Park at your own peril!

Parking tickets are a constant headache but with new rules arriving next year, there’s hope on the horizon for drivers

THINK Big Brother is watching you — and your car? You’re dead right. Especially when you’re receiving one of the estimated 8 million parking tickets issued each year to Britain’s motorists.

Should you want to see the full extent of the digital onslaught, head next week to Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre — the NEC — and visit the annual Parkex exhibition (June 14 to 16, parkex.net). It’s a real eye-opener.

Parkex is the booming parking industry’s annual jamboree showcasing the latest high-tech equipment to sell to private parking firms — and councils.

Many councils themselves contract private firms to do their parking control and enforcement for them.

It is organised by the British Parking Association (britishparking.co.uk) and runs in tandem with the Traffex exhibition (traffex.com) looking at wider road transport management issues.

But serious concerns are being voiced by motoring organisations, consumer groups, MPs and ministers, that Britain’s 35 million motorists are being fleeced by a Wild West of ‘cowboy firms’.

LEGALLY, if a local authority issues a parking ticket it is called a Penalty Charge Notice or ‘PCN’ and is a fine.

But tickets for parking on private land are different.

They are often called Parking Charge Notices and made to look like official PCNs, even using the same initials.

As consumer champion Scott dixon explains: ‘A private parking company cannot fine you. They can only issue invoices — often disguised as a fine — for an alleged breach of contract for parking on private land.’

Last week, the daily Mail revealed how attempts by the Government to crack down on excessive parking fines are being torpedoed by lawyers acting for greedy parking firms.

The Government is preparing to launch a new Private Parking Code of Practice — set to come into force by the end of 2023.

But several major parking firms launched cases against the new code and blocked two key policy measures. The first of these policies was to slash — from £100 to £50 — the maximum amount for a Penalty Charge Notice. Parking firms want to raise the cap to £120. They argued that a reduction to £50 would lead more drivers to flout rules because a ticket, if paid at the half-price rate within 14 days, would in many cases be cheaper than paying for parking.

Secondly, a plan to ban debt-collectors from hounding drivers who feel they have been treated unfairly and do not pay within a time limit has also been scuppered.

However, other measures survive, including:

A COMPULSORY ten-minute grace period after tickets expire.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

SLAP ON THE WRIST

A SIMPLER and fairer independent appeals system to give more drivers the benefit of the doubt in cases of honest mistakes or mitigating circumstances.

ROGUE operators who fail to follow the code could be banned from accessing dVLA data, principally drivers’ home addresses.

MINISTERS estimate more than 22,000 parking tickets are issued each day — about 8 million a year. The British Parking Associ