Motorists are increasingly likely to receive parking charges by post, with car park operators currently accessing driver records up to 33,000 times a day.
Parking charges have long been the bane of motorists, with many facing confusing signs, insistent demands for money and unfair fees.
This is Money has previously campaigned for the Government to crack down on private parking sharks, with the move even gaining support from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he was local government minister.
But now a Freedom of Information request submitted by This is Money to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency reveals the massive growth of private parking companies exposing motorists’ details with a view to charging them with violating the terms of private land.
Increase: In 2022/23, cases where a driver’s data was accessed through the DVLA database increased by 26.2% to £30.18 million. Private parking companies account for the vast majority of these requests
To impose a fine, organizations such as the police and local councils must apply to the DVLA.
And to charge a parking fee (private parking companies do not have the power to impose fines), private parking companies have to do the same.
The DVLA maintains records of motorists who must link a car’s registration number to a physical address or person, who can then be sent an application by post.
Each request to access your ‘vehicle guardian on an event date’ or ‘Kadoe’ database costs £2.50.
In the 2020/21 financial year, the DVLA made £13.18 million from these requests, but that increased by 81 per cent to £23.9 million in 2021/22, according to our FOI request.
In 2022/23, it soared another 26.2 per cent to £30.18 million.
The vast majority of these requests are from private parking companies, as the DVLA does not charge organizations such as the police or local authorities.
That means there were 5.2 million applications in 2020/21, 9.5 million in 2021/22 and 12 million in 2022/23 – around 33,000 per day.
Most parking companies can charge a fee of £100, which is usually reduced if drivers pay within two or three weeks.
If each search resulted in a £100 fine, with no driver appealing, this would mean motorists would fork out from £520 million in 2020/21 to more than £1 billion in 2022/23.
However, not all data requests incur a charge, and many drivers choose to pay these charges within two or three weeks, resulting in a discount.
A DVLA spokesperson said: “While there is a fee for requesting vehicle owner details, this is intended to recover the cost of providing the information.”
“This means that the cost is borne by those requesting the information and is not passed on to the general taxpayer.”
An AA spokesperson added: ‘Drivers need to learn, if they haven’t already, that almost every road trip they make will at some point be observed by a camera.
‘And it’s not just cameras monitored by traffic or parking authorities. A mistake could be filmed on a passerby’s mobile phone and sent to law enforcement authorities.
‘Most drivers don’t dart into bus lanes like lemmings, stop at yellow boxes to get a ticket or park over the line to risk losing, for some, a day’s wages.
“Many make a mistake and pay a lot for it because camera control rarely acts with discretion.”
What is the future of parking fees?
At one point, the Government came very close to introducing strict new rules for private parking companies.
These rules, the Private Parking Code of Practice, would have capped charges at 50 per cent if paid within 14 days, meaning drivers faced a £50 fine, not £100.
It would also have introduced a code of practice for car park operators and a better appeals process.
The first draft of the code was published in February 2022, but was withdrawn four months later after strong objections from parking companies, who argued it would mean they would lose money and staff.
The code was supposed to be in place by the end of 2023, but the Government is still deciding what to do.
A spokesperson for the Department of Levelling, Housing and Communities said: “We are carefully considering responses to our recent call for evidence on the Private Parking Code of Practice and next steps will be set out in due course.”
A spokesperson for the British Parking Association trade body said: “The parking sector manages millions of parking events every day and witnesses the impact of the minority of drivers who park causing inconvenience to others, such as blocking spaces, parking in areas with a blue badge or causing inconvenience to motorists who park carefully and attentively.
“The system has to be robust enough to try to deter this type of behavior – we have plenty of evidence to show what happens when it is not managed effectively.”
Parking companies say the number of driver searches is increasing because there are more cars on the streets, more parking spaces are opening up, poor parking by a small number of people persists and rates are not high enough to to discourage inappropriate parking.
The pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 may also have caused some of the dramatic rise seen in numbers between 2020/21 and 2021/22, but not the rise in 2022/23.
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