The parks within the Birmingham City Council area are used by a variety of organisations and individuals for a variety of puposes. These range from dog walkers to organisations such as parkrun, cricket organisations, British Military fitness and football organisations, to name but a few.

Birmingham City Council are proposing that they charge car parking for the use of these parks. This will mean that anyone arriving by car for an event or to use the park for recreational purposes will have to pay to park on them. This will surely result in the parks being used less.

I personally am the Event Director for the Perry Hall parkrun and can speak from personal experience when I state that participants on a Saturday morning arrive from a variety of areas and need the car parks to park their cars. If Birmingham Council were to charge for this then this would result in fewer people attending the event and getting fit. I also know of other people who use other Birmingham parks and they also feel that the car parking charge would affect them personally and also the event they run. Other organisations are sure to suffer too with this charge as anyone attending to particiapte or spectate would be subject to this charge if they parked their car. Dog walkers would also have to pay if they parked their car.

This petition is to show Birmingham City Council that charging for car parking will not be tolerated and that they should allow parks to be free at all times.

The proposal from Birmingham Council can be found at http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&blobheader=application%2Fpdf&blobheadername1=Content-Disposition&blobkey=id&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobwhere=1223572057788&ssbinary=true&blobheadervalue1=attachment%3B+filename%3D831428Parks_and_Leisure_Factsheets.pdf