Editor’s Pick of the Week: Local politics goes all Westminster amid Reform defection and car park backbiting

This article, which is free to read, gives a flavour of the 100 or so articles we publish each week all exclusively focused on local issues. To access the links, and other content, please subscribe here and support independent local journalism. It costs as little as 14p a day.

An embarrassing U-turn, political backbiting and a defection to Reform UK… local politics went all Westminster this week.

The fun started on Wednesday when North Yorkshire Council’s ‘tariff rebalancing’ report, which proposed increases of up to 100 times more than the rate of inflation on car parking charges, vanished online after achieving the remarkable feat of uniting almost everyone in opposition.

Even backbench members of the ruling Conservatives and Independents group didn’t hold back, with Ripon Minister and Moorside Councillor Andrew Williams describing it as “foolish, ill thought out and half-baked”.

Group members were quick to point the finger at Steve Brown, the council’s head of parking services who wrote the report, rather than highways chief Cllr Malcolm Taylor, who endorsed the report when it came out.

A new report appeared the next day saying tariffs would now rise by 10% — but even this wasn’t quite what it seemed.

The same day, Oatlands and Pannal Councillor John Mann became the most high-profile local Conservative to switch to Reform, albeit via a three-month detour as an independent. The Liberal Democrats called for a by-election, but if Cllr Mann’s current rate of defection is anything to go by, he’ll be sitting on their benches by August.

The call for a by-election came on the same day as the actual by-election in Gorton and Denton. The winning Green Party candidate, Hannah Spencer, said the result proved the Greens ‘can win anywhere’ but that sounded a bit hollow in Valley Gardens, where the Greens had effectively just withdrawn from next month’s Harrogate Town Council by-election to give the Lib Dems a better chance of victory.

This week’s most enjoyable gig was a tour of Ripon Town Hall, a splendid and historic building, but not one I’d like to visit alone at night. Creepy doesn’t begin to describe some of the dark and cobwebby corners of this vast and decaying space that feels a million miles away from the heart of a city. The hoped-for multimillion pound regeneration is long overdue.

Another historic property in Ripon — the former home of Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, went on the market this week. From the photos, it appears to be in considerably better nick than the town hall.

Finally, it was a good week for cyclists. Harrogate riders celebrated the completion of the county’s first parallel crossing, presumably by dancing on the acres of hard surface installed alongside it on Stray land off Oatlands Drive.

A £50,000 transport feasibility study in Ripon recommended creating a mobility hub, which is a shared space for public transport, e-scooters and cyclists. Will it happen before the town hall upgrade?