

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