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Private parking companies have formed a new panel to overhaul their code of conduct and stop motorists being penalised for taking more than five minutes to pay for parking.
Two trade bodies representing the sector said the newly established panel would revise rules after a woman in Derby was taken to court last year and asked to pay more than £1,900 in accumulated charge notices, after routinely failing to pay for her parking within five minutes, contravening the car park’s rules.
Motorist Rosey Hudson told the BBC in November that she was delayed in paying on several occasions due to a poor mobile phone signal in the car park. The case against her was later dropped.
Private parking companies have been accused of unfairly pursuing motorists for alleged infractions, and consumer advocates say that a shift to cashless payments has made it more difficult for older drivers and those in locations with a poor signal to pay on time.
In the three months to the start of October, private operators issued an average of more than 41,000 parking penalty tickets a day, according to analysis of government data by the RAC Foundation.
The think-tank said that over the past decade there had been a fivefold increase in the number of requests by operators to obtain motorist data from the DVLA, which it used as a proxy for the number of penalty tickets issued.
In 2022, the then levelling up minister Neil O’ Brien accused private providers of “often adopting a system of misleading and confusing signage, aggressive debt collection and unreasonable fees designed to extort money from motorists”.
The new Private Parking Scrutiny and Advice Panel will “regularly meet with consumer groups to hear motorists’ voices and concerns,” said the British Parking Association, a group that together with fellow trade body, the International Parking Community, represents private parking operators.
The BPA said the panel would make urgent reforms to protect “motorists who have difficulty making prompt payment on entry” by February 2025. It expects a full review of the code to be completed by April.
Andrew Pester, chief executive of the BPA, said the panel’s formation showed that “not only are we serious about raising standards but also making decisive changes to the code when issues arise”.
The BPA and the International Parking Community’s code of conduct came into effect in October last year and applies to the trade bodies’ members.
A government attempt to introduce a statutory code of practice stalled in 2022 following legal challenges by private parking companies, which said the government had not conducted a proper impact assessment.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said the announcement this week of a panel to oversee the code was “in principle . . . a positive” that “stepped into the regulatory void left by successive ministers”.
But he added that it “remains to be seen whether the promised panel will have the independence, the access to data and the teeth it will need to make a difference,” given its links to the industry itself.
Scott Dixon, a consumer advocate and founder of The Complaints Resolver blog, said the industry was “marking its own homework” and called for a “proper UK government code of conduct”.
