High risk city car parks highlighted

3:01pm Thursday 15th May 2008

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By Jenny Makin »

THE Daily Echo can today reveal the riskiest places to park your car in Southampton - while paying for the privilege.

An investigation has uncovered how city centre car parks have become hotspots for vehicle crime including break-ins, damage and thefts.

Topping the list of places where you are most likely to have your car broken into is a national-run car park where drivers pay premium prices in the heart of the city centre. It has limited CCTV coverage and lighting that is broken in some areas.

It is followed closely by a privately- run multi-storey which is among the cheapest places to leave your car for a long period of time. Again it has limited CCTV and is dark in places.

Both car parks have failed to achieve the Park Mark standard - a national award from the Association of Chief Police Officers and the British Parking Association that recognises safe car parks. To receive the accolade operators are required to have measures in place to deter criminals and make car parks clean, with suitable signage, lighting and surveillance in place.

The figures revealing the state of car crime in Southampton, obtained from Southampton police, show that there were 385 reported cases of theft from or of a vehicle between April 2007 and April 2008.

At least 56 of those incidents took place in car parks used by the public each day.

The National Car Park (NCP) in Portland Terrace came out as the worst offender, with nearly half of all crime in the car parks taking place there. It was also the most expensive, with motorists paying £2.80 an hour to park.

With 605 spaces, the street level car park used to have a member of staff working on site but they were removed 18 months ago.

Although it has CCTV cameras in operation, it is understood that they are trained on the pay stations and the entrance and exit area and do not pick up on walkways and on the vehicles parked inside.

It is a similar situation at the Bargate car park, owned and operated by the management of Bargate Shopping Centre, where 27 per cent of the crimes have taken place. There, motorists can pay £6.50 for more than seven hours - one of the cheapest tariffs in the city.

There are 220 spaces inside and again there is CCTV but it is used to record pay machines and the entrance and exit area, while the car park can be easily accessed by pedestrians walking through to any floor without necessarily being filmed.

Other targets for car crime have been The Quays and College Street car parks, owned by Southampton City Council, as well as public parking areas in Channel Way and Ocean Way in Ocean Village, and the WestQuay multi-storey, which recorded just one offence in the past 12 months.

The remainder of the car parks in the city centre - of which there are 40 in total, according to the city council - have not had any incidents of crime recorded at them during the past 12 months.

A city council spokesman said that there had been major investment in its city car parks to make them safe, which included cash from rises in parking charges pumped back into the system.

The spokesman said: "We have made huge strides in improving safety in our car parks over recent years. Tackling crime rates in car parks and improving safety has been a key goal for us.

"A significant amount of the revenue generated from car parks goes into maintaining them and making sure they are as safe as they can be.

"For example we have invested significantly in CCTV in multistorey car parks, which we believe has acted as a successful deterrent to criminals."

John Bailey, vehicle crime prevention officer for Southampton police, said that meetings have been held with both Bargate and NCP management, encouraging them to take steps to improve safety measures at their car parks.

He said: "Most of the multistoreys in the city have Park Marks awarded to them, which means they have addressed things like CCTV, lighting and access to make it as safe a place as possible to park.

"However there are some, including these, that do not and they do have some occasional problems of damage. The figures we have relate to reported damage and car crime but there are likely to be others who travel in to the city and leave and don't report it.

"I have spoken with both NCP and Bargate and have suggested they implement further CCTV to cover footways and at least the ground floor of the car parks which can be accessed from the street.

"At Portland Terrace you can easily get in at street level over low fencing, while at Bargate you can walk down from the top to bottom without being seen by the cameras.

"Unfortunately both are pre-1970s buildings and they are stuck with the design, unlike newer developments including parts of the WestQuay stage three and four, which have these kind of things being planned before they are even constructed."

Mr Bailey said he believed that NCP was injecting money to improve its car parks, but that it was mainly being spent in the Bournemouth area.

However, at Portland Terrace bosses have put up a police deterrent sign that warns "not all our police cars have blue lights", which refers to disguised "capture cars"

which are purposely placed as a potential target to thieves to catch them in the act.

Nobody from NCP or the Bargate car park was available to comment, despite repeated requests from the Daily Echo.