A fall in revenue in the city’s car parks can hardly be a surprise to the city council. Efforts have been made in a co-ordinated way for years with the precise intention of persuading people to leave their cars at home and travel into the city by other means.

It has always been expensive to park in the centre and what is not clear is why city centre car park usage has shown such a dramatic drop in the past year.

What is also unclear is whether the drop in the use of the city centre car parks equates to a fall in the number of people coming into the city either for business, or to shop, and whether people are going elsewhere.

If there has been a significant reduction in city centre footfall, as a result of efforts to keep the motorist at bay, that would prove to be a much more worrying statistic.