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

Nellymoser · 26 October at 1:27PM

DO NOTE: Maximum Copy Limit: Any identical or duplicate email sent to more than six members of the House of Lords is automatically deleted.

Central Contact Address: You can forward emails via the central address at contactholmember@parliament.uk, which is subject to the same six-copy restriction.

Nellymoser · 26 October at 1:44PM

Check out Lord Spellar on the members A-Z list. He has direct email. He participated in the parking debates and has tabled a written question to SoS re CoP.

You can read the Lords debates on Parking (Code of Practice) and Car parking companies to find out which Lords took part and their views:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/Debates?startDate=2022-03-28&endDate=2026-10-26&searchTerm=Parking%20&house=Lords&partial=False&sortOrder=1

Others that were supportive in the debates were:

Lord Truscott / Baroness Pidgeon / Baroness Winterton of Doncaster / Lord Watts / Baroness McIntosh of Pickering / Lord Khan of Burley / Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate.

Coupon-mad · 26 October at 2:28PM

Maybe we take some each.

Papermate2 · 26 October at 3:26PM

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82181351#Comment_82181351

Thanks for that, Coupon-mad

I have now written to the targeted Lords and to hclgcom@parliament.uk. (not the latest editions though) As discussed, the template intro and outro were tweaked to reflect the Lords' process (asking for a Fatal Motion or Motion to Regret) and tailored to their specific parliamentary interests (this will have to pass in the templates).

Regarding the Commons: Emailing MPs where I am not a constituent will likely be filtered out, so we desperately need forum members from those specific constituencies to step up and send the emails. That said, I am still going to try a direct, honest approach to Martin Wrigley MP, Baggy Shanker, CCing my own MP, just to see if it provides a route for consideration.

I believe you still have a copy of my email address from my ICA case a few months back that you were copied into. If it would be helpful for me to forward you the exact emails I sent today so you can see the final formatted versions, I would be very happy to oblige.

To make this as easy as possible for the rest of the forum, I am going to compile two things below in my next post:

A ready-to-use MP Template (Intro / 9-Point Body / Outro) with placeholders for names and addresses, so everyone here can easily copy, paste, and send it to their OWN MP.
The Lords "Hit List" with their contact details.with LORDS Template There is massive benefit in multiple people writing to the exact same Lords. The more noise they hear from the public, the more likely they are to act, so we need to flood their inboxes!

Let's keep the pressure on.(Bear in mind the limit of 6 identical Lords emails.)

Papermate2 · 26 October at 4:06PM

TEMPLATE 1: FOR YOUR LOCAL MP

Find your MP's email here: https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP

Subject: URGENT: Prayer Motion Required - Private Parking Code of Practice

Dear [Name of your MP],

I am writing to you with absolute urgency. The new Statutory Instrument laid before Parliament on 20 October is not only severely wanting, but its drafting explicitly breaches existing UK law. I would be extremely grateful if you could review my briefing below, and I hope you will consider supporting this critical consumer rights request, and perhaps share these concerns with like-minded MPs

I am urging you to lay or support a Prayer Motion to annul the Private Parking Code of Practice Statutory Instrument. The explicit drafting of this Code provides undeniable evidence that severe regulatory capture has already occurred during the consultation process. Rather than protecting consumers, the Government has completely acquiesced to the private parking industry's demands. If this framework becomes law, you can expect 20 million annual Parking Charge Notices (PCNs) to be issued against motorists, with absolutely no operators ever facing meaningful sanctions.

I ask you to challenge this Code on nine specific, severe grounds:

1. The Legalisation of an Unlawful £70 Fee

The Code retains the £100 maximum parking charge and officially legitimises an arbitrary £70 "debt recovery" add-on fee. The Government’s consultation strategy of kicking the legality of this fee into the long grass is an absolute abomination of consumer justice. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has previously indicated that these £70 add-ons likely breach consumer protection law. By codifying this fee in a Statutory Instrument now, the Government is cementing it permanently. How can any future legal review successfully strike this fee down as unlawful if the Government has already explicitly legalised it? Parliament must not rubber-stamp a practice that its own consumer watchdog considers a breach of consumer rights.

