‘Cowboy’ parking firms are doling out a record number of tickets, MailOnline can today reveal.
Government figures suggest private operators issued 12.8million fines in 2023/24 – one every two seconds.
This is up nearly 90 per cent in just five years, despite the Government repeatedly vowing to stop predatory operators.
With 2024/25 on track to be even worse, ministers are facing renewed calls to get tough on the ruthless firms causing misery for millions of motorists.
Simon Williams, head of policy at the RAC, said it was ‘scandalous’ how motorists were being stung by broken technology and firms deploying sneaky signs to take ‘advantage of law-abiding citizens’.
He revealed he was working with parliamentarians to stop parking firms ‘marking their own homework’ by overhauling the current complaints process.
Mr Williams said: ‘We want a truly independent single appeals service that only the Government backed private parking code of practice will deliver.
‘We also want a scrutiny board which will ensure private parking operators conform to the rules and will face consequences if they do not.’
Successive governments have long vowed to clampdown on parking firms but have so far failed to act.
The previous Tory Government withdrew a long-awaited code of practice aimed at protecting drivers from what they called ‘cowboy’ operators.
Ministers caved in after parking firms launched a legal challenge of the code, which included slashing the maximum fines from £100 to £50 and banning debt collectors from hounding motorists who do not pay within a time limit.
Last June, industry bodies the British Parking Association (BPA) and the International Parking Community (IPC) published their own code of practice.
It included requirements for consistent signage, a single set of rules for operators on private land and an ‘appeals charter’.
Motoring groups attacked it for neither including a cap on fines or the removal of debt recovery fees.
MailOnline analysis shows private parking firms requested driver information from the DVLA 7.2m times between April and October 2024.
Firms only request such data, which costs £2.50 a time and includes the car owner’s name and address, if they intend to hand out parking charge notices (PCNs) to drivers who’ve overstayed.
Each ticket can cost up to £100.
Paralegal Luke Memory, of CCJ Removal Service, which helps motorists hit with unfair parking fines get debt judgements binned from their records, accused the industry of behaving like ‘drug cartels’ running a ‘complete racket’.
ParkingEye, Euro Car Parks and Horizon Parking, responsible for 36 per cent of all DVLA requests, turned over nearly £150m between them in 2023/24.
Each has either been caught sending threatening letters to motorists who missed hidden signage, were incorrectly flagged by untrustworthy camera systems or fell victim to glitching pay and display machines.
Some have been been criticised for deploying camera systems which ‘double dip’ drivers who visit the same car park twice within short succession.
This happens when ANPR cameras fail to spot a car leaving the first time, wrongly only capturing them when they drive off the second time. When this happens, the system will assume the car was parked for that entire period.
Mr Memory said the practices could amount to ‘fraud, criminal harassment and extortion’.
He claimed the DVLA, which pockets £31m a year by processing the requests, are ‘not interested’ in keeping parking firms in check.
Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Memory said: ‘It’s worse than payday loan debacle. It’s almost on the borderline of loan sharking behaviour legitimised by the court service.
‘They’ve got worse, nastier, and are absolutely rinsing the back of this.
‘There are loads of cases where the company employed to chase the debts end up adding huge costs on in the thousands of pounds.
‘And if you didn’t know about a judgement, you owe £950 from a £50 parking ticket. And bailiffs are not nice people, they are nasty pieces of work.’
Determined motorist Wayne Boyce was one of a lucky few who managed to overturn an incorrect charge.
The football commentator was sent a letter by ParkingEye demanding £100 (reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days) for allegedly parking for nearly 19 hours overnight from February 11 to 12 at Fleet Services, off the M3.
Motorist Ian Dale said the car park sign at the entrance to the Stansted Airport Lodge was virtually impossible to see view as you enter, and only visible to traffic coming the other way (the view from the road, left, the sign, right)
Mr Boyce, 53, had stopped there on the 11th to use the facilities at around 6.20pm for 20 minutes, before continuing his journey to Shepherd’s Bush, London where he was due to work that evening.
Mr Boyce, from the New Forest, Wiltshire, then returned to the services the next day, before 1pm, to take a short break on his drive home.
The PCN only captured him arriving on the 11th at 6.09pm and leaving at 1.01pm the next day, failing to record the interceding departure and arrival.
Mr Boyce told MailOnline: ‘In my appeal to ParkingEye, I wrote down that I had visited twice but there was obviously a problem with the cameras. I said check the CCTV and I’m sure you will see my car leaving and coming back.’
He also attached a receipt showing his car was parked 50 miles way, in Shepherd’s Bush, at the time he was alleged to have been at the service station.
In a misunderstanding, ParkingEye replied: ‘The evidence you have provided shows that the payment for parking was made at an invalid location, or via a payment service that is not associated to Parkingeye.
‘As such, our records confirm that no parking was purchased to allow your vehicle to remain within the site for the duration of the stay.’
Official plans of the Stansted Airport Lodge car park and signage. The car park entrance sign (1) is angled in such a way that it would be impossible to see
Offering a resolution, the letter added: ‘We would like to offer you the opportunity to pay a reduced amount of £20. This will be on a without prejudice basis and will be available for the next 14 days.
‘If an appeal to the independent appeals service (POPLA) is submitted, the £20 offer will no longer be available, and the full amount of the charge will be due.’
Mr Boyce rejected the offer and appealed to POPLA but ‘didn’t hold out much hope’.
