Car Parking (Private Land)

Debate between Stephen McPartland and Nigel Evans

Monday 16th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)]

A growing problem has resulted from operators of private car parks deciding that a lucrative income stream is to be had by clobbering motorists who use their car parks but, for whatever reason, overstay the period they paid for. As an MP, I have received several letters from constituents who see the practice as totally unfair and wildly disproportionate to the fee paid for parking.

Just a glance at the fee versus the fine will demonstrate that admirably. In 1817, a Bedfordshire man received the death penalty for stealing a sheep; the sentence was commuted to life transportation. One might think that that was somewhat harsh for the crime that was committed. That disproportionate penalty no longer exists, but if one is looking for a new fine that is as disproportionate to the misdemeanour, if I can call it that, one can see that the car park cowboys fill the role admirably and with a zealotry and passion that would normally make their mothers proud—although not in this case, I imagine.

The car parks are cash magnets for the operators, who milk the motorist and use harassment and threats to extort money. Their intimidating letters are intended to frighten and their message is quite simply “stand and deliver”, the motto of the highway man in a long bygone era. The only thing missing is the pistol, but they use the threat of courts, which could be expensive if people use legal representation, and an ever-escalating tariff of fines that simply bleed the motorist further, and all because they overstayed their welcome by a few minutes after having paid perhaps just a pound—giving the ultimate new definition of “poundstretcher”.

That is tantamount to demanding money with menaces and should now be outlawed. A good case in point is The Whalley Arms car park in my constituency, used by the local community in a village that is strapped for car parking places. Local councillors Terry Hill and Joyce Holgate and I have received numerous letters of complaint from individuals who are incandescent that the operators are allowed such powers.

One constituent, Mr Clive Marsden, was visiting his GP in Whalley. He is a bit slow on his feet as his hip needs replacing. That is being done tomorrow and we all wish him well with his operation and his new hip. He unknowingly typed his registration number wrongly but he still paid his £1 fee. Some of the keyboards are very small and relatively low, and if the sun is shining on them and a person’s eyesight is not 20/20 things might be a bit hit and miss, as they were in this case. He received a fine through the post of £100, to be reduced to £60 if he paid up. He rightly thought that that was unfair as he had paid his pound but unwittingly made a minor mistake. Clearly, he appealed.

Mr Marsden had his son-in-law with him who at the same time parked another car whose registration number was entered correctly. My constituent politely and helpfully suggested that if the company looked at its records, it would see that a fee was paid at a particular time using a registration number very similar to his. The cameras collecting the registration plate numbers would have collected their plate numbers and shown that a fee had been paid for a car that did not enter the car park. Simples, as the advert says. The case could have been closed.

The company ignored Mr Marsden’s suggestion and reiterated the conditions of parking with the stipulation about the correct registration. He appealed to POPLA, the panel that considers such appeals, but it rejected his appeal, stating that his ticket was not displayed correctly as stipulated by the operator. I assume that the P in POPLA stands for pathetic, as the car registrations are collected by the camera, there is no parking attendant, the extortionate fine is issued automatically, and the operator’s notice states that there is no need to display a ticket. I assume that POPLA will read the debate and I want it to tell me which bit of what Clive Marsden was asking the operator to do was unreasonable. Does POPLA think it is right to clobber motorists when there is a system of checking car registrations paid for against those entering the car park when motorists can furnish rough times of entry? Now, Mr Marsden, fresh from his operation, will have to go to court to fight his case. I hope he wins.

There is also the case of a young lady, Niamh McNamara, at the same car park. She failed to pay because the machine was faulty and would not take money, and the other machine had a black bin bag over it. There was no attendant to take the money. She could not pay, so she went to the GP’s surgery and came back, thinking nothing of it. I wonder how many people were nabbed that day. She went home and left for South America on a backpacking holiday. Fortunately, her parents, my constituents, went to Manchester, where she lives, and picked up her mail. There was a demand for £150. Clearly, the time for appeal had elapsed and the charge had gone up to the full fine with an added penalty of £50. Her parents tried to reason with Debt Recovery Plus Ltd, but the company was not interested. After much reasoning, it said that it would reduce the amount to £120. The debt recovery people also threatened the family, saying that their daughter would face court proceedings and that her credit rating would be affected. Under duress, her parents paid up to protect their daughter. The short of it is that she could not pay, and yet was still fined. That is simply not justice.

The RAC published a report last month entitled “Private Parking—Public Concern”. I am sure that the Minister has read it. In it, John de Waal QC argues that these fines are illegal as they have no relationship to the loss incurred by the company. The person pays £1 for parking, overstays 10 minutes and is fined £60 or £100. How can that be fair? The charge at The Whalley Arms car park for 12 hours—there is no charge for night time—is just £5 for the entire day, so how can a fine of £60 or £100 be fair? Mr de Waal also argues that early payment discounts are unfair as they put pressure on the consumer to pay up rather than risk having to pay another £40, or even more if they go to appeal.

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend as shocked as I am by the behaviour of ParkingEye at the Roaring Meg retail park in Stevenage? Parking there is free for three hours, but on match days it is free for only one and a half hours. Every week constituents who do not know it is a match day incur large fines. When we take those cases up with ParkingEye, which we do on a weekly basis, it says that it puts out mystical boards demonstrating when it is a match day, but it provides no photographic evidence of the boards and nobody has ever seen one.

