Private Parking Firms Made a Record 12.8 Million DVLA Requests Last Year

Six years ago, Parliament passed a law ordering the government to write a code of practice protecting motorists from unfair private parking charges. The law is called the Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019. The code it requires has still never been issued. In that gap, requests by private parking firms for a driver’s name and address from the DVLA have climbed from 1.9 million a year in 2012 to 12.8 million in 2024, a 673% rise, with the industry now self-policing itself under its own rules until December this year.

A Law Parliament Passed and No Government Has Delivered

The 2019 Act followed a Private Members Bill from Sir Greg Knight after years of complaints about aggressive parking operators. It places a legal duty on the Secretary of State to publish a code setting standards for how private car parks are run and how motorists can appeal a charge. A government code was finally issued in February 2022, then withdrawn four months later after a legal challenge from the parking industry, which argued the caps it set on charges and debt fees had not gone through proper consultation.

Nothing has replaced it. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government ran a fresh consultation between July and September 2025 and has yet to publish its response. Officials’ own paperwork, published alongside that consultation, states plainly that the duty to issue a code “has not been satisfied” and that government remains “at risk of legal challenge” for as long as it stays unmet.

Who Filled the Gap While Government Delayed

The two trade bodies that dominate the industry, the British Parking Association and the International Parking Community, wrote their own single Industry Code in October 2024, borrowing heavily from the government’s withdrawn version. New parking sites have had to comply with it. Existing sites, which cover most of the roughly 50,000 car parks now under private management across the country, up from 10,400 in 2012, have until 31 December 2026 before full compliance is required.

Officials assessing the industry code found two structural problems. There is no requirement for operators to share data with government, so nobody outside the trade bodies can independently check how many drivers are being charged, why, or how many appeals succeed. And the trade bodies police their own members, deciding themselves when to issue sanction points, suspend a site or expel an operator, with government admitting it holds “little evidence” of how often that actually happens.

What the Government’s Own Evidence Shows

A survey of almost 14,000 drivers by the AA, cited directly in the government’s assessment, found one in 20 would pay a parking charge even where they had not broken any rule, simply to avoid the hassle of fighting it. More than one in ten said they would pay simply out of a lack of confidence they would get a fair hearing at appeal, and 11% said they would pay out of fear of legal action. Of those willing to appeal, only a third felt confident of winning.

A Westminster Hall debate on the issue in May 2025 heard that hospital car parks alone had imposed £1.5 billion in parking charges on NHS staff, patients and visitors in the period going back to 2018. One MP told the debate she had received 140 letters of complaint from constituents in the year following her election. Other cases raised included motorists turning up to court to find their hearing had been cancelled by the parking firm at the last moment.

The most widely reported example involved a faulty payment app. One driver received more than 60 separate parking charges from operator Excel Parking after the app regularly failed to register her payment within the required window. Taken to court for more than £11,000 in accumulated charges, Excel lost the case in April 2025 and was ordered to pay £10,000 in costs to a legal charity. A second driver was pursued by the same operator for £1,906 over payments delayed by a weak mobile signal. Excel dropped that case after the story drew public attention.

The Fee That Government Admits May Not Work

Under the current Industry Code, operators can add a £70 debt recovery fee to an unpaid parking charge. The government’s own assessment states this cap “is likely to be higher than can be reasonably justified” and notes it does not have convincing evidence the fee achieves its stated aim of encouraging early payment rather than simply adding to the bill. Officials found that only 14% of cases are actually paid at the debt recovery stage, a figure that raises the question of who the fee actually benefits.

Government modelling suggests that if its proposed reforms cut spurious parking charges by just 5%, drivers would collectively pay around £409 million less over ten years. That is the scale of money currently moving from motorists to a private industry that, over the last three years, has seen seven of its ten largest firms report record profits, while most of the largest operators have passed into ownership by private equity groups.

How Charges Became So Easy to Issue

Part of the rise in charges traces back to a 2012 law change. The Protection of Freedoms Act ended clamping on private land and replaced it with the current system, where a car park operator can pursue the registered keeper of a vehicle rather than the driver caught on the day. That made automatic number plate recognition cameras far more useful to operators than a clamp ever was: a camera does not need anyone on site to issue a charge. Government figures cited in the same evidence base show ANPR now generates more than 90% of all parking charges, and one operator, Excel Parking, is reported to have halved its headcount over the years following 2017 while cutting its wage bill by a third, evidence of how far the process has moved from a human decision to an automated one.

The industry disputes that any of this points to bad practice on its part, arguing that 99.7% of parking events involve no charge at all and that rising charge numbers simply track the growth in the number of car parks under management. Government has said this claim has not yet been independently verified, which is precisely the kind of question the promised compliance framework is meant to settle once it finally exists.

Know the Difference Between an Appeal and a Complaint

Government research found many motorists confuse a formal appeal, which goes to an independent second-stage body, with an informal complaint to a trade association, which does not stop the clock or guarantee any outcome. Getting this wrong is one of the most common ways drivers end up with a County Court judgment rather than a cancelled charge.

If the operator is a member of the British Parking Association, your second-stage appeal goes to POPLA. If the operator belongs to the International Parking Community, it goes to the IAS. Check the parking charge notice itself for which body applies, and note the appeal window: you typically have 28 days from the point the operator rejects your first appeal to escalate it.

Under the current code, a charge should not be issued if you have not paid within the first five minutes of entering a car park, provided you pay before leaving. If your payment failed on account of a faulty app, a weak signal or a broken machine, keep a screenshot or timestamped record of the attempt. This is explicit grounds for appeal under the Industry Code, and it is the exact defence that beat Excel Parking in court in 2025.

Before you pay any charge you believe is unfair, check whether the operator is a genuine accredited member of the BPA or the IPC. Only accredited members can legally request your details from the DVLA, and a charge from a non-accredited operator carries far less legal standing. Full compliance for existing sites is not required until 31 December 2026, so it is also worth checking a car park’s signage against the current code’s wording requirements. Operators still transitioning to the new standard could be relying on outdated terms that would not survive a formal appeal.

Sources:

• https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/686d45d281dd8f70f5de3cac/private-parking-consultation-options-assessment.pdf
• https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/private-parking-code-of-practice/private-parking-code-of-practice
• https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/private-parking-code-of-practice/options-assessment
• https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/new-private-parking-code-of-practice-comes-into-force-amEPQ4x3t1ek