A READER suggests in a letter (Daily Echo, October 13) that the horrific parking problem around the Fairisle schools can be resolved with residents’ parking permits and “a few signs”. If only it were that simple!

We know that schools throughout the city experience traffic congestion outside their gates at the start and finish of the school day but the Fairisle problem is compounded by the fact that Fairisle Road is a cul-desac, and virtually every bit of space for parking is outside someone’s home.

So residents become prisoners in their own homes and children and parents run a gauntlet of vehicles looking for somewhere to park and then manoeuvring out again.

Years of valiant effort by the schools’ head teachers, police and traffic enforcement officers to resolve the problem have proved futile.

The city council needs to recognise that the problem is so bad that an imaginative solution is required – and that a solution is to hand: remove the need for parents’ cars to drive into Fairisle Road at all, by making permanent the temporary car park currently being used by General Hospital staff on the adjacent site previously occupied by Oaklands Community School.

KEITH MORRELL & DON THOMAS, Independent councillors, Southampton City Council.