Parking (Code of Practice) Bill

James Heappey Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 2nd February 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that the acronym PCN is very confusing for people in relation to parking? It is used as a penalty charge notice when issued by civil authorities, but as a parking charge notice when issued by private companies. The terms are very similar, but very different sets of rule and regulations govern those two separate types of penalty.

[Sir Greg Knight]

I agree. When we are dealing with private land, such notices should be called private parking notices. The code of practice, if the Bill goes ahead, should contain requirements about what is in the parking notice so that it cannot mimic a police ticket or a court document, and cannot use unnecessary threatening language. My hon. Friend makes a good point.

The case has been drawn to my attention of 69-year-old Angela. Her car was ticketed for £70 for exceeding the time permitted in a supermarket car park. Angela is 5 feet tall, and the small signs were mounted so high up that initially she did not even see them. When she returned to discover the ticket, she looked for signage and eventually saw a sign. It was secured, if that is the word, with pieces of baler twine. Even after staring at it to try to read it, she could not read the wording as the text was so small and too far away.

In another part of the country, a pensioner mis-keyed her number plate into an automatic machine when paying for her parking, getting one digit wrong. On returning to her car, she discovered that the innocent mistake had resulted in a ticket. On appeal, she was able to point out that it was an honest mistake and, indeed, that no other car on the DVLA database had that registration number, but the parking company still demanded payment.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

I am aware that the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) is poised to introduce his Bill, which addresses an important issue. Also the Minister, to whom I shall shortly be acting as Parliamentary Private Secretary, will be cross with me if I give her cause to have to reduce her no doubt excellent speech by too much. There may even be some colleagues who are in a rush to get home because their own parking ticket expires soon.

As we have heard from colleagues across the House, this is a very good Bill, which I am pleased to support. However, a number of concerns have been raised by other Members that I also want to underline. The fact that private parking companies use the PCN abbreviation as “parking charge notice”—compared with the “penalty charge notice” issued by the police and civil authorities—is wilfully misleading and should be stopped. We should also look at the way in which private parking companies are allowed to design the waterproof wrappers for tickets, the tickets themselves and the language on them. There is a clear attempt to make these tickets look like they have come from the civil authorities or from the police.

In my experience and the experience of many of my constituents, signage in private car parks is inconsistent. At best, that could be down to poor maintenance or a mistake. At worst, it could be argued that the poor signage is again a deliberate act to confuse or deceive.

Another development that I have found unhelpful is car parks where people can park only with an app. Some of these apps are absolutely excellent. It is not the case that people can park in car parks on the Great Western Railway network only by using the APCOA app, although that app is very good; many Members will have had experience of using it. That is not so in other car parks, one of which belongs to a very fine hotel in Bristol that insisted that people used an app to pay for their parking.

Some years earlier, when the company was in a very different guise, I had used an online parking facility with that company and given over my car details. I could no longer remember any of the log-in details, and it turned out that there was no facility for me to reset my membership or to be able to access the app. However, because I had entered the car park, I would be charged, and if I was unable to pay through the app, then I would have to accept the ticket and appeal it. The fact that the company could do that was quite extraordinary, especially as I had entered the car park and incurred the charge before any of this became clear to me. That could have been a unique and extraordinary happening experienced by almost nobody else, but it does perhaps indicate how unregulated and unreasonable the private parking industry can sometimes be.

What underlines all the things we have heard today better than anything else is that in all our experience when dealing with casework, we have heard time and again that when these private parking companies are challenged, they capitulate almost immediately. Very rarely do they stand their ground, and that indicates exactly how thin the ice they are skating on is. I agree with colleagues across the House who have said that access to DVLA data is, very clearly, a privilege for companies that behave correctly and should not be allowed for those who repeatedly behave very badly indeed. I have great pleasure in supporting the Bill.