Parking (Code of Practice) Bill

Kevin Foster Excerpts

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

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

Given the time, I shall keep my remarks brief to allow for discussion of the next Bill on the Order Paper. I very much welcome this Bill, which follows on from a debate I secured last year in which many right hon. and hon. Members recounted various issues in their constituencies.

In my constituency, I have two parking companies: Premier Parking Solutions of Newton Abbot and Premier Park Ltd of Exeter. They are responsible for the management of one privately owned car park each, yet each of those car parks generates more complaints about enforcement practices than the entirety of Torbay Council’s enforcement operations, which include 39 car parks and all on-street car parking. Various interesting practices and excuses are used for things such as why a barrier cannot be put in place so that people know, before they leave, that they have not paid, and can avoid getting one of these fake fines in the post. As the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, they are made to look like fines, but they are not—they are invoices.

When I secured my debate last year, one of the companies pleaded with me not to name them as part of a cowboy industry, saying, “We haven’t had any complaints over the past month or two,” and I said, “Yeah, that’s because you had a massive fire in your car park and it’s been closed for the past couple of months, so you haven’t been trapping people.” Companies in this industry are like bloodsuckers in many cases. The reality is that the current system of regulation is absolutely hopeless. It is like putting Dracula in charge down at the blood bank. There are two different sets of regulations and companies can choose which they use, so there is an incentive to dismiss as many appeals as possible. To be fair, I do not want to impugn either set of regulations, but it is clear that the system does not have any rigour or structure and it desperately needs to change.

Contrast that system with the one governing the solicitors these companies use. We can complain to the Solicitors Regulation Authority—at least we know who is responsible. The same cannot be said in this instance. The Bill is therefore welcome and long overdue. My constituents and I fully support it. I hope it gets its Second Reading quickly so that we can get on with the task.

It is fundamentally wrong that details given to the state—details that we are required to give to the DVLA in order to register our cars by law—are then used to allow the industry to practise in this way. Most examples come from remote enforcement. It is the DVLA that needs to be the focus, and not how much is charged in a car park or the choices that people make. We should focus on the relationship whereby we have given information to the state only for it to be passed on to a company to behave in this manner. That is why the law needs to change and why this Bill is so welcome.