By Mark Andrews

Copyright expressandstar

Councillor Shaun Keasey and former Dudley North MP Marco Longhi have become embroiled in a bitter row with council leader Patrick Harley after he announced that the council would be offering a new 50p rate for half-an-hour’s parking at the end of the month.

A report to a council scrutiny committee last week revealed that Dudley’s Duncan Edwards Leisure Centre had lost £150,000 since May 2024, having lost 830 members.

The council scrapped its two hours’ free parking in October last year.

Councillor Keasey, a former Conservative who now sits for Reform UK, accused Councillor Harley of a ‘predictable Conservative U-turn’ prompted by falling leisure centre membership rather than genuine concern for residents or businesses.

Councillor Keasey said: “Despite Councillor Harley’s usual gaslighting, we know this isn’t about helping residents or supporting town centres, it’s about trying to prop up declining membership at the council’s own leisure centres.

“When it suits the Conservatives running Dudley Council, they suddenly acknowledge that parking charges put people off.

“But for years, while shops, pubs and other businesses in Dudley, Sedgley, Brierley Hill, Halesowen, and Stourbridge have been crying out for support, and residents have warned them, they wouldn’t listen.”

Mr Longhi, also a former Tory who defected, said Reform had consistently campaigned for two hours’ free parking across all the borough’s high streets.

“It shouldn’t take falling membership numbers at council-run leisure centres to make the leadership act,” he said.

“Local businesses and residents deserved this action years ago.”

Councillor Harley said the parking charges were introduced reluctantly because of the difficult state of the council’s finances, and said it was always the intention to review them when the situation improved.

“They have and we are,” he said.

“Not only that, as the council’s finances stabilise even more my administration will continue to lower the cost of parking. But it must be a measured approach.

“By doing that we can stabilise ourselves financially and reduce those charges year on year.”

He aid not one of the council’s Reform had taken control of in May had made any significant changes to the financial models those councils use.

“I won’t take any lectures from Keasey who every political party turned down and Longhi who forgets he was a Tory MP under Rishi Sunak and did nothing to help local Conservatives secure more funding from the then government,” he said.

“Any additional funding was secured by hard working council officers and me, not the one-term MP from Walsall”