Parking in the UK has become a major annoyance for drivers. There are the fiddly apps, the cashless machines that never seem to work and the ever-increasing rates. Fall foul of the rules and you can expect a parking charge notice to be posted through your door within days.
Motorists have taken to online message boards to rail against what they see as profiteering, alleging unfair fees, confusing signage and heavy-handed enforcement, with many believing the process has become more vindictive in recent years.
Drivers are certainly getting more fines. In the 2023-24 tax year, private car park operators handed out a record near-13mn parking charge notices. In the six months to last October, they were being issued at a rate of one every two seconds.
Private parking companies have grown rapidly over the past decade and now manage more than 50,000 sites across the UK, up fivefold from 2012, according to the International Parking Community (IPC), a trade body. Over the same period, penalty ticket issuance has skyrocketed, rising more than eightfold.
Operators say their growth has been commensurate with a rise in demand for parking spaces and an increase in the number of people repeatedly flouting the rules.
Will Hurley, chief executive of the IPC, is keen to point out that most people pay for their parking without incident — 99.77 per cent of “parking events” are “seamless”, he says. “It’s absolutely right that we look to improve,” he adds, “but unfortunately the sector only gets talked about when something goes wrong.”
Nevertheless, it’s a sector that has enjoyed bumper profits recently. Seven of the UK’s top 10 largest private car park operators have brought in record operating profits in the last three years, according to a Financial Times analysis of Companies House filings.
The industry has also undergone significant change. A wave of takeovers since 2017 has brought most of the biggest players under the ultimate ownership of private equity groups such as Wall Street behemoth KKR.
Hurley claims that, across the industry, the money from “paid-for parking” far exceeds that from “enforcement”. That isn’t true of every car park operator. In its latest accounts, ParkingEye, the fifth-largest operator by revenue, claims it earns most of its turnover “from the issue of parking charge notices”. Smart Parking, the UK’s 11th largest car park operator, earned almost 90 per cent of its global revenue last year — the majority of which originated in the UK — from issuing penalty tickets, according to its 2024 annual report.
Most of the top 10 did not respond when contacted by the FT. National Car Parks, the largest operator, declined to comment and Q-Park, the second largest, says it operates barriered facilities and does not issue parking tickets. Apcoa says the “vast majority” of its income is “derived from client management fees where we do not take a share from parking/penalty charge notices”. (Creative Car Park, NCP and Q-Park have not achieved record profits in the past three years.)
Although often described as parking “fines”, the tickets issued by private companies are technically parking charge notices, invoices that allege a motorist breached the contract to which they implicitly agreed by parking on private land.
Only local authorities can issue fines, says Scott Dixon, a consumer advocate and founder of The Complaints Resolver blog. Parking charge notices often “look the same [as local authority tickets] and that [means] most motorists see them as fines to pay off as soon as possible,” he explains.
More than 80 per cent of paid parking charge notices are settled soon after they are issued, according to a submission to parliament by Euro Car Parks. Those who have paid the charges generally aren’t allowed to appeal them subsequently.
Parking companies can obtain car owners’ details from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), which sells them on request to approved members of the parking industry’s two trade associations — the British Parking Association and the IPC. Last year, the DVLA netted at least £31.9mn from the practice. The RAC Foundation, a think-tank, uses the number of vehicle keeper requests made by car park management companies as a proxy for the number of penalty tickets issued — and FT Money has done the same.
So how did we get here? Many consider the original sin to be the ban on vehicle clamping on private land, introduced by the government in 2012.
According to Hurley, the lack of deterrent resulted in many more people breaking the rules. Others disagree.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, says: “What no one foresaw [in 2012] was the scale at which parking firms would subsequently go after registered keepers. A big part of the issue is that cheap camera technology and ready access to DVLA data means pursuing car owners to ‘enforce’ parking offences is less expensive than driving around to apply wheel clamps used to be.”
There have been numerous calls for reform. In 2022, the government attempted to regulate the industry and impose a £50 cap on most charges. That year, car park operators launched multiple legal challenges, leading the government to withdraw its proposals.
