Private parking firms told to cap fines for motorists (The Times)

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Article from yesterdays Times, with the usual 'weak' reporting on a subject they are not familiar with:

Private parking firms told to cap fines for motorists

Operators will lose the power to pursue drivers through the courts if they do not abide by a new code of practice to be placed before parliament on Tuesday

Oliver Wright, Policy Editor, and Laurence Sleator, Transport Correspondent
Monday October 19 2026, 10.30pm

Private parking firms will have to abide by tough new rules or lose the power to pursue drivers through the courts under a government pledge to tackle everyday annoyances.

Operators will be banned from automatically charging motorists for entering a car park without paying and will have to give them at least ten minutes to leave after their session has expired.
The rules will also cap the maximum fine that an operator can charge a motorist for parking without a ticket at £100.

Motorists will also face a maximum fine of £20 on appeal if they make a mistake like entering their number plate incorrectly on a ticket machine. If a machine is out of order, then operators will not be able to issue fines at all.

Any operator that breaches the new regulations will lose its right to access the DVLA database of number plates that allows them to trace a vehicle owner.

A new private parking code of practice will be laid before parliament on Tuesday. It is the latest of Andy Burnham's "series of everyday fixes" and follows an announcement that people who play music out loud on public transport face £100 fines.

However, the measures formed part of a government consultation to crack down on unscrupulous companies in England, Scotland and Wales that closed more than a year ago, but had not yet been put into effect. 

The number of private car parks has mushroomed in recent years, from about 10,000 in 2012 to almost 50,000 today. At the same time the number of fines issued has increased to almost 14.4 million a year — a 148 per cent increase since 2019.

Under the new rules, drivers will be given a guaranteed five minutes to decide whether to park and ten minutes to leave once their session ends.

Charges will also be scrapped on appeal for mistakes like stopping briefly to check directions, in the case of breakdowns or broken ticket machines.  
For small slip-ups, like forgetting a parking permit, entering the wrong registration or forgetting to confirm it in the machine when parking, drivers will face a maximum charge of £20 on appeal. 

The changes have been welcomed by motoring organisations, but they said ministers could have gone further.
"While this isn't quite the Christmas present we wanted for drivers, it should hopefully save many the stress of having to challenge unfair tickets," Simon Williams, the RAC's head of policy, said.

"We've long called for the banning of debt recovery fees being added on top of parking charge notices and a single independent appeals body to replace the two industry-run ones, but neither have been included, which is disappointing."

Jack Cousens, head of roads policy at the AA, said: "After seven long years, drivers finally have something which could offer them better protections against the worst private parking operators. For too long, many private parking operators have aggressively attacked drivers to the point where many simply pay up if they receive a charge from one on the doorstep.
"Ultimately, we need to stop charges being issued in the first place, especially where the driver has done nothing wrong."

Alison Tooze, chief policy officer at the British Parking Association, said the group welcomed the new code "as an important step forward for motorists, communities and responsible parking operators". 

She added: "Overall, the code strikes the right balance between stronger protections for motorists and effective parking management, helping keep communities, businesses and local economies moving."

So, after seven years of delays, the government's long-awaited statutory Private Parking Code of Practice is shaping up to be little more than a watered-down version of what was originally promised.

Most of the supposedly new protections are already contained in the industry's thoroughly discredited Private Parking Sector Single Code of Practice (PPSSCoP). The BPA and IPC cynically used the government's original proposals as the basis for their own self-serving version, conveniently watering down or omitting the provisions that would have seriously curtailed the industry's worst excesses. The obvious intention was to persuade the government to adopt their version as the basis for statutory regulation. It was a blatant attempt to pull the wool over the government's eyes and, judging by this announcement, they've succeeded.

The original 2022 statutory Code proposed significantly lower parking charges, an end to the outrageous £70 debt recovery add-ons and a single genuinely independent appeals service. All three have effectively been ditched. The £100 maximum remains, the £70 add-ons have been kicked into yet another consultation in 2027, and we're still stuck with POPLA and the kangaroo court that is the IAS.

Even the CMA has identified serious failings in the way operators handle appeals under the PPSSCoP, yet the government appears perfectly happy to give statutory backing to rules largely shaped by the very industry of greedy and unscrupulous firms it is supposed to be regulating.

What disgusts me most is that we've waited seven years for legislation that was supposed to bring this industry to heel, only to see the government apparently swallow the industry's own proposals while abandoning the measures that would actually have made a difference.

The BPA and IPC must be laughing their heads off. They've managed to turn what was supposed to be meaningful regulation into something that largely preserves the status quo. And the government seems either unwilling or incapable of recognising that it's been taken for a ride.