MORE money to prevent people from becoming homeless will be spent by the city council next year – but unpopular car parking charges will go ahead.

Ed Turner, Oxford City Council’s board member for finance, said it will spend £5m over 2018/19 to buy homes, which will be used by families who had been at risk of homelessness.

It will also spend an extra £187,000 next year, on top of the £200,000 increase planned for 2019/20, to combat homelessness.

Mr Turner pledged to push ahead with the controversial expansion of the council’s Seacourt Park and Ride, while freezing parking charges at it and the city council’s other park and ride sites around Oxford.

He said: “In this budget there are some hard decisions: nobody likes putting up fees and charges, and while our council tax increase is lower than that of other public authorities, we understand it all represents money that has to be paid.”

Charges for the city council’s Headington and St Leonard’s car parks will increase to £2 for up to an hour, rather than £1.70 for the first two hours, despite Lib Dem councillors staging a last ditch attempt to get them stopped.

Mr Turner added: “We have also decided to increase city centre and suburban car park charges. Of course we understand representations saying we should not do this, but essentially we are in a position where either we need to raise these charges, or we need to hike up other fees and charges or to cut other services.”

The council said it would spend £5,000 on promoting the Oxford Living Wage across the city. That already guarantees a minimum wage of £9.26 an hour for all city council staff and contractors, which will increase to £9.69 in April.

It also said it hopes to make £500,000 from its trading company, Oxford Direct Services, and will pump in £1.6m to improve the Covered Market.

Council tax will increase by 2.99 per cent, with the average rate across the city increasing to £298.86 from 2017/18’s total of £290.19.

The Lib Dems and Greens put forward other amendments – but neither party got sufficient support at Monday’s meeting.

Both said they would scrap any expansion of the Seacourt Park and Ride but former council leader Bob Price said the groups were ‘weeping crocodile tears’ over the protected land the council plans to build on.

The Lib Dems’ said they would have spent £2m extra on buying council homes for homeless people or people at risk of homelessness.

Liz Wade said the city was facing a ‘social epidemic not seen since the end of the First World War’.

Rather than hiking up Headington parking charges, the Lib Dems said they would take £52,000 from the council’s resurfacing budget to pay for it.

The Greens said they would invest £1m into energy efficient and renewable energy schemes and £1m to refurbish a building to improve homeless facilities.