Parking fines have been in the news lately, especially those levied by private parking companies and technically called ‘parking charges’. A large number of car parks are owned by or outsourced to these companies. They go by various names, for example Euro Car Parks, Excel Parking, Parking Eye, Total Parking Solutions, Britannia Parking, National Car Parks. The first you know you’ve been fined (or charged) by one of them is when you receive a letter in the post giving you details of what you’ve done wrong and instructing you to pay them an amount of money – usually £100 but £60 if you pay within 14 days. They make payment simple – by phone or online. You’re also given the option of appealing the charge, but, as everyone who’s ever tried that knows, appeals are rarely successful.
Eternity
This came close to home for me recently, when a friend asked me if I could help her appeal against a charge for not parking her car entirely within the confines of a parking bay. It was unfair, she said, since her limited personal mobility meant she needed extra space on the driver’s side to get out of the car and this caused her to park just over the line on the passenger side. And as she’d parked in the last bay of the row – the only one available – and the other side was just empty space, she was not occupying part of another bay or causing any other obstruction. It seemed cut and dried to me that the charge was unfair and unreasonable and that it would be overturned, especially given my friend’s disability.
But that’s not what happened. Her appeal was rejected by the parking company (Eternity Fire and Security), the reason being given that ‘the vehicle was not parked correctly within the markings of a bay or space’, meaning that ‘the terms and conditions of the car park were not followed’. It was also stated that ‘parking out of marked bays can cause obstruction, inconvenience and safety hazards to other users of the car park’. So no account whatever was being taken either of the fact that my friend was disabled (her car was displaying a blue badge) or of the fact that, since the bay in question was the last one in a row, she could not have been causing ‘obstruction, inconvenience or safety hazards’. She was invited, if not satisfied, to appeal further to what was called an Independent Appeals Service, POPLA (Parking on Private Land Appeals).
POPLA
I advised her to do this. If POPLA was independent, surely it would see sense and reject Eternity’s decision? But no. It came back with confirmation of the decision on the grounds that ‘POPLA cannot allow an appeal based on mitigating circumstances’. I found this astonishing and my obvious question was on what basis could they ever allow an appeal? But it was sort of answered when I typed POPLA into the internet. I found its average score of 1.3 out of 5 on the Trustpilot site together with a profusion of negative comments. One of them said ‘private parking companies are the scum of the earth’, and another effectively summed things up by writing: ‘Comes across as heavily weighted towards the operator rather than a proper appeals process. They rejected my appeal on the basis of claims provided by the operator’. That said it all, so I wasn’t surprised when my friend received a further letter from POPLA telling her that she must pay without delay and it had now gone up from the original £60 to £100.
DCBL
We both agreed that she shouldn’t pay and wrote back to Eternity explaining again why and basically saying ‘see you in court’. Their response was yet another demand for payment and, after a further reply from us, a ‘Notice of Debt recovery’ letter from DCBL (Debt Collection Bailiffs Ltd) arrived threatening court action. This, it was stated, could lead to consequences like ‘further fees and costs’ and ‘prevention of future lending’. The amount demanded was now £170. Our further response was that we were sure that a court would see the reasonableness of our mitigation and throw out their case, probably with costs to us.
We couldn’t be sure of this of course, but there had been a recent case in the news where a company who took someone to court claiming over £11,000 had their case thrown out and were ordered by a judge to pay over £10,000 themselves to a charity. I duly drew DCBL’s attention this (tinyurl.com/4uranrzz), but their only response was to send me a ‘final reminder’. Another ‘final reminder’ has arrived since. We have ignored both. Will they take us to court? Well, I obviously can’t be sure they won’t, but I sort of doubt it, especially in view of the recent publicity about such cases, the obvious weakness of trying to rely entirely on formal ‘terms and conditions’ without attempting to consider other relevant factors, and also the fact – which I also made sure was drawn to their attention – that, under the Equality Act 2010, ‘reasonable adjustment has to be made for disabled people’. So watch this space.
Money and profit
What to make of all this? Well, first of all, the very existence of a plethora of parking companies whose purpose is to make money for landowners or investors either by charging people to park their cars or fining them for not carrying out the operation correctly is a prime example of how the system we live in is ruled by money and profit and not by human need. Secondly the practice of issuing fines (or ‘charges’) and pursuing people for payment, of appeal processes, of debt collection and then maybe court hearings are among the many examples of the enormous waste of human energy and resources inherent in the system we live under. It is a prime example of how that system spawns vast amounts of socially unproductive activities resulting in complex bureaucracies that need servicing and in large numbers of people doing jobs that they themselves can take little satisfaction from rather than being able to exercise their talents and capabilities in cooperative and socially productive ways.
Howard Moss
That's the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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