A workplace parking levy tool for Ambridge

Around twelve years ago Nottingham Council introduced a workplace parking levy. Over their first ten years they raised over £90m towards sustainable transport. That income then allowed them to secure investment of over £1bn in transport.

Seeing what a workplace parking levy has done for Nottingham, we were asked to make a tool to help other councils explore the impact of a workplace parking levy in their area.

Our new Workplace Parking Levy tool takes "hereditaments" - commercial land and/or buildings - and identifies those that have workplace parking spaces attached to them. It then allows the council to set a levy, define a minimum number of parking spaces for a hereditament to qualify, define a minimum rateable value for hereditaments (to make it easy to exclude zero-rated), and be able to limit to specific geographic areas.

For a bit of fun, we've created a demo version of the tool for a fictional Borsetshire County Council - based on places and businesses in BBC Radio 4's long-running soap opera The Archers.

Our tool lets you select specific areas such as Ambridge (Village), Borchester (Local Authority), or Grange Spinny (MSOA). You can also draw your own custom area instead. This helps you see how different areas may be affected by a potential levy.

The demo is driven by a Google sheet of Borsetshire Hereditaments that we've created. But, it would be easy to use real data from the Valuation Office Agency for a non-fictional council area. So please feel free to reach out to us if you're interested in this work for your area.