2. Consultation Hijacking and Sham Appeals The fact that Will Hurley, representing the International Parking Community (IPC), sat on the Government’s own steering committee explains exactly why the consultation was captured by industry interests. It is why he has publicly celebrated the laying of this Code, and why the new framework deliberately fails to dismantle the industry's closed-loop appeals system. Under the IPC's current "Independent Appeals Service" (IAS), the system outright refuses to consider driver mitigation or operator Code of Practice breaches. The operational commingling is so blatant that the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) currently appears content that official correspondence from the IAS "Lead Adjudicator" is actively routed through the email account of Vicky Jarret—who is simultaneously the Head of Compliance for the IPC. The legality of the IAS's ongoing transition under the DMCCA 2024 (now fronted by a £100 shell company) is highly questionable, and formal challenges submitted to both the Government and the CTSI regarding the lawfulness of this setup remain entirely unanswered.

3. The Farce of Self-Regulation and DVLA Oversight Failure

The new Code explicitly relies on the industry to continue managing sanctions against its own members, but this self-regulation is entirely fictitious. Under recent Freedom of Information (FOIR12780) disclosures, the DVLA has formally admitted that the IPC has issued zero sanctions against its members. Furthermore, the DVLA is currently refusing to answer the exact same question regarding the British Parking Association (BPA), having gone completely silent for over 40 days past the statutory FOI deadline (FOIR13611-IR placed on 20 August 2026). Astonishingly, this same ignored FOI request suggests the DVLA does not even hold the founding accreditation documents for the BPA. The Code completely ignores this catastrophic oversight failure, allowing the industry to police itself while keeping its lucrative access to the DVLA database completely unchecked.

4. Hidden Transition Rules and Broken Promises on Signage

Crucially, the detailed transition rules for implementing this Code are being deliberately withheld and will not be published until after the Code becomes law, bypassing parliamentary scrutiny. The industry’s track record proves they will abuse any transition period. In April of this year, both the BPA and the IPC openly reneged on their previously published commitment to update all non-compliant car park signage by the end of 2026, halting improvements in favour of waiting to see whatever minimum standards the Government might require. Because the Government has acquiesced to almost every industry demand, it is highly likely these hidden rules will grant operators an excessively long transition period to comply. Once the 40-day laying period expires, MPs will have no power to challenge these loopholes, giving the parking industry a massive, unscrutinised grace period to continue exploiting motorists with defective signage under the old, failed system.

5. The Commercialisation of UKAS Certification and Lack of Independent Funding

While the Code introduces UKAS (United Kingdom Accreditation Service) certification as a purported safeguard, the practical mechanism guarantees further regulatory capture. Certification will be carried out by commercial Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs) acting as service providers. Because these bodies will be paid directly by the parking operators they assess, they will inevitably monetise the approval process. Operators will simply "shop around" and employ only the CABs that offer lenient audits. Rather than driving up standards, this commercialised certification model creates a race to the bottom. Instead, both certification and the secondary appeals service must be established as government-controlled, unassailable functions. This oversight should be entirely self-funded through a mandatory statutory levy applied to the £2.50 KADOE fee that operators currently pay the DVLA for keeper data. This would instantly remove the industry's financial leverage over their own auditors and appeals bodies at zero cost to the taxpayer.

6. The Inadequate 30-Day Trap and Lack of Operator Penalties

The new Code introduces a highly restrictive rule stating that if a motorist pays a charge, any appeal to reclaim those funds must be made within just 30 days of payment. While framed as a consumer concession, this is a deliberate trap. Vulnerable motorists frequently pay illegitimate charges under extreme duress—simply to stop the harassment of the £70 debt recovery fee and the terrifying threat of court action. If definitive evidence of sharp practice comes to light after this arbitrary 30-day window—such as discovering the site relies on deliberately deceptive entrapment signage, as seen at Lythgoes Lane in Warrington where Euro Parking Services Ltd has brazenly breached the industry's current Code since March 2025—the appeals door slams shut permanently.

