Parking restrictions for Cold Ash Village store?

Letters are to be send out to the surrounding houses after the parish council asked for further consultation

LETTERS are going to be sent out to homes near the Cold Ash village shop and post office to see whether parking restrictions are needed in the lay-by outside it.

The step has come after Cold Ash parish council was approached by West Berkshire Council about whether the issue should be looked at again, because the store owner, Resh Patel, complained that long-term parking was having a detrimental effect on her business.

Mrs Patel, who owns the store in Cold Ash Hill with her husband Pat, said that customers were having difficulty parking outside the store, particularly on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, because drivers were leaving vehicles in the lay-by for long periods of time.

A traffic management and road safety project engineer from West Berkshire Council, Alex Drysdale, conducted a site visit, but said that the lay-by was not there for the sole purpose of customer parking.

He asked the parish council whether it wanted the issue of parking restrictions looked at again.

The vice-chairwoman of the parish council, Corinne Rust, said: “It's a really difficult one.

We want to support the local shop but it [the lay-by] was not put in for them.

“We are here for the public and they should be consulted.

“We need to know what the public now feels.”

Councillor Jon Rosier said: “I appreciate that we have to do anything we can to keep the shop open but we cannot antagonise the neighbours.”

Councillor Helen Mowat said that they needed to make it clear that this would be the last time that the issue would be looked into.

She said: “We can only do so much with a bit of parking.

Maybe the post office is lucky to have facilities to park outside.”

West Berkshire Council spokesman Phil Spray said that the letter was not a formal consultation.

He said: “As the subject has recently been raised again by residents, we have agreed to distribute a further letter to the local residents to gauge opinion again.

“At this stage, it will only be distributed to local properties.”