A councillor’s complaint that the Halifax Evening Courier inaccurately reported plans to introduce resident parking permits in parts of the town has been rejected by the Press Complaints Commision.

Calderdale councillor Roger Taylor complained that a series of articles about council car parking permits had wrongly claimed that proposals to introduce a charge for permits – which have since been abandoned – would mean that residents would be charged to park outside their own homes.

He said although the proposal was to introduce a charge, residents would only be able to park directly outside their home if there was a space available, and so the statement that the scheme would make people pay to park outside their own homes was inaccurate.

The commission said there was no breach of the code and did not uphold the complaint.

In its conclusion, the PCC said it had considered the complaint under Clause 1 (Accuracy), and noted that the coverage had referred to plans to introduced payment for permits to park ‘outside homes’.

However it did appear to be the case that the council had been planning to introduce charges for residential permit parking schemes, and it did not consider that readers generally would be misled into believing that the proposed scheme had been to charge people for an allotted space directly outside their home.

It said the crucial point was that, under the proposed scheme, some residents would be charged to obtain permits to park in the vicinity of their homes.

The councillor also raised concerns over the “emotional language” employed by the newspaper on this issue, but the PCC said the paper was entitled to be partisan, provided it distinguished clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.