Cardiff council says the quiet part out loud
Jim is an Associate Editor (SUs) at Wonkhe
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Last time I looked at a selection of local plans, for example, I tended to find students framed as pound signs rather than citizens with needs.
But sometimes what goes on goes way beyond carelessness.
Cardiff Council has a parking problem – and as it introduces permits, its wheeze is to propose a blanket ban on anyone in a Class N or M property (student HMOs or halls) from getting one.
For a start, it’s easily one of the most egregiously age-discriminatory things I’ve seen in three decades of knocking about universities.
The Single Impact Assessment is almost amusing. The positive impact on the old can be summarised as “well, they’ll be able to park”, while the positive impact on the young is framed as “they seem to care about the environment”. Negative impacts – or even a recognition that students tend to be younger – are missing.
But it’s the thoughtlessness and othering that’s most shocking. Look at the way this section frames students as residents… or not:
Reduced commuter and student (temporary resident) parking pressure: Parking Zones discourage long-term parking by non-residents, reducing the pressure on residential streets from commuter parking. This ensures that residents have priority access to parking spaces near their homes.
It is also that, from 1st August 2026, properties that are exempt from liability for payment of Council Tax are excluded from the resident permit parking scheme. This policy will primarily affect properties occupied by students. Bringing the policy into operation in August 2026 allows the Council time to effectively communicate the changes to students.
On the one hand, the council must know how expensive student rent has become, and how many students are in jobs outside of the city as a result. But even setting that aside, the assumption that every student nurse or teacher is either on the bus/train to placement or not in an HMO/halls is breathtaking.
As Cardiff SU ably puts it, lots of students rely on cars for essential reasons:
- Traveling to academic placements or part-time jobs – speak to the many medical and healthcare students travelling to remote parts of Wales on placement and ask them if the Welsh public transport system would be able to get them there?
- Essential travel for students with access needs – some who have no choice but to drive to access their lectures or seminars as there are parts of the public transport system that are not accessible to their needs.
- Students who have caring responsibilities – many of who may have to drive to classes in between taking children to nursery or caring for sick relatives.
- Students travelling for activities – many students use their own vehicles to attend sporting fixtures or society events across different parts of the city and country. Early mornings and late starts to many activities mean public transport isn’t always an option, and we know it’s not always the most reliable!
- Students going about day-to-day activities – from going to the supermarket (and may we add we carpool en masse to do this) to picking up furniture or attending GP appointments. The basic activities that other individuals in the community get the luxury of using their car for.
- These needs reflect the diverse, complex lives of students, and to deny them permits risks treating students as second-class citizens.
We can have little doubt that the expansion of student numbers in cities like Cardiff won’t have been done in lockstep with the council – an issue we’re more used to thinking about in terms of housing availability.
And there’s almost certainly something in here about who votes in local elections and the electoral system used in the locals.
But if councils are under pressures of this sort, they can punch up – where is the campaign from the Welsh LGA on student numbers planning and its relationship to the services they offer and the pressures they’re under?
Or they can punch down – riding roughshod over equalities legislation and saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to what they really think about students.
This feels like quite the superficial analysis by Wonkhe as much as by Cardiff Council. Yes there are student cases for car use (and parking) but students should not be automatically bringing cars to University, most particularly to a city.
Cardiff’s plan is part of their broad approach to making the city far more liveable, including for those with caring responsibilities and disabilities – students or not. The article would definitely have benefited from a more nuanced context about whether students are long-term visitors or a real part of city life and how students might cope in cities, like London, with these sorts of concerns.
To paraphrase Jim, This is easily one of the most egregiously age-discriminatory things I’ve seen in [a] decade of knocking about [WonkHE]
While a blanket ban may seem rather crude, even leaving aside the fact that cars ‘punch down’ every day, with people with access needs the most affected by issues like pavement parking, the reality is we are in a grave situation with the climate crisis, and need change fast. Given how much emissions come from cars, and the impracticalities of reducing car use outside cities, if you want to shift away from cars, the key place to do so is in cities, and a key group you need to work with is young people – before they become locked into lifelong habits of car dependence. I first learned to live without a car as a student in a city where students weren’t allowed them, and decades later have never looked back. Given that the number of young people learning to drive has been falling for years, largely for cost reasons, we have a rising generation of young pedestrians, public transport users and cyclists, who are receptive to the message that designing cities for cars as the rule rather than the exception is a really bad idea. So those students who bring cars to university accommodation are already in a minority, and we need that minority to shrink.
However there will always be exceptions, so yes it should be possible to apply for a parking permit for the more convincing of the reasons listed in the article (not for going to the supermarket!).
But what’s missing here is that a joined-up approach needs carrots as well as sticks. A measure like the one proposed in Cardiff would be better accompanied by something akin to the Scottish government’s provision of free bus travel for under-22s. That is truly empowering a generation of students to be a real part of city life: that the city is theirs, without a car.
I broadly agree with ‘non-driver’. As a dyspraxic trade union official, I have frequent occasion to (successfully) hoof around Wales on public transport.
Some parts of the city are subsumed by cars whilst others are not. At the end of the day, this has to be about balancing competing rights.
Is it reasonable to expect a student teacher or health practitioner to bus 40 miles into the wilds of the Caerphilly Valley? No! Conversely, should every undergraduate have an absolute right to rock up with their own vehicle? Absolutely not!
So how do we regulate this?
A lot of it comes down to notions of tenure. My step-dad is a chef. Up until recently, he travelled from Cathay’s (Cardiff) to Caerleon not knowing whether there would be a spot outside his house when he returned at 3am. Having lived in Cardiff all his life, the fact that my parents ‘bought their home’ certainly weighs in his thoughts. Of course, I am sufficiently sensitive not to point out that his status as a (tidy) landlord to three small properties is probably contributing to his hardship.
We need to be careful with the environmental coating. Welsh government rightly identifies ‘a just transition’ as the best way to win hearts and minds. Personally, I think there is a very good case to move towards universal free public transport. As it is, the competitive conditions under which the HE sector operates turns this into a toss up between accommodating relatively mobile, fee paying customers and pacifying council tax paying residents.
Whatever happened to from each according to their ability; to each according to their needs?