Britain’s private car parks need a code of practice
Last month Matthew Brooker took a sick child to the accident and emergency room at a hospital in north London. He overstayed his parking ticket outside the hospital by 23 minutes and was hit with a £100 fine, with an appeal later rejected. The Bloomberg journalist points out in an opinion piece that the parking site is owned by Parkingeye Ltd, a company with a wider profit margins than Apple Inc. that is part-owned by Macquarie Group – a company dubbed the “vampire kangaroo” for its ability to extract profits from infrastructure companies. Parkingeye has been named in numerous reports as the biggest requester of vehicle owner records, which it needs to send out fines. But the problem is bigger than one company. A proposed government code of practice – which has been temporarily suspended – says private firms issue around 22,000 parking tickets daily, with a “labyrinthine system of misleading and confusing signage” and “opaque appeals services”. A spokesperson for Parkingeye said the company operates “responsibly and fairly”.
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