This strict cut-off must be abolished. Motorists must retain the right to reclaim extorted funds no matter how far back the incident occurred, in line with standard statutory time limits for fraud and misrepresentation. Furthermore, when a PCN is proven to be the result of deliberate entrapment, the Code must legally compel the operator to refund the charge with added interest and a statutory penalty paid to the motorist. Without this punitive mechanism, the Code provides a permanent, government-sanctioned shield for rogue operators to keep extorted funds with absolute impunity.

Furthermore, a leading consumer parking expert who actively served on the Government’s own Steering Group for this Code has blown the whistle on three additional catastrophic drafting errors:

7. Illegal Data Harvesting and Equality Act Breaches

The Code allows operators to charge disabled motorists a £20 "concession" fee for failing to display a Blue Badge, but only in the "first instance." This is fundamentally unjust and breaches the Equality Act 2010, which requires full cancellation of the charge as a reasonable adjustment. Furthermore, enforcing this "first instance" rule forces operators to illegally harvest and store 'special category' health and disability data—in direct violation of the Data Use and Access Act 2025 and GDPR—for the sole purpose of blacklisting disabled drivers to deny future appeals.

8. The "Relevant Land" Two Tier Loophole

By restricting the statutory Code strictly to "relevant land," the Government is actively excluding tens of thousands of sites—including airports, drop-off zones, ports, council estates, TFL stations, and private tolls (such as the disastrous Warburton Bridge scheme). This creates a chaotic two-tier system: a limited statutory Code for some sites, and the continuation of an unregulated, self-serving "Wild West" for the rest. This drastically reduces existing consumer protections, encourages operators to invent "no-stopping zones" to bypass the rules, and totally reneges on the Government's promise to end self-regulation across all private parking.

9. The Unlimited "Tariff" Trap

The Code introduces a catastrophic loophole allowing operators to double-claim charges where an unpaid parking "tariff" exceeds £60—without setting any upper ceiling on what that tariff can be. Rogue operators will inevitably weaponise this by erecting signs stating: "Free for 2 hours, £100 tariff thereafter." This allows them to instantly pursue vulnerable, delayed, or elderly shoppers for the £100 fake tariff plus the £100 PCN, hitting drivers with an immediate £200 demand. It is a naïve drafting error that serves as an open invitation for operators to print money at sensitive sites like hospitals, GP surgeries, and high streets.

Please urgently coordinate with your like-minded MPs to raise a Prayer Motion to annul this Code before the 40-day period expires. It must be sent back to be stripped of the £70 debt recovery fee, the hidden transition rules, the unlimited "tariff" trap, and the illegal harvesting of disabled drivers' data. The Government must close the "relevant land" loophole to ensure the Code protects consumers across all private land, sever the industry-controlled access to the DVLA database, and instead mandate a reduced £60 maximum parking charge with a mandatory 50% early payment discount.

Thank you for your kind attention to this urgent matter. I would be extremely grateful if you, or your office, could let me know if this is of interest to you.

Yours sincerely,

[Your Name][Your Full Postal Address including Postcode][Your Phone Number]

Papermate2 · 26 October at 4:11PM

🛑 TEMPLATE 2: FOR THE HOUSE OF LORDS

The Lords do not have constituents. We need multiple people sending this to the EXACT SAME Lords to create overwhelming noise but it must be limited to 6 only as later copies will be automatically deleted..

Subject: FAO [Insert Lord's Name] - URGENT: Fatal Motion Required - Private Parking Code

Dear [Lord / Baroness Surname],

Because you have previously taken an active interest in the severe lack of regulation in the private parking sector, I am writing to you with absolute urgency. The new Statutory Instrument laid before Parliament on 20 October is not only severely wanting, but its drafting explicitly breaches existing UK law. I would be extremely grateful if you could review my briefing below, and I hope you will consider supporting this critical consumer rights request, and perhaps share these concerns with like-minded Peers.

I am urging you to lay or support a Fatal Motion or a Motion to Regret against the Private Parking Code of Practice Statutory Instrument. The explicit drafting of this Code provides undeniable evidence that severe regulatory capture has already occurred during the consultation process. Rather than protecting consumers, the Government has completely acquiesced to the private parking industry's demands. If this framework becomes law, you can expect 20 million annual Parking Charge Notices (PCNs) to be issued against motorists, with absolutely no operators ever facing meaningful sanctions.