Parking Regulation

Abtisam Mohamed Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) and the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Martin Wrigley) on their excellent speeches.

This is not a marginal issue, but a systemic one. It touches the lives of millions of motorists and contributes to the erosion of our high streets and of public confidence and belief in a fair process. Constituents continue to be harassed, penalised and financially extorted by a private parking industry that has operated largely unchecked for over a decade. In my constituency, I continue to receive complaints about one particular operator, which has become notorious. I am extremely disappointed that it has failed to respond to queries raised by my office. The scandal is that there are many motorists who pay up even when they should not have been issued a fine at all. The companies are known to use intimidatory methods to press people into paying high fines. People pay because they do not want the aggro.

I have a number of stories from constituents, but because time is short, I will share just one. Leila told me that she parked in the Broomhill Excel car park for a hairdressing appointment. There is no coin machine, so people are wholly reliant on the app. On that occasion, the machine did not work, but she kept trying for 17 minutes and eventually the payment went through. She thought nothing of it until she received a letter stating that she was liable to pay a fine of £100. She worried that the payment had not gone through, but she checked her statement and it showed that it had. She therefore confidently appealed, thinking that it was an oversight on Excel’s part. She was aghast to learn that her appeal had been rejected because, per its policy, she was seven minutes late. It erroneously states that there is an alternative payment source; there is not. It is wholly reliant on the app, which was not working at the time.

[Catherine Atkinson]

Some car parking firms still believe that their code of conduct is enough—the code of conduct that they decide and that they police. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need a statutory code of practice so that car parking is straightforward, convenient and fair?

[Abtisam Mohamed]

I agree: the private parking code of practice is not fit for purpose. Will the Minister explain whether the Government will consider reintroducing the official private parking code of practice as soon as possible? Will he also consider the immediate suspension of DVLA data access for any operators found to have engaged in predatory practices or information misuse?

Our constituents cannot continue to face this unjust system. The only winners under the current system are the private parking companies that are profiteering at the expense of the public.

Renters’ Rights Bill

Abtisam Mohamed Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate everybody who has made their maiden speech today and made excellent points in this debate. I thank the Secretary of State, Ministers and everybody involved for their hard work in preparing this Bill. They have already demonstrated a greater level of ambition on tackling housing security than the Conservatives showed in 14 years.

I receive a significant amount of correspondence from private renters concerned about high rents, insecurity and poor living conditions. Nearly half of my constituents are private renters, many of them students. I have visited some of their houses and been horrified by the extent of the damp, mould and disrepair that many are forced to live with. Sadly, many have become resigned to accept that this is what they have to deal with. Far too many families live in appalling conditions, which in turn significantly influences their physical and mental health. That should never be acceptable.

I am reassured to hear the Secretary of State talk about safety first. Safety should come first and it will be a relief to many tenants that this Bill will extend Awaab’s law to the private rented sector, to ensure that repairs are undertaken in a timely manner. The Bill will also make homes safer by applying the decent homes standard to the private rented sector for the first time. I welcome that but, as a lawyer who used to practice in social welfare law, I know that many people struggle to navigate the system and will struggle to take on landlords on disrepair cases. I urge the Minister to work with colleagues to look at how we can extend social welfare law legal aid to people who need support to navigate the system.

This legislation is a major step forward and I have no doubt it will help to tackle housing insecurity and affordability in the private rented sector. However, it clearly will not solve all the problems in the sector, because many are due to the wider housing crisis. I call on Ministers to go further and investigate the possibility of introducing legislation to cap in-tenancy rent increases at the lower end of either inflation or wage growth. We must make it a national priority to fix the housing crisis to ensure that everyone can live in affordable, safe and secure homes, so I welcome our Government’s ambition to build more affordable homes. I am delighted that we have already started this process through our plans to reform the planning system and to reinstate home building targets, which the Tories scrapped. However, affordable must really mean affordable—for far too long affordability has come without a definition, and deposits have remained unaffordable for many.

These policies will make a difference in Sheffield Central, as home ownership rates are much lower than the national average and its constituents are among the youngest in the country. We need to build more green, sustainable and genuinely affordable homes so that more of my constituents, especially young people, can leave the private rented sector and get on the housing ladder. I look forward to supporting the Government in this House to deliver their mission of building the homes we need—affordable homes—so that people in Sheffield Central and across the country can benefit.