AS many as 37,000 motorists may desert York's car parks this year - leaving council bosses with a massive budget headache.

Parking revenue from city centre car parks is on course to be £367,000 less than the authority forecast. City of York Council is blaming a slump in retail trade and the popularity of Park&Ride.

Planning and transport chiefs at the council revealed the department is set to overspend because of a drop in parking, and a decline in the number of planning applications submitted.

But Len Cruddas, chief executive of York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, said the council's parking pricing policies over the previous few months will have had a bearing on the current shortfall.

In total, council bosses are predicting the department will face a shortfall of about £360,000, and have recommended a raft of remedial measures.

An officers' report to councillors meeting to examine the issue on Wednesday will advocate freezing the cash allocated to the car park improvement budget.

In June, the Evening Press reported how spaces were going begging at York's short-stay car parks since charges were increased on April 1. A calculation based on the maximum daily length of stay in a city centre car park shows that if the projected shortfall figure proves correct, then a minimum of 37,000 people will have deserted the council-run spaces by the end of the year.

The report, written by finance manager Patrick Looker, says: "The reason for the shortfall appears to be primarily migration from city centre parks to Park&Ride, where numbers have significantly increased over the past year.

"There are also a number of privately-operated car parks in central York, which compete for business with the council operations.

"It is also considered that the slowdown in the retail and housing markets in the past six months has led to reductions in income taken at the council's car parks.

"This is shown as users of standard stay car parks are staying for a shorter duration of time despite no increase in the charges."

Damon Copperthwaite, who leads the council's city development and transport team, said the figure was a "very small percentage" of the overall total.

"It is within a tolerable variation," he said. "We don't see it as a huge problem. This is the whole point of a monitoring report - it monitors and now we can do something about it."

Mr Cruddas said: "Part of this must be in some element due to pricing, which has made people look at other ways of getting into the city centre, as well as the success of Park&Ride.

"The retail sector was quiet in the first part of the financial year, but that is now out of the system."

Coun Ann Reid, the council's transport chief, today said significant sums of cash had already been spent on improving car parks, which were now all covered by CCTV.

She said: "We will continue to maintain and spend what is necessary, but we feel we don't need to improve them further at present."

Coun Reid added that residents would soon be receiving a leaflet about parking charges, which aimed to clarify some points of the council's policy.

Coun Tracey Simpson-Laing, Labour transport spokeswoman, said: "There is resistance to the increase to daytime charges and the evening charges, which we campaigned against, because we knew the effect it would have on the city centre.

"We would hope the council continues to make residents feel safe in car parks, particularly at night, and believe the freezing of this budget is a step backward in the way we would look to see car parks in the city centre developed."

:: Parking budget problems

Short stay - down 10.3 per cent on budget (£235,100)

Standard stay - down 4.2 per cent on budget (£139,500)

On Street - up 1.8 per cent on budget (£7,800)

Respark/Season - level pegging

Updated: 08:26 Tuesday, September 06, 2005