Why Private Parking Firms Have Until December to Follow Their Own New Rules

The Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation into Euro Car Parks in July, examining whether the company broke consumer protection law by fining drivers who were simply queuing for fuel or a car wash rather than parking illegally. It is the clearest sign yet that private parking enforcement remains a mess for ordinary drivers. But the industry’s own promised fix, a code of practice with a 10-minute grace period and a lower cap on charges, will not be fully binding on many operators until December 2026, more than a year after it was first announced.

Private parking companies issued 9.7 million penalty charge notices to drivers across Britain in just nine months, according to RAC Foundation analysis of government data. That volume, combined with a legally backed code of practice that has already been delayed once and watered down once, leaves millions of drivers dealing with a system that has no single enforceable rulebook right now.

What the CMA Is Actually Looking At

The CMA’s case against Euro Car Parks, opened on 15 July 2026, covers two specific practices. The first is whether it is lawful to issue parking charges to drivers who are queuing for or using petrol pumps and forecourt services such as car washes, rather than parking without paying. The second is whether the company’s appeals process meets the standard consumer law requires: a fair, independent route to challenge a charge is a basic protection for anyone who receives one.

This is not the CMA’s first run-in with the company. In December 2025, the regulator fined Euro Car Parks £473,000 for failing to comply with a legally binding information notice, a penalty for stonewalling the watchdog rather than a finding about the fines themselves. The current investigation is expected to run through its evidence-gathering stage until spring 2027, meaning drivers affected now will likely wait well over a year for a formal ruling on whether the underlying practice was ever lawful.

A Code With No Teeth Until December

Two industry bodies, the British Parking Association and the International Parking Community, published a joint private parking code of practice covering signage, appeals and a 10-minute grace period before a charge notice can be issued. The cap on charges stays at £100, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days.

The trade bodies wanted the code fully in force by October, but private parking companies were given a “period of transition” and only have to fully meet the new standards by December 2026. Sites that opened after 1 October 2024 had to comply from day one; sites that already existed get more than two extra years of grace on top of that.

Motoring organisations have been blunt about what this means in practice. The AA has said the code “falls far short” of the standards it, government and consumer groups have called for, and criticised it as “self-authored” by the industry it is meant to regulate, arguing it does not cap charges hard enough or remove aggressive debt recovery fees. The RAC has gone further, warning drivers not to mistake this voluntary code for the legislation-backed code of practice that Parliament actually passed.

The Law That Still Is Not in Force

That legislation-backed code has its own troubled history. A bill enabling a statutory code of conduct received Royal Assent back in March 2019. It was supposed to include halving the cap on tickets for most breaches to £50, a fully independent appeals system, and a ban on aggressive language on parking charge notices. It should have been in force by the end of 2023.

Instead, a legal challenge from private parking companies forced the government to withdraw the statutory code in June 2022, and no replacement has followed. Four years after Royal Assent, drivers are still relying on an industry-written substitute that will not even be fully enforced until the very end of 2026.

The Two Codes Drivers Keep Confusing

Part of the confusion facing drivers is that there are now effectively two different sets of rules circulating, and only one of them carries any legal force. The industry-written code from the BPA and IPC is voluntary, was drafted by the sector it applies to, and will not be fully enforced until December 2026. The statutory code, backed by an act of Parliament passed in 2019, would have gone further, capping most charges at £50 rather than £100 and banning aggressive debt collection language outright. That statutory code remains stuck, withdrawn after a 2022 legal challenge and never reintroduced.

Local authority run car parks, by contrast, operate under an entirely different and long-established legal framework, with penalty charge notices governed by traffic regulation orders rather than a trade body’s code. Drivers who assume the same protections apply whether they are in a supermarket car park or a council-run one are often surprised to find the appeals routes, caps and even the language used on the notice itself are completely different between the two systems.

What You Can Do If You Get a Charge Notice

If you receive a private parking charge, check the timestamp against when you actually left the space or finished paying. If the gap is 10 minutes or less, most operators who have adopted the new code should cancel the charge on a grace period defence, though full compliance is not mandatory until December, so some operators still refuse. Ask them directly whether they have signed up to the BPA or IPC code and quote the grace period provision in your appeal.

Always appeal in writing to the operator first, then to the independent appeals service if you are refused. Members of the British Parking Association route unresolved appeals to POPLA, while International Parking Community members use the Independent Appeals Service. Both are free to use and you should never need to pay a claims company to submit an appeal on your behalf.

If you were charged while queuing at a petrol station rather than parking without paying, keep any evidence, receipts, dashcam footage or bank statements showing the fuel purchase, in case the CMA’s investigation into Euro Car Parks leads to a wider review of similar charges. And if a charge notice arrives with aggressive language, threats of court action within days, or debt collection fees added before you have had a chance to appeal, report it to Trading Standards too, alongside challenging it directly.

Vulnerable drivers, including those with disabilities, older motorists unfamiliar with app-based payment systems, and anyone who has received a series of escalating debt letters over a single disputed charge, have specific protection provisions under both the industry code and general consumer credit rules. If a private parking firm is pursuing a debt through a collection agency without giving you a reasonable chance to appeal first, that pursuit itself can be challenged, and Citizens Advice can help draft a formal objection at no cost.

Finally, resist paying a disputed charge simply to make it go away unless you have exhausted the appeals process: paying can sometimes be treated as an admission that the charge was valid. If you believe you did nothing wrong, whether that is a grace period breach, a signage failure, or a fuel-queue charge like the ones now under CMA scrutiny, put your case in writing and keep pushing through the free appeals route before paying anything at all. Photograph the signage at the site on the day you park if you can, timestamped on your phone, as poor or missing signage remains one of the most common grounds on which charges are overturned at independent appeal.

Sources:

• CMA: Euro Car Parks fined £473k for failure to comply with legal information notice
• Auto Express: CMA opens investigation into Euro Car Parks over petrol queue fines
• British Parking Association: Code of Practice and Compliance Monitoring
• BBC: Private car parks to have 10-minute grace period