[Mr Evans]

Nothing shocks me about that industry. It sounds to me like a scam, so I am pleased that my hon. Friend has come here this evening to talk about the plight of his constituents. If a car park has a tariff, or if it has no tariff for certain hours, that is what people are accustomed to. He is right to say that many constituents will be uninterested in whether it is a match day, whatever the match happens to be, and so will carry on in their usual fashion. It seems that many of them will thus be clobbered by ParkingEye. That is totally unfair and it should look again at its practices. I trust that the Minister has heard what my hon. Friend has said.

Back to POPLA—or un-POPLA, as I prefer to call it. On the “Frequently asked questions” page of its website, to the question “Will the parking charge increase if I lose my appeal?” amazingly it answers “No”, but follows that with:

“If your appeal is refused then the full parking charge will be due because the time for any early payment discount offered by the operator will have passed.”

In my book that is a £40 increase in what an individual would normally have paid. Only POPLA could make those grasping operators appear angelic by offering a reduction should the individual cough up straight away and fail to appeal.

The message from the operators is this: “If right is on your side as you couldn’t get the coins in or you mis-typed your registration number, just take the hit on the chin; otherwise, you might get another hit on the chin.” If that does not work there is always the threat of a third hit on the chin, as credit ratings could be affected and another financial penalty added to the already extravagantly and insanely high fine.

How big is that insane fining regime? It is a massive extortion racket worth hundreds of millions of pounds. In 2013 the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency was asked for the registration plate numbers of 2.2 million car owners, and it provided them for a fee—a nice little earner for a Government agency.

The RAC instanced its own example of a young mum returning late to her car because one of her young children got upset. She also had a seven-month-old child in tow. She had to attend to her upset child and was late returning to her car, so she was fined. She did not have the resources to raise the £60 to pay the fine in time so ended up paying £100, and all for being a good mother.

Minister, enough is enough. We all know that this wretched rinsing of the public has to end. The disproportionate fines should go, and those operators and the hoodlum side of their operations—the debt collectors who use oppressive means—have to be tamed and reined right back. Strong-arm tactics can be met only with a strong law response.

The Government did well in 2012 to stop the ferociously active, salivating clampers from persecuting drivers with their hated Denver boots, but a new and sinister breed of persecution has taken over. The Government acted once, and it is now time to act again. As one might expect, I have a few suggestions for the Minister. The Government have already made an announcement concerning council-owned car parks giving a 10-minute grace period before fines becomes actionable. I understand that that is now to be extended to privately owned car parks, which is good. That is one suggestion I was going to make that has already been enacted before I even asked for it. I hope that is a good omen for my other suggestions.

The technology is available to allow car registration plates to be monitored on entrance and exit, so why not allow motorists the option of paying via credit card and being charged for exactly what they use? There would be no fines. I understand that that might require a change in legislation. If so, let us do it quickly in the next Parliament. In cases where the motorist does not have a credit card, why not just pay on exit with money, but at the actual rate? Again, there would be no fine. That might not even need a legislative change.

Then there is payment by credit card or by phone. Drivers could be charged when exiting a car park, or they could pay by phone, as happens in London, with car park operators texting them to inform them that they are about to overrun their paid parking, offering them the option to extend. There would be no fine in that either.

When someone mis-types their registration number, the operator should be duty bound to check the information to see whether it was likely that the wrong number was entered. I am sorry if that technically simple operation would spoil the bumper payouts to the car park regimes, but that is tough—natural justice is something I believe in. For small car parks in which it is simply not feasible to introduce that technology, we could have old-fashioned car parking attendants issuing tickets for the non-display of tickets.

If the motorist appeals, there should be no inferred gamble here. The motorist has the option of going to Coral, Ladbrokes, William Hill, Betfred, Paddy Power or a number of other legitimate bookies if they want a flutter—I am currently at 33:1 for my seat at the general election. When a motorist makes an appeal, there should be no element of gamble in it. Let us end the early payment discounts or extend them to cover the full period of the appeal. I have never gambled £40 in my life on any single punt, so why should the hapless and otherwise law-abiding motorist either be lured into a gamble that will cost them more if they lose or just have to cough up and pay the fine? That is no choice at all.

Let us make fines relate to the loss incurred by the operator. If it costs £1 to park for an hour and someone overstays by 10 minutes, some dynamo accelerator should not be allowed to kick in. Fines should be commensurate with the actual loss in relation to the car parking charges. I appreciate that there is an administration cost to be included, but it should also be proportionate, and the authoritarian, threatening, white-knuckle, gut-turning, official-like demands for eye-watering sums of money because someone has the audacity to overstay by a few minutes have to stop. If a car parking machine is not working, for whatever reason, it should be made illegal to fine people. That will stop another little scam whereby some people are simply harassed into forking out a fine despite the fact that they simply cannot pay.

I understand that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is about to be handed authority over private car parks by the Prime Minister. He will have the opportunity to bring some sort of order and common sense to a system that has simply spiralled out of control and is hated by the long-suffering motorist, a system that is geared towards inflicting the greatest financial misery and disproportionate stress for what is, frankly, a minor contravention.

I have spoken to the man who is about to take the reins of that wild animal and told him to be strong—not that he needs my advice, as I believe he knows what needs to be done. I and the public are fed up to the back teeth with charlatans operating under their own distorted and disproportionate penalty regime, unrelenting in the face of genuine mistakes or lapses in order to fill their coffers. It is now time for them to be brought under control and strictly regulated, with no room to siphon off hundreds of millions of pounds with kick-backs to debt recovery agencies and the DVLA. In short, it is time to act. Get to it, Eric.