Parking Code of Practice Consultation 2025 - now let's see what happens

Umkomaas

Nellymoser said:

Martin Wrigley MP tables questions x 3 to HCLG Minister 

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions?SearchTerm="Private+parking"&DateFrom=09/07/2024&DateTo=22/07/2026&AnsweredFrom=&AnsweredTo=&House=Bicameral&Answered=Any&AnsweringBodyId=7&Expanded=True

Scroll down to the first question on 10th Oct Smart Parking get a special mention from Shockat Adam MP.

Answered on

30 October 2025

This government is taking action to protect motorists.

The Department for Business and Trade provides annual funding to Citizens Advice to deliver general consumer information, education and to raise awareness. This includes the Annual Scams Awareness campaign which Citizens Advice run on behalf of the Consumer Protection Partnership.

That's alright then! 😩

Nellymoser

I came across this 11th Sept 2025 ICO decision  supporting MHCLG refusal to release information relating to Parking CoP.

https://ico.org.uk/media2/mndf0cyk/ic-363308-j6s8.pdf

The request was for electronic copies of the following documents under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

1. Impact assessment resulting from Call for Evidence: private parking charges and debt recovery fees. Launched 30 July 2023.

2. Minutes of department meetings with BPA, IPC and consumer working groups from 1/1/2022 to the present time.

Refusing to share information only fuels suspicion and distrust of this Ministerial Dept.

The MHCLG FOI team feed me similar cr*p excuses...'gives Ministers "safe space" to consider the policy' when I requested copy of the report on the responses received to Parking: Call for evidence consultation. A report that should have been published according to their own Consultation Principles.

Coupon-mad

I also found that ICO decision the other week. There's more of concern than first appears.

Look at what the MHCLG told the ICO about certain issues being "no longer on the table" and "no longer being considered". And they told them that BEFORE the Consultation.

1505grandad

Perhaps they all should be reminded of the Nolan Principles:-

https://www.civilservicecollege.org.uk/news-7-rules-for-public-life-the-nolan-principles-in-2024-551

"One of the main mechanisms for maintaining high standards across the public sector are the Seven Principles of Public Life, informally known as the Nolan Principles. Collectively, they form a set of values which underpin public service in the United Kingdom.

They are, as follows: 

1. Selflessness – Holders of public office always place the public interest before themselves.
2. Integrity – Holders of public office must not take unfairly decisions that benefit themselves or people they know and should report all conflicts of interest.
3. Objectivity – Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.
4. Accountability – Holders of public office are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.
5. Openness – Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.
6. Honesty – Holders of public office should be truthful.
7. Leadership – Holders of public office should act as examples to others and call out poor behaviour when they see it. " 

"The Nolan Principles are applicable to all who work in public life, whether a government minister, civil servant, police officer or local councillor. They also apply to private companies engaged in providing public services; for example, it could be argued that during the much-publicised Horizon Post Office scandal, the technology company Fujitsu fell short of the standards of openness and accountability expected when serving the public."

To much to hope I suppose.

patient_dream

All 7 points above, the government do not practice ?

If there was a point 8, it would be arrogance which this government is very good at

Protest

If the CoP is not actively in place before the next election it will neve see the light of day. The Act will join the list of "not yet commenced" Acts https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/law-but-not-law/

When is the deadline by which the CoP needs to be officially published (in HoC Library?) if it is to become fully active within this parliament?

Note "“there are plenty of examples of legislation that has remained uncommenced for many years after it is passed. The remedy lies with the legislature”.   ie Parliament can require Government to act and to command civil servants to deliver. In six years this has not happened. 

Protest

Isn't AI wonderful: 

There is no confirmed target date for the statutory code to come into force. Despite the recent activity, the government is effectively still in the "analysis" phase. Here is the exact situation as of December 8, 2025: 

The Official "Non-Answer"

Miatta Fahnbulleh answered a written parliamentary question on November 21, 2025, regarding the timetable. Her response was standard civil service language: "The consultation closed on the 26th September, and we are currently analysing all responses. The government will publish a response... in due course."  In government terms, "in due course" has no fixed deadline. It could mean weeks, or it could mean another year.

Realistic Timeline

Since the government consultation only closed in late September 2025, the typical timeline for this process suggests:

• Early 2026: Publication of the "Government Response" (analysis of the feedback).

• Mid-to-Late 2026: Laying the final regulations in Parliament.

• Late 2026 / Early 2027: Actual enforcement (operators are usually given a 6–12 month "adjustment period" once the law is passed).

Bottom Line

There is no date. The "Act" passed in 2019 is still, for all practical purposes, collecting dust while the government analyzes the latest round of arguments from parking companies.

AI does seem to have some practical weaknesses. Is "Mid-to-Late 2026: Laying the final regulations in Parliament." deliverable? And is it only "arguments from prking companies" that are being considered?

h2g2

Protest said:

AI does seem to have some practical weaknesses.

Getting into something I do have some professional expertise with: this isn't something I'd trust AI (or more accurately, LLMs) with at all. I prefer the term "LLM" over "AI" because it describes what these tools actually do. "LLM" stands for "Large Language Model".

What they do, approximately, is convert the question into a bunch of numerical tokens and parameters and then - based on the data they were "trained" on - works out a bunch of words that look like they should be an answer.

Now, if the actual answers do exist in the training data the LLMs turn out to be quite good at finding it (though, I'd wager, less good than a normal search engine - certainly for the same computing cost) and they are also quite good at rephrasing it, so "explain in simple terms..." or "here's a speech - make it funnier" type queries tend to give decent results. Especially in situations like the latter where you can verify for yourself that the result is correct.

BUT (and this is a big one) if the answer doesn't exist the LLM doesn't typically have any way of knowing of that, but will still finds words and sentences that look convincing anyway. Think of it this way (to grossly oversimplify how they work): if the answer has the words "in the year xxxx" in it, but there's no source with the correct year it will find other examples of "in the year xxxx" in related text and put that (possibly irrelevant) year in instead. But the way the algorithms work it probably has no idea it's done this. It's just trying to find a best match to answer the question. Truth is kind of secondary. (This was particularly bad before "AI summaries" started putting sources on their results.) This is how an AI infamously recommended supergluing pepperoni slices onto your pizza before putting it in the oven to stop them falling off. It was traced back to a reddit post where someone suggested it. It was obviously as a joke, in the original context, but the LLM wasn't able to pick up on that and presented it as advice. This is a more lighthearted example - there are more serious examples with LLMs recommending very dangerous courses of action.

More relevant here, perhaps, are the numerous reported cases of lawyers using LLMs to draft pleadings. They will generate bits of text that appear to be case citations (and are very good at making convincing looking ones - correct formatting and everything!) but with words picked from the training data rather than actual cases. This has led to at least one lawyer (unnamed in the article) in Victoria, Australia, being forbidden from being a principle solicitor, forbidden from handling client money, and forbidden from running his own law firm.

At the risk of skirting the "no politics" rules here, in LLM research the tendency to present very confidently about something without any actual truth behind it is known as "the Boris Johnson problem".

Ralph-y

To back that up .......

AI Overview

+1

Parking "fines" near Upholland church are

likely from automated systems (ANPR cameras) at nearby businesses like the Davy Lamp pub, where you must register your car to avoid charges, leading to penalty notices for non-compliance, though some fines (even for businesses) can be successfully appealed or cancelled if you were a genuine customer or if there was an error. The issue seems common in the area with local businesses and parking management. 

I live here and know the area very well ..... Davy Lamp pub, ...  no such place that I know of ...... user beware !