Neighbour using residential road for car parking

Whowhatwhat

A neighbour is using our residential road for parking up to 20 cars.  The individual cars change frequently but are sometimes left for months.  It is a tight lane where parking is at a premium and adding this many cars has created chaos.

I appreciate residents do not own the road and people are free to park where they please but this is excessive and selfish to say the least. 

We live not too far from the airport so the best guess is that they are running a business from their house for airport parking. A lot of the cars are very high end so I imagine they are told that the parking is very secure and off street.

I'm not sure if there is any legal recourse for this as imagine its not a widespread issue.  Any advice on steps that could be taken?

MattMattMattUK

As long as the cars are taxed, insured and parked in accordance with the Highway Code then there is nothing that can be done about this from a legal perspective. 

DullGreyGuy

Our road, and surrounding, have recently become permit holders only parking because of complaints about difficulty in parking allegedly. 

Its solved the parking issues, not that we thought there was much of one before anyway, but now its £225/year to park a non-electric car as a resident £677/year for a business and £6.50 per day for visitors. Permits are tied to registration so no switching permits between different vehicles. 

Keep_pedalling

I wonder if the owners know where their cars are being parked. Your neighbour has definitely got a dodgy / risky  parking business running there. Shame if the locals got really cheesed off with this.

https://www.skyparksecure.com/blog/near-airport-street-parking/

Herzlos

If there are any particularly unique or expensive cars, then it may be worth asking on an owners club forum if they know it's there.

It does sound like it's a valet parking but assuming everything is insured properly I'm not sure if they are doing anything illegal beyond any restrictions on running businesses.

It may be worth seeing if you've got a local community police officer and asking them about it; they *might* be able to have a word with him about it.

Aretnap

If it was a motor trader using the street to store cars which he had up for sale then he'd be committing a specific offence and there are measures that the council could take to stop him.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/take-legal-action-against-nuisance-parking

You are probably right that it's airport fly-parking rather than motor trading, but it would do no harm to look at Auto-Trader etc and see if you can find any of the cars for sale.

I don't think there's an equivalent law about airport fly-parking so if it's that then probably all you can really do is lobby the council to introduce parking restrictions and/or a residents parking scheme. Stansted Airport for example has a page where you can report nuisance parking and if enough people complain the council say they'll look at parking restrictions.

https://www.uttlesford.gov.uk/Report-on-street-airport-related-car-parking

Arunmor

I think a few photos and posts on social media may alert potential owners to their expensive cars being parked on the street and not a secure compound.

TooManyPoints

If he is running a business then planning permission may be necessary. As a guide, my local authority says this about running a business from a domestic property: 

If the answer to any of the following questions is 'yes', then permission will probably be needed:

Will your home no longer be used mainly as a private residence?

Will your business result in a marked rise in traffic or people calling?

Will your business involve any activities unusual in a residential area?

Will your business disturb your neighbours at unreasonable hours or create other forms of nuisance such as noise or smells? 

If the parked cars are part of a business activity (either motor trading or car parking) I would think that the answers to questions 2 and 3 will almost certainly be “yes”.

Stateofart

I think you could probably go to the council and report them as a niusance.

Gavin83

Keep_pedalling said:

I wonder if the owners know where their cars are being parked. Your neighbour has definitely got a dodgy / risky  parking business running there. Shame if the locals got really cheesed off with this.

https://www.skyparksecure.com/blog/near-airport-street-parking/

Ignoring that these residents are criminals and certainly not even slightly in the right I'm surprised none of their houses/cars got damaged in response.

People get funny about parking but ultimately they have as much right over the spaces in their road as anyone else does, ignoring a few extra rules/laws. If residents don't like the way people park in their street then permits are the way to go. A lot of residents don't like this option either though due to the cost. But vandalising other peoples property is not the way to go.

You can also blame airports. Their parking is insanely expensive for what it is so naturally they'll drive people to find cheaper alternatives. When I've parked at an airport in the past I've sometimes found the parking is more expensive than the flights.

TooManyPoints said:

If he is running a business then planning permission may be necessary. As a guide, my local authority says this about running a business from a domestic property: 

If the answer to any of the following questions is 'yes', then permission will probably be needed:

Will your home no longer be used mainly as a private residence?

Will your business result in a marked rise in traffic or people calling?

Will your business involve any activities unusual in a residential area?

Will your business disturb your neighbours at unreasonable hours or create other forms of nuisance such as noise or smells? 

If the parked cars are part of a business activity (either motor trading or car parking) I would think that the answers to questions 2 and 3 will almost certainly be “yes”.

Unless I'm missing something this is easy to avoid though. There's nothing to say he has to have the business registered to his home address and if it's as sketchy as it sounds it would be advisable for him not to. Whether there's other rules that would stop him operating like this, even if the business was registered elsewhere will need someone else to comment on.

OP, out of interest how do you know it's this resident operating a business and isn't just a bunch of randoms parking there and then wandering to the airport?

TooManyPoints

There's nothing to say he has to have the business registered to his home address and if it's as sketchy as it sounds it would be advisable for him not to. 

But it's what he's actually doing from the address in question that the council may be interested in, not what arrangements he has for the registration of a business. If he is resident at the address and it can be shown that he is using the address to operate a business, planning regulations may be applicable.

My local authority faced a very similar problem when the owner of a children's nursery business, which had properly registered premises elsewhere, decided to expand into the house of one of its employees. It was declared as an "annexe" to the main property and it was maintained that because the business was registered elsewhere, no planning rules were being broken. The council issued an enforcement notice and the nursery applied for retrospective planning permission. This was denied and an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate failed.

Of course it depends on what is actually happening in the OP's road, but registering a business (if indeed it is registered at all) elsewhere will not circumvent the planning regulations.