FREE car parking has been scrapped in favour of free buses in the run-up to Christmas after a row between councillors.

The tradition of Worcester City Council offering free festive parking will come to an end this Christmas with councillors narrowly voting to replace it with a complimentary bus service for one day in December.

Labour councillors had made a call last month to forgo tradition and use the subsidies previously set aside to offer free parking in Worcester throughout December to pay for free or cheaper bus travel instead.

Council officers came back with a plan which would see a free bus service put on throughout the city on December 3 to coincide with the Christmas Victorian Fayre but when the policy and resources committee came to vote on the plan, there was some fallout over what forms of travel the council should and should not be subsidising.

Cllr Chris Mitchell said he, and the rest of the city council’s Conservatives, were under the impression that the free bus service was in addition to the council also offering free parking in the run-up to Christmas, as it had been doing for years, and he did not support it being scrapped.

He put forward a change to the vote which would see free car parking continue alongside a subsidised bus service and despite the support from the council’s Conservatives, the amendment was voted down by Labour, Green and Lib Dem councillors by seven votes to six.

The decision means the council will now pay for a free bus service on one soon-to-be-announced Saturday in December with free parking on weeknights and Sundays scrapped.

“Loose” estimates by the council’s financial director Shane Flynn showed the council’s car parking income was down by around £15,000 last December because of the free offer, which he said could give some idea of how much it would cost if repeated.

Mr Flynn said £185,000 had still not been spent from last year’s £565,000 budget surplus, which was set aside to support the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, so there was “sufficient coverage” to pay for both free parking and free buses.

The council’s managing director David Blake said £50,000 was put aside in last year’s budget to help cover the cost of free Christmas parking as a ‘one-off’ and the loss of earnings through offering free parking had “just been absorbed” in previous years.

Cllr Marc Bayliss, leader of the city council, said Christmas was the most important time for businesses and the city needed to continue offering free parking to attract as many people as possible.

But city mayor Adrian Gregson disagreed saying it was “disingenuous” to suggest that free parking would always be offered, and the council should be confident it no longer needed to offer free parking as a way of attracting people to the city.

Cllr Andy Stafford said it was “utter nonsense” to suggest that Worcester and its retailers were ‘safe’ with an impending recession and the council could offer free parking in the evenings and on Sunday when there were not many buses running anyway.

At the meeting in the Guildhall on November 15, Green councillor Louis Stephen said it would be “reckless” given the council’s budget deficit to offer free parking when the “car parks would be full anyway” and Labour councillor Pat Agar she was “weary” of spending money offering the discount this year given the council’s “significant” budget gap.