A statement from Cllr Nina Killen confirms she does not support parking charges in Formby's Sumn

I do not support parking charges for Sumner Road car park and ideally parking in Formby village would be free. This helps traders and shoppers.

But you can't find £55m of savings from nowhere. It is death by a thousand cuts by the Tory government. The £25,000 a year which is due to be raised from Sumner Road would have had to be found elsewhere if not from parking charges.

I do not agree with cuts - any cuts. But they have been forced on us. I will continue to work with my Labour colleagues and the new shadow minister for small business and Sefton Central MP Bill Esterson to help support Formby traders.

Some comments were made by a Labour colleague of mine at the "call-in" meeting on September 29 which were attributed to me. These comments said that charges may help with availability of spaces and flow of traffic and that evidence from the Excel car park shows people can be willing to pay. The instalment of credit card payment machines may help because people will not need to find change.

Although these were comments that I had made informally to Cllr Owens, they were not made in support of charges, more in mitigation for the difficult decision that was having to be made. It was certainly not "a statement" that I wanted read out at the meeting. If the full transcript were available I believe he said that these were comments that the public had passed to me and that the anecdotal evidence shows there are differing views among the public. The comments as presented by other councillors on social media were taken out of context.

If I had known Cllr Owens was going to read out my comments at the meeting I would have made it clear that I do not think parking charges are a good thing and that if it were not for the cuts the council has to make it would not be happening.

I don't support the charges but we have to set a balanced budget. The Tories are in the fortunate position of being able to oppose cuts and charges that they don't like while supporting their government's ideological decision to cut council budgets and shrink the state.

So far the £170m of cuts have forced Sefton Council to close libraries, to cut care packages for the elderly, to cut education packages and respite care for the disabled, to cut adult day care. It is almost half of Sefton Council's controllable budget and after five years of this, the council is reaching a point where only statutory duties can be met.

The only way to stop this is to fight to get rid of this Tory government. The Tories are looking to cut another 25% to 40% from governmental departments including local government so Sefton residents can expect to wave goodbye to many other council services and see other charges increase. This is reality.

If the Formby Conservatives and Community Action group want to fight these charges, they should join with Labour to fight cuts to local government.

Cllr Nina Killen