The Thamesmead Grump

The problem is this........

Your shop has a car park for the use of your customers, but unfortunately other people will abuse the facility and either park there without visiting your shop or park inappropriately, such as in a disabled bay or by causing an obstruction.

The solution is to employ someone to police the site to ensure everyone complies with the rules. The problem is that the company you engage to do this has a vested interest in ensuring they fail.

In most cases, the company employed is not paid any sort of fee for this work, they get their money from issuing parking charge notices, so what you create is a paradox. They have been employed to ensure that motorists comply with the rules but would go broke if they did. Out of sheer desperation, they resort to the kind of tactics you can see in this example.

Here, an ambulance driver has been given a ticket for parking her ambulance on a double yellow line in a shopping centre car park in Northwich, Cheshire. The jobsworth issuing the ticket probably has a target to meet so has no choice and the company responsible, Euro Parking Services has had to cancel the ticket following a lot of adverse publicity. I wonder if they would have cancelled a ticket quite so quickly if it had just been Joe Public on the receiving end.

There are any other number of examples of cars being ticketed without good cause or of the company trying to impose wildly inflated charges. There is good reason why they rarely take motorists to court as they know they would lose.

These parking companies are virtually unregulated, there is no generally recognised governing body, training of parking operatives or rules governing their conduct; the result is like something out of the wild west. Parking charges are made up based on nothing at all and bear no relationship to the actual financial damage to the owner of the site. There are even any number of cases where there is no connection between the owner of the land and the parking company making any attempted charge a purely speculative affair.

There is a sort of "Micky Mouse" organisation called the British Parking Association (BPA) which likes to pretend it gives its members some sort of legitimacy but the company responsible for this fiasco, Euro Parking Services, aren't even members of that.

Anyway. For any of you who may find yourself on the receiving end of one of these parking scams, here are a couple of sites for you to visit for more advice

This one deals with a case involving Euro Parking Services itself and this one for general advice on how to deal with parking charges on private land.