UK on course for record-breaking number of parking charges

The number of parking tickets being issued by private firms in the UK is on course to reach a record high. 

The RAC Foundation claims that, by the end of the 2018/19 financial year, the DVLA will have shared a total of 6.44 million sets of records with private parking firms, up from 5.65 million in 2017/18. 

The DVLA data is used by parking companies to pursue motorists for charges that they say are due for infringements in private car parks such as those at shopping centres, leisure centres and motorway service areas.

"Numbers like these suggest that something, somewhere, is going wrong”

Figures for the first four months of the 2018/19 financial year show that private parking companies requested 1,479,152 sets of vehicle keeper records from the DVLA - a 14 per cent rise on the 1,299,716 bought in the same quarter of 2017-18. 

The biggest purchasers of data in Q1 were ParkingEye (388,061 sets of vehicle keeper records), Euro Car Parks (125,322) and Smart Parking (114,217). During the 2008/09 financial year, there were 687,000 such data requests.

“Motorists might well be asking what is going on when the number of records being sought by private parking companies has shot up yet again. Numbers like these suggest that something, somewhere, is going wrong,” said Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation.

To access DVLA data parking firms currently need to be members of an accredited trade association of which there are two: the BPA and the IPC. These bodies each have their own code of practice and independent appeals service.

The Government has backed a Private Members’ Bill which aims to introduce a single, sanctioned code of practice that all parking firms will have to adhere to if they want to request DVLA information. The bill passed its committee stage in the House of Commons in July; the next step is the House of Commons report stage, scheduled for 23 November.