A £392,000 scheme to draw shoppers back to a town centre by offering free car parking until after Christmas could make no difference to help secure jobs and the local economy and cost taxpayers up to £65 per extra car it attracts to subsidise, it has been claimed.

A meeting of Darlington Borough Council’s cabinet heard Labour and Green councillors question whether the authority’s move to introduce a two-hour free offer in most council parking areas from the end of September would represent value for money for council taxpayers.

Green Party leader Councillor Matthew Snedker told the meeting the council’s previous free parking scheme, before the pandemic, had brought in between 66 and 100 more cars a day, so if the latest parking initiative drew similar numbers of extra cars and at a cost of almost £400,000 over three months, the parking subsidy would cost between £45 and £65 per extra car.

Labour group leader Councillor Stephen Harker said the officers’ report into the car parking initiative had made a point about examining previous car parking initiatives before the pandemic to understand how they had worked before going ahead with the latest scheme, but there was no evidence that previous initiatives had made a significant difference for the town centre.

He highlighted how the report stated the council’s pre-pandemic free Sunday parking scheme had seen an “almost nil” difference in car park use, while its two hours free parking scheme had seen an increase of just two per cent. He said that rise could be explained by people changing how they travelled to the town centre.

Cllr Harker said: “Have you seen more convincing evidence before you spend £400,000 on a scheme that on my reading of this report has had negligible impact on improving the town centre? I’m not criticising doing schemes like this, but what I am saying is that we do need some certainty that the money we are spending will have the desired effect.”

The Conservative-run authority’s cabinet member for local services, Councillor Andy Keir said the cost of the subsidy per car could be quite different to Cllr Snedker’s calculation. He said: “The costs are the costs. I think it is value for money when you think we are trying to regenerate the town centre. The town centre is the key thing we need to re-energise going forward as we come out of Covid and we want to make the position of the town centre such that people can get there. Until such time as local transport and any other transport means are up people will tend to come by car and we have got to accommodate that.”

Cllr Keir said the council was working to bring people into the town centre as public transport was limited and allowing people to feel safe by using their cars. He said the council would not be able to measure the success of the scheme until it had been implemented, but the latest scheme was designed to create greater turnover of car parking spaces.

He said: “The proof of the pudding will be when we see the footfall between now and Christmas. What we don’t want to do is dent that. People can go to other places.”