UKC

Imagine I owned a piece of land and had planning permission to turn it into a car park. I decide to charge people by the hour and put a sign up showing fines for overstaying their visit. What is the legal position here? Am I allowed as a private individual to issue such fines and if people refuse to pay do I have any redress? I heard that the National Trust cannot, or perhaps does not, enforce fines for people who overstay. If this is so, is it because they don't want to tarnish their image or because they have no legal right to demand fines? I'm a NT member, so have no personal interest apart from curiosity, and I understand that South Lakes District Council can and does enforce such fines.

It's an invoice for services not a fine.

The legal side of this is that as long as you meet certain obligations around for example signage, drivers are entering in to a contract. You can’t fine them, but you can say that if they use the car park they are agreeing to pay £50 or whatever if they overstay. Based on contract law.

One argument against this in the past was that this constituted a penalty a so was an unfair contract, because it didn’t necessarily reflect the liquidated damages associated with the act of overstaying. However, several court have upheld that charges well in excess of £100 can be reasonable and therefore legal.

Really? So they're going to charge me £60 an hour for the hour I ran over? Sounds like a fine to me.

it's part of the contract to which you supposedly agree when you park.  Collection of non-payment is on the basis of breach of contract.  A Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) issued by a local authority is very much enforceable and non-payment will lead to bailiffs and all manner of discomfort (and escalating costs).  A Parking Charge Notice (PCN) issued by Mick and Montmorency (two blokes with a van and a dog) is a punt and best ignored (never acknowledge receipt of one of those).  If it's a 'Penalty' pay up quickly.  If 'Parking' ignore - you might need to be determined, and may think that paying up is less hassle than endless threatening letters, which will eventually stop.

They are not fines.  Only the courts, and in certain circumstances the police, can impose fines.  Parking Charge Notices (which are misleadingly initialised as PCNs to make them sound like they're something to do with Penalty Charge Notices) are issued under the guise of contract.

Essentially, the signage needs to say that by parking here you agree to pay for your parking ticket, or if you choose not to pay for that ticket, then you agree to pay this rather higher rate.  I'm not sure this is really a fair contract - would you really agree to pay, say, £3 for two hours, but £103 for 2h10min?  Still, the court in PE vs Beavis decided that it was fair.

If you do not then pay the invoice when they send it, they might choose to take you to the County Court for small claims - essentially they are saying that you agreed to this debt and now they will reclaim it.

Here's the thing, though - it was the driver who allegedly agreed to the charge and incurred that debt.  They don't know who that is.  They have the right to ask the DVLA for the vehicle's registered keeper, but there is no presumption in law that the RK must have been the driver.

(This is why you as a private individual couldn't do this - you won't have the right to request keeper details from the DVLA unless you form a private parking company and become a member of the BPA.  So you can issue your invoice, but where do you send it?)

PoFA 2012 does allow the PPC to transfer liability from that unknown driver to the RK, if and only if a rather stringent series of requirements are met.  Most of these parking firms are utter cowboys and fail miserably to meet the strict requirements. Sadly most people don't know this and give away the driver's identity in their initial appeal.  Still, the signage is very rarely up to scratch, and there is usually a way to show that they have failed to comply with PoFA 2012.  I rather delight in helping my friends win in these cases.

I don't know the situation with the NT.  It might be that they decided the adverse publicity wasn't worth chasing non-payers and accidental overstayers.

Ignore is terrible advice and has been since PoFA 2012.  Most firms will eventually issue a County Court claim, and if you ignore that you end up with a very real CCJ against your name.

Some companies are not litigious (because they know their notices are so incredibly incompatible with PoFA that they won't win) but many are.  PE, CEL, UKPPS, all take thousands of people to court every year.

I think the courts view the charge as a measure to incentivise you not to overstay. Ie the argument that the carpark has not incurred costs to the tune of £60 as a result of you overstaying is not relevant.

Bastards the lot of them rog, they are robbing the law-abiding motorist blind.

When I finally pass my driving test I will run the thieving Bastards of the Parking Lot's.    42  failed attempts to date. I will get there eventually... Up THE  Parking LOT REVOLUTION  go rog go.

Slightly off topic, I don't understand why councils charge for parking in towns with free supermarket parking and then wonder why the footfall in the town have dropped off.

"Car Park", not "Parking Lot".  There are standards. 

Because the supermarkets make money from their shoppers, which in turn covers the cost of the supermarket car park.

Council's could choose to increase taxation to subsidise free parking, or local shops could pay a local parking fund to cover the cost of the car parks. I doubt either would be popular.

I understood that the situation with the NT is that they are technically a charity, and therefore when you pay for parking you are actually making a donation rather than paying a compulsory fee. So that can not be enforced with a fine. (May have misunderstood though)

Some interesting replies which have clarified some vague ideas I already had. Thank all.

It's not connected to their charitable status - any landowner could engage a private parking company to issue PCNs.  No Parking Charge Notice is a fine - they are simply invoices under contract.

The NT seems to have made a deliberate decision not to enforce.  I've just googled a few of the signs at their entrances and none of them are even slightly PoFA compliant, and I can't see any case of a PCN being issued for any NT car park.  I can only guess that they decided it would look bad.