Last October, the industry set up its own code of conduct and in January 2025 formed a new panel — that it claims is independent — to oversee it.
Hurley, whose IPC organisation was not involved in 2022’s legal challenges, says: “What I want to achieve is for people to read the signage, follow the signage and then avoid a parking charge, because ultimately it’s really easy not to get a parking charge if you’re told how to avoid it.”
The first item on the new panel’s agenda was to stop motorists being penalised for taking more than five minutes to pay for parking.
In December, Excel Parking dropped its court claim against Rosey Hudson, a 31-year old from Leicestershire, whom it had charged nearly £2,000 in accumulated penalty tickets. Her case, disputed by Excel, was that she was delayed in paying for her parking on multiple occasions due to a poor mobile phone signal when trying to use the car park’s app.
From 2017 to 2024, Excel Parking tripled its operating profits to £5.1mn and last year its operating margin stood at 28 per cent, the highest level since it started filing public accounts. Owner and founder Simon Renshaw-Smith was paid a dividend of £522,000 last year on top of at least £150,000 for his role as a director. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Excel has nearly halved its headcount since 2017 and slashed its wage bill by over a third, according to its 2024 annual report.
“We need parking to support our high streets, towns and city centres, but something is clearly going wrong,” says Catherine Atkinson, the Labour MP for Derby North, who has raised the issue of unfair parking charges in parliament.
She says that many of her constituents paid for parking but had received parking charge notices for exceeding grace periods allowed by car park operators. “For a lot of people, it’s been because they’ve been older or assisting others, or they’ve really struggled with [parking payment] apps and broken machines.”
Atkinson called for “an independently set code of practice” and says she will broach the subject with parking executives at a roundtable in February.
Back when the government tried to set new rules for the sector, parking companies made the argument that a full impact assessment had not been carried out. A survey by audit firm Mazars on behalf of the BPA argued that the government’s fee caps would bankrupt almost half of private car park operators affiliated with the trade body within a year.
Speaking to MPs in 2021, Philip Boynes, chief executive of ParkingEye, said the drop in revenues resulting from the changes would be “unsustainable” without significant cost-cutting and job losses.
Boynes told the MPs that the “average profit of a car parking operator was about 2.1 per cent”, citing a report by IbisWorld.
The FT’s analysis shows that ParkingEye’s operating margin that year was 15 per cent, up from 5 per cent in 2020. From 2015 onwards, aside from the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the company’s margins have remained above 20 per cent.
Boynes did not respond to a request for comment.
ParkingEye issued roughly one in five of all UK parking charge notices last year. It is owned by the world’s largest infrastructure investor, Macquarie, which previously owned distressed utility provider Thames Water. ParkingEye manages car parks for clients ranging from McDonald’s to the NHS.
In 2023 the company made an operating profit of £15.5mn from revenues of £57.5mn — a margin of 27 per cent.
ParkingEye says it “operates responsibly and fairly”. The company adds its growth has “been in response to the increase in demand [from] landowners who wish to ensure an increasing motorist population can access [facilities] that might otherwise become congested by non-compliant motorists who misuse the parking facilities”.
The industry’s own code of conduct, which came into effect last year, was largely similar to the government’s original, but omitted the proposed £50 cap on parking charge notices and restrictions on debt recovery fees.
At the time, the RAC Foundation said the industry’s code “conveniently avoided some of the biggest issues [that] badly need[ed] to be addressed to prevent drivers being taken advantage of.”
Sir Greg Knight, the former Conservative MP who introduced legislation to regulate the sector, is urging the new government to “take up the gauntlet” and introduce a “national parking code”.
“The present situation is highly unsatisfactory; parking companies are in effect policing their own rules,” he says. “The threat of legal action was unfortunate, but the government appears to have let this matter drift.”
The government says it is “determined” to protect motorists and “drive up standards in the industry”. It adds that it will “set out further details on the private parking code of practice as soon as possible”.
“In my book, this is unfinished business,” says Knight.
Additional reporting by Alistair Gray. Data visualisation by Stephanie Stacey
