Every UK Driver Gets a £100 Cap on Private Parking Fines This October

• A single Code of Practice for private car parks took effect on 1 October, with operators given until the end of this month to fall in line and a full rollout running to December.
• Penalty charges are capped at £100, or £60 if a driver pays within 14 days, but the cap does not touch the debt recovery fees that often double a parking bill.
• The AA has called the code “watered down” as it was written by the parking industry itself rather than imposed by government, after a tougher 2022 law was withdrawn following a legal challenge from parking firms.

A £100 cap sounds generous. The small print says otherwise

Every driver who has parked at a supermarket, retail park, hospital or private housing estate in Britain is now covered by a new rulebook that most of them have never heard of. The single Code of Practice, drawn up jointly by the British Parking Association and the International Parking Community, formally came into force on 1 October. Car park operators were given until the end of this month to adopt it, with a wider implementation period running through to December.

The headline change is a cap on penalty charges: £100 at most, reduced to £60 if the driver pays within 14 days of the charge notice landing. Drivers also get a guaranteed 10 minute grace period after their paid parking time runs out, time that was previously eaten by operators who timed cameras to catch a car still rolling out of a bay.

Who wrote the rules, and who is checking anyone follows them

This is not a law passed by Parliament. It is a self-authored code written by the two trade bodies that between them accredit nearly every private parking operator in the country, which is why the AA has been blunt about its limits. The motoring organisation says the code “falls far short” of what it, the government and consumer groups have been asking for as far back as 2019.

The clearest gap is debt recovery. A £100 charge that goes unpaid can attract separate collection fees once it is passed to a debt recovery agency, and the new code does nothing to cap those add-on charges. Drivers who have ignored a parking charge notice assuming the worst case is £100 have found themselves facing bills several times that size once a third-party collector gets involved.

A tougher version of these rules very nearly became law. In 2019 Parliament passed the Parking (Code of Practice) Act, and a 2022 government consultation proposed capping charges at £50, banning aggressive or threatening language on tickets outright and ending debt collection fees altogether. That version never reached the statute book. Parking companies mounted a legal challenge against the government’s preferred code author, the law was pulled, and ministers handed the job back to the industry itself. The code now in force is the industry’s own answer, not Parliament’s.

What the code actually gets right

It is not nothing. Alongside the £100 cap and the 10 minute grace period, the code requires clear and consistent signage telling drivers the terms of parking before they commit to a space, a simplified appeals process, and specific protection for Blue Badge holders against being charged in accessible bays where local terms should exempt them. Fleet and leasing companies have also secured a change: the code now sets out a process for transferring liability for a parking charge from the registered keeper, often a leasing company, to the actual driver at the time, something the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association had been pushing for separately.

None of this is enforced by a government regulator. Compliance rests on the BPA and the IPC policing their own members, and on the two independent appeals services each trade body runs, POPLA for BPA-accredited operators and the IAS for IPC-accredited ones. A driver who believes they have been wrongly charged can escalate to whichever service matches their operator’s accreditation, and both services have a track record of cancelling a substantial share of the charges referred to them.

What to check before you pay

The first thing worth doing with any parking charge notice that lands on a doormat is checking whether the operator is accredited at all. An unaccredited operator cannot use the DVLA’s keeper lookup service to trace a registered keeper, which means an unaccredited charge notice sent by post may not be enforceable in the same way. The BPA and IPC both publish searchable lists of accredited members on their websites, and a five minute check against the company name on the notice is enough to establish which, if any, appeals route applies.

Next is the 10 minute grace period itself. If a charge was issued within 10 minutes of a paid session ending, that charge should be cancelled on request under the new code, and citing the code by name in writing to the operator is usually enough to get it dropped without a formal appeal. Keeping a timestamped photo of the pay-and-display ticket, or a banking app screenshot of a card payment through a parking app, turns that request from an assertion into evidence.

Drivers who do want to appeal should do it in writing, through the operator first and then through POPLA or the IAS if that fails, rather than ignoring the notice and hoping it goes away. Ignoring a charge is how modest £60 bills turn into £400 county court claims once debt recovery and legal costs are added, as nothing in the new code stops an operator passing an unpaid charge to a solicitor’s letter stage. Anyone who receives a charge they believe is unfair has 28 days in most cases to lodge a formal appeal before escalation becomes harder to reverse, so the clock on a response is worth checking the moment a notice arrives rather than weeks later.

Residents of private housing estates and new-build developments face a slightly different version of this problem. Many estate roads and visitor car parks are managed by private factoring companies rather than a local council, and those companies sit outside the new code entirely unless they have chosen to join the BPA or IPC voluntarily. A driver who gets a charge notice on their own street, outside their own house, should check their management company’s accreditation status before assuming the £100 cap or the 10 minute grace period applies at all. Where the managing agent is not accredited with either trade body, the usual advice is to challenge the charge directly with the freeholder or management company rather than through POPLA or the IAS, as neither appeals service has authority over an unaccredited operator.

Blue Badge holders have a specific protection written into the code that is worth knowing in detail. Enforcement of accessible bay rules in private car parks has historically been patchy. Operators are required to recognise a correctly displayed Blue Badge in bays marked for disabled use, and cannot issue a charge for a vehicle properly parked in such a bay purely on the basis of overstaying, where local terms set out a longer allowance for badge holders. Anyone who has been charged while displaying a valid badge in a clearly marked accessible space has strong grounds for an immediate appeal, and should quote the relevant section of the single code by name when challenging the operator.

For the millions of drivers who park in a supermarket or retail car park without a second thought, the practical change this month is modest but real: a hard ceiling on the headline fine, a protected 10 minutes to get back to the car, and a named code to quote if an operator tries to charge outside those terms. The gap drivers still need to watch is what happens after the charge notice, where debt recovery fees remain uncapped and where the only enforcement is the industry checking itself.

Sources:

• Carwow: Private car parks – watered down code of practice introduced
• BVRLA: Shifting liability added to Private Parking Code of Practice
• GOV.UK: Fairer parking drive as government crackdown on unjust charges