Parking machines won’t be ready to take new £1 coins

THE introduction of the new pound coin will lead to parking chaos as tens of thousands of machines will not be ready to accept the coins in time, the British Parking Association has warned.

The organisation told The Daily Telegraph that a “big queue” for modification means around a quarter of Britain’s 100,000 parking meters will not have been updated in time.

The 12-sided coin will enter circulation on March 28, six months before the current £1 is phased out in October. Machines which are not updated by March 28 will have to carry signs warning customers that they are incapable of accepting new coins.

Richard Boultby, marketing director at Metric, a major manufacturer of parking ticket machines, said older machines would cost hundreds of pounds each to modify. He said a “backlog” of requests meant most machines would be upgraded in May or June.

It has also emerged that around 40pc of the UK’s 500,000 vending machines will not be updated in time, the Automatic Vending Association said.