A Hereford car-sharing club has been granted free use of a city parking space that would ordinarily cost £480 a year.

Members of the St James & Bartonsham Car Club had found it difficult to return club cars to the same place they borrowed them from, and to pass that information on to the next user.

To resolve this, Herefordshire Council has set aside a dedicated parking space for the club in its Nelson Street car park to the southeast of the city.

The 23-space car park is only for longer-term parking, with spaces ordinarily available for quarterly (£120) or yearly (£480) rental.

“Due to there being many different users in the scheme, applying this charge would be problematic,” the council’s decision notice said – while charging the car club as a whole for the space “would be cost-prohibitive for the scheme”.

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According to the Car Share Herefordshire website, there are now five clubs in the county overseen by Malvern Hills Car Clubs.

As well as the Hereford neighbourhood club, there is one in Colwall and Ledbury, while new council-funded clubs have recently been set up in Kington, Leominster and Fownhope. There are three more in the pipeline.

The council has already provided a parking space for the Kington scheme, and said it would consider similar requests from other clubs, so long as these did not “become onerous”.

The St James club says it welcomes enquiries from new members who typically need car around two or three times a week, and would do under 6,000 miles per year – meaning “it would probably be cheaper to belong to a car club than to pay your own tax and car insurance costs”.