We are in receipt of the bill for the District Levy and have various concerns with this charge.

We have contacted your office but failed to get a reply.

We have traded in Worthing for 25 years and have never had as many concerns as we do at the moment.

The council are not doing anything to attract visitors to shop in Worthing and set out some of the reasons below.

• Parking has become an extremely big issue and I raised this fact about a year ago because of the high parking charges.

Union Place is extremely pricey and this is certainly shown by the low number of people parking there.

A few years ago there had to be police directing traffic at Christmas because of the huge queues, a sight that you will not see now.

• This high charge for parking has now been reinforced by the astonishing numbers of traffic wardens who are pouncing on everyone.

Even the delivery guys have been told they can't park whilst delivering.

• We have customers complaining daily about the parking.

It is not viable to simply pop to town anymore.

• Why do Crawley, Horsham and Chichester pay far lower parking charges than us?

• These lower charges are attracting people out of Worthing and the roads in and out of Worthing also deter people.

• We already pay £710 per month for the business rates, plus pay a separate charge to get the rubbish collected.

• We have no loading bay or parking space.

• Although pensioners have been given bus passes, many of the bus routes into town have been stopped.

Shopping in Worthing is a luxury for them because they have to rely on taxis.

•Teville Gate is still an eyesore.

• We are often greeted with cans of beer and sick on our doorstep due to the large amount of clubs.

We have to clean this up.

• Internet shopping and out-of-town centres, with no parking charges, will obviously take away a lot of business from the town.

We would appreciate your feedback to these comments and also explain to us why you require yet another £147.50, a payment that we do not remember having any prior notice about.

We would like to know what benefit we will gain from this payment and if any of our issues will be addressed?

We will not be paying this amount and will be forwarding a copy to the Federation of Small Businesses and the press.

M Caplan
Cover-Up Interiors
Chapel Road
Worthing

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