Lack of parking has reared its ugly head again in Kingston, leaving a landlord contemplating how he will rent out flats without any parking bays.

Cumberland House has 120 flats but only 58 parking bays, and when residents asked for permits to park in nearby Crescent Road they were knocked back.

Landlord Tony Adams said: “There’s nowhere at all where they can park. Why can’t the Cumberland House people park anywhere in area B? There are houses in area B which have one or two permits for their house.”

Annie Yates, a 21-year-old nurse at St Helier Hospital, has to have a car for work.

She said: “I do antisocial hours and they are random shifts as well. I asked for a bay and they wouldn’t give me one as there wasn’t a bay to give, but there are quite a few that are not used.”

After Mr Adams mentioned he had contacted the media, the 13 people on the waiting list for Cumberland House he was told were there last week appeared to evaporate. Overnight there were two bays offered, he claimed.

He said it would not change the problem, as within a few weeks thousands of students would arrive back in Kingston.

“How am I going to rent out my flats if there’s nowhere to park?” he asked.

A council spokesman said there were in fact 16 vacant parking spaces at Cumberland House and said: “To allow residents of accommodation outside the zone, who already have a set amount of allocated parking on their own estates, would mean that the benefits of the scheme would be unlikely to be felt in this new zone.”

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