Faulty parking machines replaced after council threatened supplier with legal action

Faulty parking machines are being replaced after Buckinghamshire Council threatened a supplier with legal action, its Conservative leader has said.

Martin Tett said he had received a stream of complaints about the machines, including from frustrated drivers in his own Little Chalfont and Amersham Common ward.

The current set of machines were only installed in 2022 to replace those the council inherited from its predecessor authorities.

But two years on, those machines are also now being replaced after frequent breakdowns, which in some cases left residents with no way of paying for parking apart from using apps such as RingGo.

Cllr Tett confirmed this week that new machines were now being rolled out to replace those that replaced the original ones.

He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “We inherited a lot of old machines that quite frankly are way past their sell-by date.

“Many are just breaking down and despite our best endeavours to keep them going, they are now really past their sell-by date.”

Cllr Tett explained how the council had bought new machines from a manufacturer, but these had proven to be ‘unreliable’ over the last 18 months, with the company providing them having been out multiple times to update software and make repairs.

He said: “We threatened legal action against the new supplier and lo and behold they have done a better fix, surprisingly. They are still not totally reliable.”

The council has since sourced another set of new machines from a different company, which Cllr Tett said had ‘not had a single day out of order’ since they began being installed around six weeks ago.

He said: “We are going to be purchasing more machines from the new company and gradually removing the old machines that don’t work.”

The council leader added that the council would try and retain a single cash parking machine in each area, with the rest being cashless.

He added: “But sooner or later, we will go cashless completely. That is just inevitable. It is always like, ‘the council are incompetent. They don’t know. Why don’t they fix it?’ We have been working desperately hard to get that fixed.”

The Tory council leader’s comments come after nine Liberal Democrat councillors on Amersham Town Council warned in a letter in July that residents had been let down over parking.

The group wrote: “The modern machines, installed just over 18 months ago, did not meet users’ requirements, as the frequent breakdown of the machines left users with no option but to use RingGo.”

The councillors said elderly people and those with certain disabilities were especially impacted as many did not have smartphones to use apps and could not use automated phone systems to pay for parking.