The Sid Valley’s 730 paid parking spaces collectively brought in £827,873 in 2016/17, according to a Freedom of Information request (FoI) by the Herald.

The figure, the total revenue from the seven car parks owned by East Devon District Council (EDDC), is up from £753,329 in the 2011/12 financial year.

This equates to a 10.5 per cent increase, although the income has fluctuated over the intervening years. In contrast, income in Beer and Ottery St Mary has fallen over the same period.

EDDC says the weather is a predominant factor in how well its car parks are used.

The Ham West car park was Sidmouth’s highest earner last year, netting £316,199, but that is down from £346,590 in 2011/12. Each space in the car park was worth £1,727 last year.

Mill Street was previously operated on a permit-only basis but now some of the bays are ‘pay and display’ – a move that brought in £31,444 last year. EDDC receives payments of approximately £500,000 each year for parking permits but the authority’s information and complaints officer, who handled the FoI request, said this cannot be split to show the income from individual car parks.

Beer’s 473 spaces across three car parks raised £228,454 in 2016/17, down from 232,202 in 2011/12, despite new income from the Fore Street car park since 2014/15.

In Ottery’s EDDC car parks, the 33 spaces in Brook Street took £7,142 and the 129 in Canaan Way £24,233. That gives a total for the town of £31,375, which is down from £32,634 in 2011/12.

The highest earner in East Devon was its biggest town, Exmouth, which netted £1,140,450.

Across the district, the revenue was £3,291,023 in 2016/17, an increase of £317,319 or 10.7 per cent compared to 2011/12.

The income figures obtained by the FoI request includes car park charges, fines, permit sales, rental and reserved income. They are purely revenue and do not include any costs to manage, enforce or maintain the car parks.

An EDDC spokeswoman said: “The weather is a predominant factor in how well our car parks are used throughout the year which, of course, impacts on income.

“It would be pure speculation to draw any reliable conclusions between car park income and the health of towns and villages.”