Complaining about a business (parking)

[InvisibleBuffy]

I'm after some advice please. I live in a purely residential road with terraced housing and on street parking (no offroad). I often don't get a space and have to park some distance away. I absolutely accept that. It's the price I pay for living near the centre of town and not paying for a place with a driveway.
However, in the second road up there's a garage that does MOTs, repairs etc. There is little parking on that road and they only have space for up to two or three cars in their premises (very small).
This means that all throughout the day, we have mechanics moving cars in and out of our road, taking the rare spare spaces.
To add to this, the owner frequently buys cars to fix and flip and parks them on our road while he gets round to it. Sometimes these stay parked for months and in one case, over two years. The number varies but once there were nine separate ones he had parked.
Apparently if we need a space, we should just 'ask' but this involves finding somewhere to park in the first place and then walking to the garage, back to the car and then hovering in a one way system while we wait for a mechanic to turn up and move one. It's a pain in the arse and ends up taking longer than just parking a ten minute walk away.
Technically he's done nothing wrong. It's a public road. The cars tend to be MOTd and taxed (everyone in our road checks 🤣) but this has been going on for years and I'm getting very fed up with parking ages away only to walk back and see his employees moving one car only for another one of them to be hovering behind to move another customers car into the empty space.
He's effectively using our road like an extension of his business premises and his own private parking lot.
I want to put in a complaint but to whom? The council only has options for food or noise complaints. Everything else seems to be about scams which it's not. Do we have any options here?

I doubt there's anything much you can do about it but I empathise.

I would be pissed off too.

It’s usually the council - is there a phone number you can call? It’s very unusual for there not to be a central number which can then put you onto the right department.

You have my sympathies - that sounds grim.

I would have thought the council . It’s not ok for the business to be impacting on residential parking like this.

We have the exact same situation. The parish council called an ‘extraordinary meeting’ to which we went. There were representatives from the county council, local council, parish council and police.
Absolutely nothing to be done so long as the have tax, mot and insurance.
dvla can impound them if tax isn’t upto date and do so fairly quickly after being reported. It’s a non-emergency police report on line (for Staffordshire. It might be different elsewhere.) for mot and insurance not being up to date - this may take months to a year or more for anything to actually happen, if it does at all.

it is utterly frustrating.

Can't the council impose a resident parking permit system?

Only if the is resident housing on both side of the street. Apparently if only one side is housing and the other is industrial units then no, residential parking permits (even paid for ones) cannot be instigated. We tried as a street to go that route. Yes we were all willing to throw money at the council just to get the problem
sorted. Even if it can be used, it’s a very long drawn out process apparently.
(again, Staffordshire council - others may have different rules).

You could call the council or one of your councillors. We had a problem of lots of mini cab drivers who were waiting for calls for pick ups waiting in our street day and night. They were blocking all the parking but also talking to one another all night while they were waiting and keeping people awake. The council went and spoke to the company and it stopped.

Both sides of the street is residential. We've been asking for years and have been getting either promises or blowoffs. On the plus side, bitching about parking has certainly brought the street together. It's the first thing my neighbours talk about when we see each other 🤣

Surely when you run a business, you can’t negatively impact the residential amenity of the residential area or whatever the phrase is. Is it flouting some sort of planning and access ruling? Definitely contact your local councillor.