Why Are Private landlords buying into this?

assura

Ok, I've been on here for hours reading through the advice et all, but it strikes me that if this is generally recognised as a scam why are supermarkets allowing this to happen?

I went to the .gov website and they don't even raise it under their scam buster tips. Are they choosing to ignore and let the consumer do the hard work of finding out thier rights on this matter?

Surely an omission from the government means they are complicit in allowing this to go on.

Someone is benfitting from this, Is it the DVLA (who are governnment run) who receive a payment for every name they give out to these companies?

Under what law do these parking operators exist?

There must be something that allows them to carry on. Anyone know?

I say supermarkets becasue they make millions a week from thier customers and presumbly money being collected on thier behalf must be going to them. it seems greedy to allow these people to do this nasty work on thier behalf and expect the customer to return.

If they do not recieve any money, it even worse!

Why not have their own parking attendant?

The more i read the more this is an injustice! And i think somone somewhere is profiting hence dragging of feet to put a clean stop to it.

Right? Does anyone know?

taffy056

The DVLA makes about £3-£4m a year out of this, they simply sell our details onto basically anyone who asks, and pays £2.50 a shot, these people are supposed to have a reason for asking, speculative scammers are allowed if they are in the BPA, electronic access if they are in the BPAs AOS scheme.

They operate under a legitimate law as its not illegal, like these payday loan companies offering loans with an APR of 4k percent , their practices are often underhanded, and they skirt the grey area of the law.

The landlords make money out of it, they get a cut out of every ticket, they are part of the scam of fleecing money out of people, these people happen to be their customers, if you want to contact the head office of the retailer concerned to complain, please do so, don't contact the parking company as its unregulated business designed to fleece people out of money, appeals are useless.

The people who are making the money are the scammers , and they are the parking companies, its quite clear that its not about parking , its about getting as much money out of people in the shortest amount of time, if you would like to complain, go to your MP, the Prime Minister, the DVLA, the press, the land owners, the retailers, basically everyone except the parking scammers.

TrickyWicky

Most supermarkets are retail and know nothing about parking - thats why they don't have their own parking attendant. They also don't want their brand name on a Parking Charge Notice that arrives through your letter box. It would kill their business overnight. Use your head, when you think about it, it all makes sense.

As for why they use PPCs, many supermarket car parks get abused for neighbourhood parking, storage (eg untaxed/uninsured cars that owners can't do anything with until they have the funds), parking for non customers to go elsewhere etc. The supermarkets are not obliged to provide public parking for anyone to use for any purpose, they provide them for their customers so that their customers have easy access to their shop and can get their shopping to the car with ease. Thats why they often have 2-3 hours maximum parking policy.

Many landlords don't want cars being 'stored' on their land because they end up sat there for long periods with no tax/insurance, get vandalised, damaged, start to look unsightly and then it puts off other customers from using the car park and shop.

Would you want to park in a car park where you see this?:


PPCs operate under contract law (or at least they try to). The government benefit from every company that pays tax, yet I don't see people claimng that Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, ASDA, etc are some sort of conspiracy - do you? It's only companies / sectors that people don't like that they accuse of being involved in a conspiracy with the government - remember that.

As for the supermarkets making money out of the PPC PCNs.. well its true that many PPCs pay the land owner £10 for each PCN thats paid but the PPC gets the rest. Out of that they then have to pay staff costs, tax, office costs etc.

So, while its true that most PPCs are big bad horrible companies, how else do you stop private car parks becoming littered with burned out cars, breeding grounds for youths in hoodies causing trouble, keep a turnover of empty parking spaces and make the majority of people comply?

We all moan about them (along with council parking depts) but the moment we can't find anywhere to park we all start getting stressed and complaining about it. I'm not supporting PPC tactics in any way but they do have their role to play - especially with council parking charges always on the up and car parks being sold off for housing etc.

What we need is a major clean sweep of how the PPC industry operates.

Coupon-mad

Good questions, assura, and similar to the questions we regulars ask.

But we are banging our heads against a brick wall. Yes the DVLA make a pretty penny out of this and various websites, Watchdog and the national press have outed this issue several times, but nothing changes:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8432227/DVLA-selling-drivers-details-to-unscrupulous-car-parking-firms.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-369177/Your-details-sold-car-park-extortionists.html

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23485490-15-million-what-the-dvla-has-made-selling-your-private-details-to-car-park-spies-and-wheel-clampers.do

http://www.roadweb.org.uk/dvla-selling-info-to-car-park-bandits/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2011/04/dvla_driving.html

The PPC industry is very rich and has some top people with influence. When one of the Queen's cars was clamped last year in Southampton (and the guy got a criminal record for it!) she was on a yacht belonging to...the owner of NCP! NCP is one of the biggest PPCs. Then you have the owner of Excel, Simon Renshaw-Smith who is literally coining it; his daughters go a very posh private school and the whole family own horses galore as well as a country home in Derbyshire.