Last week, POPLA – funded by the British Parking Association – wrote to Mr Boyce to confirm that ParkingEye were dropping the charge in the face of the incontrovertible evidence.
A Parkingeye spokesperson said: ‘The car park at Welcome Break Fleet features prominent and highly visible signs throughout providing information on how to use the car park.
‘This includes guidance that there is a two-hour free stay period and tariffs apply thereafter.
‘On this rare occasion it appears the motorist’s vehicle wasn’t detected correctly by the cameras, but following a further review of the case the charge was cancelled and we informed and apologised to the motorist for the inconvenience caused.’
Motorist Debbie Dinckal in Syston Town Square car park in Leicestershire, who was sent a PCN by Euro Car Parks after the pay and display machine did not log her full registration plate
Jyothi Nadarajan, from Leytonstone, East London, is still receiving threatening letters after being ‘doubled dipped’ at her local Iceland.
At around 8.30am on September 12, Mrs Nadarajan, an NHS occupational therapist, bought a one-hour ticket on an app. She left after just 20 minutes, dropping her kids off at school.
The mother-of-two returned to Iceland shortly after 3pm that day and bought another parking ticket.
Five days later, Mrs Nadarajan, 52, received a letter from Excel demanding money, saying her car was parked at Iceland for around seven hours.
Demanding evidence that she was there all day, Excel said they did not need to offer any and that, conversely, she needed to prove she was elsewhere. The firm also sent her an ‘enormous document explaining how state-of-the-art the camera system was’, she claimed.
Tesco, where Mrs Nadarajan visited before returning to Iceland, handed her CCTV of her car entering its car park.
Yet, because she got it a month later, Excel and the so-called ‘Independent Appeals Service’ said the deadline for appeals had passed – meaning they wouldn’t consider her evidence.
The £100 parking charge has now been passed onto debt collectors, who are threatening her with court action.
Mrs Nadarajan told MailOnline: ‘It’s corrupt. The PCN notice and the very system of appeal is such a short amount of time.
‘It’s not the money, it’s the unfairness of it, the principal. If they do this, how many others are there who don’t have the energy to fight it?
‘When it’s clearly incorrect, you can’t do this to people. There’s something wrong in the process.’
Excel has been contacted for comment.
Elsewhere, retired aircraft engineer Ian Dale received a PCN days after dropping off cousins visiting from Australia at Stansted Airport Lodge on September 4, 2023. He left 17 minutes later after helping them unpack and saying his goodbyes.
Euro Car Parks has been accused of unfairly demanding hundreds of pounds from drivers who say its ‘faulty’ ticket machines incorrectly recorded their vehicle registrations
The 58-year-old was accused of staying too long in the B&B car park – which looks like a driveway – without paying.
But Mr Dale, from Wolverhampton, was not even aware he needed to pay as he saw no signs explaining the rules.
UK Parking Control (UKPC) demanded £100 from him, or £60 if paid within 14 days.
Mr Dale said: ‘I told them “I just dropped people off, go away”. I didn’t even know it was a car park, because I didn’t see any signs.’
His POPLA appeal was rejected. By December, he was receiving letters threatening court action.
He said the promise of sending bailiffs felt like ‘extortion, threats and harassment’, with the alleged debt being pass to different collectors.
Mr Dale then received a letter on his birthday in June 2024 with a court date for six months later. He believes the timing of the letter was a deliberate use of the courts system to intimidate him into paying.
Ahead of the showdown, Mr Dale made the 300-mile round trip back to Stansted to investigate the car park.
Once there, he immediately realised that the car park’s entrance sign with the terms and conditions was almost impossible to read upon entering because of its angle.
Mr Dale said: ‘The entrance sign that’s supposed to tell you the rules, it has to be like a belisha beacon, but there isn’t one. Well, there is but it’s invisible – not possible to see.
‘I put it to the court that this has been designed so that people approaching from the direction I approached cannot see the entrance sign.’
Mr Dale called it a ‘predatory’ tactic that was designed to ‘fraudulently entrap’ drivers.
The BPA’s code of practice states that entrance signs ‘should be placed so that it is readable by drivers without their needing to look away from the road ahead’.
The court ruled in Mr Dale’s favour. He is now trying to go after UKPC for the thousands in costs he says he incurred in defending their spurious claim against him.
Excel Parking has been contacted for comment.
The DVLA primarily relies on parking trade bodies, the BPA and IPC, to enforce their codes of practice. If a company is kicked out of the association, they will also lose their rights to the data.
As it stands the BPA only has active sanctions against just one firm, and the IPC has made none.
The Information Commissioner’s Office said it was unable to speculate on how many false positive PCNs would need to be discovered for them to force the DVLA to stop providing driver data to parking firms.
A spokesperson added: ‘We expect all organisations to use people’s personal information lawfully.
‘If anyone is unhappy with how their personal information has been used, they can make a complaint.’
Euro Car Parks also came under fire last week after motorists were ‘bullied’ to pay sums as much as £900 after a ‘faulty’ pay and display machine incorrectly recorded their registration plates.
Users of the System Town Square car park in Leicestershire entered their registrations correctly using the ticket machine’s keypad and paid, yet the ticket printed out a ticket with incorrect numbers.
Many have received PCNs each worth £100, and had their appeals rejected by Euro Car Parks despite some providing evidence that a ticket was purchased.
Euro Car Parks has been contacted for comment.
The BPA has been contacted for comment.
