Private parking firms on track to issue an astonishing 14.5 million tickets this year

An astonishing 14.5 million penalty demands will be issued by private parking firms this year, if the current six-month trend continues.

Analysis of data from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) by breakdown organisation the RAC points to the total value of parking penalties issued privately rising to a whopping £1.4 billion in 2025, assuming that targeted drivers all receive a £100 parking charge notice.

The increasingly lucrative nature of the industry is revealed by the fact that parking firms are currently issuing double the number of parking charge notices compared with 2019, when the Government first introduced an Act of Parliament designed to crack down on greedy operators who were widely seen to be taking advantage of drivers. 

Unfortunately in 2022, a potentially effective Private Parking Code of Practice designed to limit parking charges was scrapped following a legal battle and claims of hardship from the parking industry.

Operators claimed that following the new Code’s rules could result in 46 per cent of parking businesses going bust within a year, and the loss of 3,000 jobs. At the time, the British Parking Association – an industry trade body – said reducing the maximum parking charges could limit the effectiveness of parking enforcement and increase the risk of drivers ignoring parking rules.

The RAC points to recent high-profile parking cases that highlight the perceived unfairness of parking operations, including one where a driver was threatened with £1,906 in fines after taking longer than five minutes to pay for parking in Derby, and also the hundreds of angry users of a car park in Syston, Leicestershire, who have been threatened with fines due to what they claim are parking machine faults.

The RAC also says its analysis shows that just five parking firms are responsible for almost half the requests to the DVLA for keepers’ details currently, while our calculations suggest the £2.50 cost of making such requests nets the UK Government more than £36 million in revenue each year from parking firms.

Click here to read more about the Private Parking Code of Practice...