All the largest PPCs have owners who are always on exotic holidays, driving sports cars and trying to buy every other luxury in life as well. Gary Wayne (CEL and Creative Car Park Management) AFAIK has a 4 bed home in London and drives a very expensive sports car, and Mike Perkins (known as Perky) comes on here to gloat about his holidays sometimes and he thought it was OK to try to buy his daughter into a grammar school (see the bottom of the page for his mugshot):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/4755270.stm

There's a definite element of old-boy networking going on with some of those at the helm of the BPA, with friends in high places.

For instance, the Government, when putting through the Freedoms Bill (debated this year and due to become law next year) has outlawed private clamping BUT it has listened to the bleating of the BPA and allowed something almost equally shocking: 'keeper liability' in 2012 for private parking fake PCNs!

See all the discussion about that - the Freedoms Bill is now doing the final rounds in the Lords and 'keeper liability' remains in it, despite petitions, letters, emails, you name it, and much has been said on this MSE forum (wait for the search to fully load to see all relevant threads):

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=+site%3Aforums.moneysavingexpert.com+Freedoms+keeper+liability

You couldn't make it up! :eek:

taffy056

TrickyWicky wrote: »

As for why they use PPCs, many supermarket car parks get abused for neighbourhood parking, storage (eg untaxed/uninsured cars that owners can't do anything with until they have the funds), parking for non customers to go elsewhere etc. The supermarkets are not obliged to provide public parking for anyone to use for any purpose, they provide them for their customers so that their customers have easy access to their shop and can get their shopping to the car with ease. Thats why they often have 2-3 hours maximum parking policy.

I don't agree, I would put a rather large sum of money on the line to say that these parking companies make a huge majority of their money off the customers using the car park for the purpose it was set up for. The fact is when you have 15-20 retailers on one site with a 2 hour limit on it people get caught out, and those people are the clients of the retailers.

Car park abuse is blown hugely out of proportion by these companies, probably less than 1% who use these car parks abuse it, those 1% know that these tickets are a scam, so don't give a monkeys! IMO there is no such abuse on any car park, how can there be when for most of the year they are half full at the max? For a loss to occur it must be proven, I would love to hear the retailers explaining a financial loss in a free car park!

The fact is most money is made out of petty rules, like staying to long, parking on a line, not parking in a bay, or shock horror parking in a parent child place, and parking in disabled bays, we all know on here that these pretty boxes are advisory only, and we know that the parking companies try to make their invoices look like PCNs from the council.

For me I park where I like, and stay as long as I like, I drive a big van in my job and cannot fit on a parking bay for the most part, I have already been pulled once already for parking in tesco in llanelli for staying there for 9 hours, the leasing company was quite bluntly told not to pay them from my company's fleet manager, he knows it was a scam, and he knows that I went to tesco in the morning to grab some brekky, and went there some hours later for a call of nature. The reason he knows because there is a tracker on my vehicle

Basically parking companies and those who employ them can swivel :rotfl:

Coupon-mad

Agree with you, taffy.

And TrickyWicky, although they don't like it, many Supermarkets DO have to provide local parking as part of their planning permission:

http://newsfrombrighton.co.uk/brighton-culture/shopping/aldi-fined-for-failing-to-offer-free-parking-in-portslade/

And some of the biggest Supermarket car parks work perfectly well with no PPC there at all. Other smaller ones work perfectly well with a barrier system - there really is NO NEED for a protection racket going on, driving away custom!

And @assura, the trouble is that PPCs approach the Supermarkets (not the other way round, in many cases). They convince them there is a problem to address and promise to sort out their car parking issues for free. Supermarkets jump at the chance and have no clue about the debt collector threats that go out - nor even realise that these firms cannot even issue fines.

I complained at my local Co-op and Sainsburys about their use of a PPC. I got blank looks in the Co-op, completely clueless, and in Sainsburys they tried to tell me 'but these ARE real fines'.

