| PRIESTS’ cars in the London Borough of Barnet can carry special parking badges from this week, so they can be left in residents’ parking bays while their drivers rush to minister to parishioners.
The scheme, which has taken a year to finalise, was unveiled by the borough on Monday. It is available to ministers of many religions and their pastoral assistants, and was designed to help provide pastoral care in parishioners’ homes without having to worry about finding visitors’ parking permits, a borough spokesman said.
The permits, which are modelled on the borough’s normal red residents’ parking permits, but they are coloured yellow, cost £40 a year for the first one, and £70 for each extra one.
So far, the eligible religions include Baha’i, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Sikhism, Unitarianism, and Zoroastrianism. “But we would not rule out Jeddist Knights or Scientologists. We would need an accompanying letter from their religious community, and we would consult the Barnet Multi-Faith Forum.”
Mike Freer, and the leader of Barnet Council, who chairs the Multi-Faith Forum, said that he had come up with the idea after meeting faith leaders who had difficulty in the controlled-parking zone.
“It’s predominantly for priests, rabbis or vicars who need to visit a parishioner, particularly if a priest needed to give last rites. It means that they don’t have to go into the house first and ask them for a visitors’ pass. It won’t affect the other residents in the area because there are tens of thousands of residents’ bays, and we will only be issuing tens of permits,” he said on Tuesday. |
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