They do not have to.
The industry operates under a legal framework that is considerably less powerful than the notices suggest with their official appearance, and the rights available to drivers who receive a charge are far more substantial than most people understand. What follows is a guide to what private parking companies can actually do, what they cannot, and where your money goes if you hand it over without reading the small print.
The industry is enormous and almost entirely unregulated
The Parking (Code of Practice) Act was passed by Parliament in 2019 with the explicit intention of bringing rogue parking operators to heel. It included a cap on fines of £50 for most offences, a fairer appeals process, requirements for consistent signage, and a ban on aggressive debt collection language. It was due to come into force by the end of 2023.
It never did. The parking industry launched a legal challenge, the Conservative government withdrew the code in June 2022, and the Labour government that followed launched a consultation to reintroduce it that has proceeded with the urgency of a very old tortoise. The industry's own trade bodies, the British Parking Association and the International Parking Community, published their own joint code of practice in October 2024, which motoring groups criticised for omitting a cap on charges and keeping debt recovery fees in place.
The result is an industry issuing fourteen million charges a year with a rulebook that the government passed and has not yet managed to enforce.
The first question: are they in the club?
The single most important thing to check when you receive a private parking charge is whether the company is a member of an accredited trade association. There are two: the British Parking Association and the International Parking Community.
If the company is not a member of either, it cannot legally request your details from the DVLA. Without your name and address, it cannot pursue you. A charge from an unaccredited company is not worth the paper it is printed on. Do not contact them. Do not respond. They cannot take it further.
If the company is accredited, it can obtain your keeper details from the DVLA. The DVLA charges £2.50 per record request, which means the agency itself earns a substantial sum from the system it enables. This does not mean the charge is automatically valid or enforceable. It means they now know who you are.
Grounds for challenge
Which? has identified the most common and successful grounds for appeal against private parking charges. Signs that are unclear, obscured, absent at the point of entry, or that do not clearly state the terms of parking are among the strongest. A charge above £100 is unlawful under current private land enforcement rules. Mitigating circumstances — a medical emergency, a vehicle breakdown, attending to a passenger who became unwell — are recognised grounds. So is any error in the notice itself: wrong registration, wrong date, wrong location.
Take photographs. The moment you return to your vehicle and find a charge notice, photograph the notice, the signs at the car park entrance, any other signs in the vicinity, and your vehicle's position relative to any bay markings. This evidence is the difference between a successful appeal and an argument with no supporting material.
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The appeals process
For companies accredited by the BPA, you have 28 days from the rejection of your initial appeal to escalate to POPLA — the Parking on Private Land Appeals service, which is an independent adjudicator. For companies accredited by the IPC, you have 21 days to take the case to the Independent Appeals Service. Both are free to use. Both are genuinely independent, and both overturn parking charges with regularity.
Use them. The industry relies on the fact that most people do not. The total cost to drivers at the current rate of fines approaches £4.1 million per day if each charge is paid in full. The discount for early payment, typically 40 per cent within 14 days, is designed to encourage payment before drivers consider whether the charge is valid.
What about debt collectors?
Unpaid private parking charges frequently end up passed to debt recovery companies, which will send increasingly formal letters implying legal action is imminent. These letters are not court documents. A debt recovery letter from a third party is not the same as a county court judgment. The charge cannot affect your credit rating unless a court has issued a judgment against you and you have failed to pay it. The letters are designed to generate payment through anxiety. Do not let them.
A company that wishes to enforce a private parking charge in court must demonstrate that a contract existed between you and the landowner, that the terms were clearly displayed, and that you accepted those terms by parking. Courts have thrown out parking cases where signage was inadequate and will continue to do so. Taking an unmeritorious case to court also exposes the parking company to costs.
The machine keeps running
The figure of 14.4 million charges in 2024/25 is more than double the 6.8 million issued in 2018/19, just before Parliament passed legislation specifically intended to reduce this number. The legislation failed. The charges doubled. Just five companies are responsible for nearly half of all tickets issued nationally. ParkingEye alone bought 668,000 DVLA records in a single quarter.
The system is producing revenue at industrial scale. The protection that Parliament promised has not arrived. Until it does, knowing your rights is the only code of practice that reliably works.
For more on enforcement, surveillance and drivers' rights, see GaukMotorBuzz's Drivers Revenge coverage.
Sources
- RAC analysis via Fleet News — Record number of fines issued as DfT issues scam text message warning (14.4m figure, year ending March 2025)
- RAC analysis via Fleet News — Rise in DVLA driver data requests suggests record year for parking fines
- The Independent — Drivers fined on average every two seconds as record number of parking tickets issued
- Which? — How to appeal a parking ticket (free template letters and appeals guidance)
- Contend Legal — Private parking fines UK: know your rights and fight back
- PA/AOL — Big spike in private parking fines amid claims machines 'set up to trap people' (quarterly data 2018 to 2025)
- GaukMotorBuzz prior coverage — Private parking fines you can throw in the bin