One Way Street The Councils Ramping Up Income from Drivers

Methodology

Sources

Local authority revenue and expenditure data from gov.uk, gov.wales and gov.scot.

You can view the collated dataset here.

Income and expenditure

Net income from parking is taken as the summary figure for the relevant budget category in the local authority’s published accounts. In some cases, the net income from parking is negative, because the cost of running the services exceed the revenue gained.

Net spending on the roads is taken as the sum of all the relevant budget categories for each local authority. These include transport planning, construction, structural maintenance, winter service, street lighting (including energy costs), road safety, road safety education, safe routes (including school crossing patrols), and traffic management.

Figures exclude spending on public transport, airports, harbours and toll facilities.

Inflation adjustment

Figures reflecting the percentage change in income and expenditure between the reference years have been adjusted to account for inflation using the Bank of England Inflation Calculator and Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the ONS.

Zero net income from parking

North Lanarkshire, Aberdeen City, Isles of Scilly, and Redcar & Cleveland published ‘0’ or ‘null’ net income from parking for all years in the accounts analysed.

Greenwich, Lewisham, Inverclyde, East Lothian and Shetland Islands reported a net income from parking of zero in 2013/14. We’ve taken the first year with a non-zero net income for these authorities as the base year for calculating the percentage growth over time. This means the percentage growth reported was for a shorter period than other authorities, and is indicated where relevant. Inflation adjustment calculations for these local authorities were amended accordingly.

Local authorities

There are four types of local authorities in the England data: Unitary Authorities, Counties, County Districts, and London Boroughs.

Unitary Authorities and London Boroughs are responsible for spending on roads and they also collect income from parking.

Counties, on the other hand, are responsible for road maintenance but don't get income from parking fees into their budget. With County Districts, it's the opposite: they make income from parking but aren't financially responsible for road maintenance.

To address this, we aggregated the budgets of Counties and County Districts into Counties, meaning that for each County we added up the expenditure on roads and income from parking for each of the constituent County Districts.

That way, we have a fuller picture of road expenditure and income from parking across the country, allowing us to make fairer comparisons between different types of local authorities.