So I wrote to Sainsburys HO to complain about their leaflet actually threatening their customers with fines. They said it like it was a good thing! :eek:

Here's that thread. I got no reply from Sainsburys HO who obviously didn't care - but I don't think that leaflet exists any more:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1966977

That thread is worth a read just for the laugh of bargepole's classic letter shown in post#2!

bromsgrovebarry

The PPC system is disfunctional. For carparks that are provided as a facility for retail customers, any charges for valid infringements of reasonable terms and conditions should be paid to the car park owner. The PPC should be paid by the owner to properly manage the car park. This will prevent the 'bounty hunter' system whereby PPCs do everything to extort unreasonable charges from the gullible and often vulnerable. Paying a PPC to provide a service will become a fixed cost and retailers or agents can decide if the service is cost-efficient. Landowners will moan that they now have to pay for something that was free and PPCs will moan that they have lost their ill-gotten gains. No car parking is free, the cost of owning and maintaining it is paid by customers. If PPCs provide a service, they should make a sensible charge for it and not obtain their revenue from scamming.

TrickyWicky

@taffy: responses are below in blue.

taffy056 wrote: »

I don't agree, I would put a rather large sum of money on the line to say that these parking companies make a huge majority of their money off the customers using the car park for the purpose it was set up for. The use being parking for customers to go in, do their shopping and get out. For some reason many folks still think these car parks are some sort of honourary parking facility that anyone can use. The fact is when you have 15-20 retailers on one site with a 2 hour limit on it people get caught out, and those people are the clients of the retailers. Agreed, when you have that many stores on site its stupid to have such a daft limit. However we're talking about supermarket car parks the last I was aware of it so changing it to a car park that caters for 15-20 retailers is trying to sway the arguement by influence.

Car park abuse is blown hugely out of proportion by these companies, probably less than 1% who use these car parks abuse it, those 1% know that these tickets are a scam, so don't give a monkeys! You say that but have you ever worked in the parking industry to know just how many motorists do abuse the parking facilities? - I've known loads of it go on. It's only when you're in the trade that you see the regular mick takers. IMO there is no such abuse on any car park, how can there be when for most of the year they are half full at the max? As mentioned above its not about capacity in every case, it's about keeping a turnover of vehicles and detering dumped cars which later become a problem. For a loss to occur it must be proven, I would love to hear the retailers explaining a financial loss in a free car park! They don't have to and if the freedoms bill gains royal assent its the beginning of the end of your arguement. It will be a contract law that the driver is legally bound to and if they fail to agree then new bill will try to assume the RK has become responsible for it. If you've agreed to pay them £X for breaching their terms..

The fact is most money is made out of petty rules, like staying to long, parking on a line, not parking in a bay, or shock horror parking in a parent child place, and parking in disabled bays, we all know on here that these pretty boxes are advisory only, and we know that the parking companies try to make their invoices look like PCNs from the council. They may seem petty to you but to the landlords their retail business may depend on the convenience they can offer their customers. I worked for a large retailer marshalling a while back and the parents and disabled drivers were practically running to the customer service desk thanking them for keeping their parking bays clear by using me. It's only when its YOU that is affected, you realise how much of an impact it has. It tends to be the "I'll park whereever I want" types that actually encourage PPC activity. If everyone played fairly and stopped trying to take the mick / wind up the landowner, PPCs might well get flushed down the pan but because people can't be bothered to put in a bit of effort they're keeping the PPCs in business.

One thing is for sure, the PPC industry needs to change.

Coupon-mad

But Tricky Wicky I have never seen cars dumped in Supermarket car parks!

And I have 4 children and did have a disabled Mum (God bless her soul) and have never 'run to the CS desk to thank them for keeping certain bays clear!'

bromsgrovebarry

TrickyWicky wrote: »

One thing is for sure, the PPC industry needs to change.

You are not wrong there. We need to show the Westminster trough feeders, the supermarkets and the PPCs that we are not cash cows to be milked at leisure.

TrickyWicky

Coupon-mad wrote: »

But Tricky Wicky I have never seen cars dumped in Supermarket car parks!

Maybe not in your area but in some areas I've been in it's been very common. Big companies tend to roll out policies that affect all their stores so if they start PPC activity in one store the odds are it will roll out to others too even where it's not needed, wanted or liked. Crap isn't it. Don't forget many PPCs give the land owner a whopping £10 for each paid PPC PCN. That might not sound like much but to a supermarket thats £10 for nothing.

Coupon-mad wrote: »

And I have 4 children and did have a disabled Mum (God bless her soul) and have never 'run to the CS desk to thank them for keeping certain bays clear!'

You've never had me there thats why - If I'd been the marshall of your local supermarket car park you'd soon see a (positive) difference .