The latest figures on the losses from the Hop Oast Park and Ride - secured under the Freedom of Information Act - can be seen here

http://www.welcometohorsham-not.co.uk/HopOastParkandRide.pdf

(You'll need to rotate this clockwise in Acrobat).

These alarming figures show the following:

  • The apparent losses on the P&R from its start to 2008-9 (actual) total £619,658
  • BUT if you remove the contributions from the developers (first two years - these would have been built into his costs - nothing from a developer is free) of £130,000, and an injection of West Sussex County Council funds (public money - £55,002, again, over two years) the P&R's operating losses are, actually, £749,658

 So, that's £¾ million operating losses to date.

 Also, in the next two years:

  • The losses are predicted to be £127,520 in the year 2009-10, and £96,310 in the year 2010-11. This would take the total losses to £973,488 - touching £1m.
  • ..and the council is being surprisingly optimistic about certain figures (perhaps to keep them off the £1m figure?). In its 2010-11 budget, it predicts normal ticket sales to suddenly hit £84,000, signalling either an impossible increase in daily users (by their own admission, numbers are currently on their way down, not up), or another massive price hike.

Season tickets:

  • The season ticket sales are interesting (and a barometer of the town's business health). If you look along this line, you will see they peaked in 2007-8 at £5320 income, and fell back by a whopping fifth to £4109 (a real, actual figure, not a projection) in 2008-9
  • And they anticipate a(nother) whopping drop, this time, to £3200 (see the column "2009-10 revised budget"). That's getting towards a 50 per cent fall in income from the peak figures of £5320, which is truly shameful. These workers are also 250-day-a-year shoppers

Thus, surely:

  • We have ¾ of a million £s actual operating losses in the years to date, at a time when the council is shedding their own staff jobs and threatening services, to save deficits of £1.5-£2million.
  • This total losses will hit a cool £1 million by next year
  • The council is slashing its estimates for season ticket sales at the P&R to around a half of their peak (just recently - 2007-8), clearly conceding that the town has been hit not only by the recession, but by the very parking policies they have implemented, as companies pack up and go elsewhere, and new ones are put off coming here. Visitors to the town have only seen an increase in the sea of "to let" signs, and surely a recession alone could not be responsible for such a dramatic fall?
  • The abandonment of the much heralded plans for more P&Rs showed the existing one was a disaster, and now we know just how much of a disaster