MOST of us know that sinking feeling you get when returning to your car you find one of those little yellow plastic wallets plastered over the windscreen – the dreaded parking ticket.
Usually, we take it on the chin. We have forgotten to pay, overstayed or in some way or another infringed the parking regulations. We don’t like it but we pay up, often to the local authority if it is a public car park, with good grace.
But as all motorists know, as car ownership has soared in recent decades, car parking spaces are increasingly at a premium. Private landowners faced with abuse of the parking spaces they control have introduced charges and employed parking companies to run them.
While many of those parking companies operate responsibly, many do not and some, frankly, have been running little more than thinly-veiled extortion rackets.
Many offer their services to private parking owners on a ‘free’ basis and rely on charges and, more importantly, fines to generate their revenue.
Through a combination of easy-to-miss or confusing signage and intimidatory, aggressive letters threatening legal action, the dubious actions of these rogue parking companies have provoked a flood of complaints.
Last year, almost 10,000 people approached the Citizen’s Advice Bureau for advice on private parking tickets. Parking firms are issuing almost 13 times more tickets than decade ago. This year, that is expected to be more than six million tickets - up from 4.7 million in 2017
And this is not just a big city problem either. I have had to step in on behalf of constituents who have fallen foul of these companies in North Yorkshire. Many of them were not just angry, they were distressed about the way they had been treated.
Today (Fri, Feb 2), in the House of Commons in my role as Local Government Minister with parking as part of my brief I will give the Government’s full support to legislation put forward by my Yorkshire MP colleague Sir Greg Knight which will curb the parking cowboys.
Sir Greg’s Private Members’ Bill is expected to be given its Second Reading – that’s the stage in a Bill’s progress where MPs have the chance to debate the detail of the proposal – with support from across the House.
The Parking (Code of Practice) Bill has at its heart a stringent new Code of Practice for parking companies developed in conjunction with motorists’ groups and other experts.
The new stringent mandatory code will replace existing codes of practice operated by two parking trade organisations and will effectively bring the small minority of unscrupulous operators in line with those who are behaving appropriately.
Those falling foul of the new rules will then be blocked from accessing the driver data held by the DVLA which they need to issue fines and chase motorists, often menacingly, for payment. That will effectively force them out of the industry. They behave, or go bust.
These measures build on action the government has already taken to tackle rogue private parking operators, including banning wheel clamping and towing, and over-zealous parking enforcement by councils and parking wardens.
The new private parking Bill is just one of the new areas I am now responsible for and which I hope will make a real difference.