Where do all the 30p's go?

A thought which occurred to me as I parked up at the Cherry Tree shopping centre car park in Liscard last Saturday.

A frequent visitor to the town, due to the fact my dad owns a bistro there and I like to grab a free sausage butty every now and again (not hinting here - editor), I embarked upon the rigmarole of searching for 70 pence for the parking machine. Good luck with that one. As always, I had a mountain of pound coins, a couple of coppers and a five pound note. Useless.

As opposed to going though the whole embarrassing of hassle of running to the nearest shop, asking for change and hoping a parking attendant hasn't collared my little black Corsa on my return; I opted to pay a brand new shiny quid for my 30 minute visit.

Now please don't be thinking I'm stingy or that I need to get out more. If you do the math and think of all the people, like me, who put pounds into these machines on a daily basis and don't get any change, it soon adds up to thousands, millions in fact. So where does it go? Who gets it? Annoying isn't it?

This isn't just happening in Liscard, but in most commercial areas of the UK. Councils can't (or won't) install machines which distribute change so instead they happily to take our money.

I can't imagine it goes in to maintaining the car park as a good proportion of them I wouldn't even tip my litter in and anyway don't we pay tax for this?

I don't suppose it wouldn't seem so bad if we received more parking for the extra money.

As always at Paver Towers, I like to take a proactive approach and really do believe there is a major opportunity missing here……….

Could the money collected, as opposed to being swallowed by the black whole, be distributed amongst charities which are constantly struggling to raise money of this ilk by organising gruelling charity events, (like the Paver Smith Spanish Trek for Claire House, not that I'm name dropping)? I think we need to start a campaign for which I'd offer to be leader.

I for one wouldn't bat an eyelid to dropping my pound in the meter if this was the case, would you? My moaning would stop and I'd feel I was doing my bit for charity.

For the record, if anyone does know where the money goes, please drop me a note.

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