What about National Parks? Do they follow up on over-stayers or non payment for parking. For example, there is the Snowdonia NP that is responsible for Pen y Pass, and the Dartmoor NP had recently introduced parking charges at a number of their car-parks eg. Haytor? I have parked a few times without paying at Haytor as it is one of my local dog walks and I resent having to pay every day to walk my dog. It was the same when I lived in Nant Peris. Snowdon Miner's track was a regular dog-walk but eventually paying that fee even midweek in winter felt like an imposition. Likewise paying to park when shopping in Llanberis  the parking by the lake was suddenly ticketed. So everyone blocks up the high street. It's all just madness to me. I even have to pay to park at my local supermarket in Newton Abbott. The day will soon come when we will be immediately ticketed as soon as the car leaves the garage.

It's about time the motorist took back control. And they moan about the death of the High Street!

You're talking about council issued Penalty Charge Notices in those places if it's a council owned car park.  Very different kettle of fish, genuinely legally enforceable.

It was widely rumored that Snowdonia NPA didn't actually have any bylaws in place to enforce car park charges. I don't know if that's still the case but their website doesn't seem to make any reference to any.

It is a bit of a deal with the devil though.  For companies/charities/whatever it has the potential to burn through an awful lot of goodwill and do serious harm to their reputation and PR letting these cowboys loose on their customers. 

It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the NT have decided not to go down that road.  In their case I bet compliance in their car parks is generally pretty good anyway.  It might not be uncommon for people to over-stay a wee bit, but I doubt many of them take the piss.  People are less likely to begrudge paying the money if they know where it's going and generally support what it's being used for.

Pedant point: "PCN" should really only be used as an abbreviation for Penalty Charge Notice, and of course a private parking company can't issue one of those (unless they've been contracted to do the job on behalf of some local authority).

It's been known lately in the Peak I believe.  After many years of non-enforcement, tickets (Penalty Charge Notices) have been issued at Stanage Plantation and Millstone at odd times over the last couple of years.  (I've no personal experience of this, just read about it on here.)

There are few points that need to be understood with regard to Town Centre parking.

Firstly, it tends to be a much more finite resource than supermarket car parking, by virtue of location, on that basis it needs to be carefully managed. Unregulated car park in or close to town centres are generally full by 8am and stay full until after 5pm, this doesn't help attract shoppers. Plenty of town centres still offer some free town centre parking, but this needs to be carefully regulated, ideally with maximum time limits of 20 minutes or so. My local town centre offers 3 hours free parking, but you generally cannot benefit from this, because there is not enough turnover of parking spaces.

Secondly, parking is used to encourage certain behaviours, is it easier to walk, cycle, use public transport, if I am driving, would I be better to park in a large car park just off the ring road and walk the last 200m to the town centre. Lots of cars in town centres isn't good for anyone and has been shown to put people off visiting town centres.

Thirdly, providing parking has a cost. How that cost is met is clearly different when we compare supermarkets and town centres. That said, I can give you plenty of examples of supermarkets in or very close to town centres that charge for parking.

Finally, supermarkets and town centres do not offer the same thing, or at least successful town centres and supermarkets do not offer the same thing. Town centres are not just retail centres and to be fair the supermarket influence on town centre trade is yesterday's story. It is one of many threats to retail, loot at INTU going bust, they offered free parking. Town centres need to be about business, culture, leisure, residential, civic amenity and retail, like they used to be not just about shopping. Lots of things that you cannot get from your supermarket or Amazon.

That and they all love the vicious cycle of raising money from things that will inevitably and obviously lose money in the long run. Income from business rates drops so parking charges are introduced to milk some more cash out of each shopper which drives shoppers to out of town retail which cuts the revenue from parking which knackers the high street which means parking doesn't bring in the same money which means charges have to go up which means fewer people go into town which means more shops close which means we have 4 betting shops, a costa, a ton of planning applications to make all our empty shops into flats and a few sad vox pops about regeneration on the local news to show for it.

I think money parking charges should be replaced with buying local produce, eg Lakes - Cumberland sausages, Cornwall - pasties, you get the drift.
Local sellers can set up their stalls and you have to buy a minimum quantity to receive your exit ticket.  Maybe at slightly inflated cost to go to car park upkeep.
I'd happily go for that.  Yum Yum!

In a word, no!

When I'm not driving my car, but rather using a bike or walking - it already feels like "motorists" have plenty of control over the design of towns and transport systems more generally. If I'm traveling with my family (5 people) about the only place I can think of where it doesn't make financial sense to drive and park, as opposed to use public transport, is central London, and even then when we've needed to go we have driven to the outskirts and then got on the tube for the last hour.

But leaving that aside, if there isn't some cost to parking surely people never consider other ways of accessing places they want to go to? And if that doesn't happen, the next problem will be, like Nick was saying above, any free parking facility just gets used up. I'm not sure what's better for say, Llanberis, paying a few quid to park in carpark or not having anywhere to park at all because the free parking is all used up.