Five Minutes and a Nineteen-Hundred-Pound Demand

The number on the sign at the Copeland Street car park in Derby is five. Five minutes is not the length of a stay, and it is not the price of anything. It is the interval a driver is given between entering the car park and paying for the right to be there, and everything that follows in this story hangs on which of those two clocks the operator chose to read.

Rosey Greenwood paid every single time she parked at Copeland Street. She had bank records to prove it, transaction by transaction, and she kept them because the demands kept arriving. What she had not done, without knowing it, was pay inside the five-minute window the car park’s terms and conditions required, and that single missed interval generated ten separate charges adding up to a demand for £1,906.

The demand arrived while she was planning a wedding and saving for a first home. The sum was not one she could absorb, and the machinery around it did not pause for her plans. Letters came through the post, and then the people who send the letters came after her. “I was completely on edge, every single day,” she later recalled. [1] “I had letters coming through - I had debt collectors after me.” [1] To understand how a five-minute rule becomes a four-figure demand, it helps to separate the charges the system stacks. The first is the charge itself, capped at £100, or £60 if the driver pays within a fortnight. The second is the escalation fee: operators are permitted to add £70 in debt recovery costs to each unpaid charge. The third is the court stage, where fees and legal costs attach. Ten charges that begin at £100 do not stay at £100 once the £70 debt recovery fee and court costs are added to each one.

The case did not end in a courtroom. After publicity around the dispute, the £1,906 court claim against Rosey was dropped. She has since married her fiance Simon, and the two of them have bought a house together. “I feel like our voices have been heard; fellow motorists like myself have been listened to,” she said, and added a hope that other drivers would not feel the fear she felt pulling into a car park like the one at Copeland Street. [1] The political route ran through Parliament rather than through the courts. On 5 December 2024 the case was raised in the House of Commons by Catherine Atkinson, the MP for Derby North, who described charges of this kind as a “five-minute rip-off charge” and noted that they had caught out countless other motorists besides the one in her constituency.

The parking industry moved before the government did. The sector updated its own code of practice and banned the five-minute payment rule outright, which meant that the practice at the centre of the Derby case was already prohibited by the trade’s own rulebook before any statute existed. That sequence matters: the first correction came from the industry itself, under public pressure, and it applied to operators who had signed up to that code.

The government then went further, with a statutory Private Parking Code of Practice. The code was laid out in Parliament on a Tuesday and is now subject to a 40-day period of parliamentary scrutiny, during which MPs and peers can object before it is formally issued. Once issued, it comes into force 21 calendar days later, and unlike the sector’s version it carries legally binding power rather than a voluntary industry rule, which is the difference between a rule an operator can leave and a rule an operator must keep. Housing and communities minister Florence Eshalomi told the Commons the code “will give drivers a range of rights and protections to make these unfair practices a thing of the past.” The prime minister, Andy Burnham, framed the politics in a single sentence: “These charges leave people feeling ripped off and out of pocket, so I’m putting a stop to them.” Rosey’s was not an isolated total. Hannah Robinson was asked to pay £11,390 across her own set of parking charges, a figure that follows the same ladder from a capped charge through recovery fees into court costs.

The Derby facts show why a five-minute rule was ever worth enforcing at all.

So the question worth asking of any new code is not whether it sounds fairer but whether it changes the charges a driver actually pays. And on that test, the government’s text has to be read line by line against the text the industry wrote for itself, because in several places the two are the same document with a different cover.

The New Rulebook Reads Like the Old One

The comparison begins with the window in which a driver is allowed to decide whether to stay. Under the government’s code, drivers have a guaranteed minimum of five minutes to make that decision. The sector’s code already gave drivers a minimum five-minute window in which to decide whether to stay, so as a protection this does not appear to be new.

Five Minutes and a Nineteen-Hundred-Pound Demand (Image 1) — AI-generated image

The second item is the grace period, the extra time allowed to leave after the permitted stay has ended. The consideration period covers the moment before a driver commits to parking; the grace period covers the moment after a permitted stay has run out, and the government’s code gives drivers 10 minutes to leave the site. The sector’s code already gives 10 minutes as well, so this does not appear to be new either.

The third item is the headline number that every driver recognises. The government’s code sets the maximum parking charge at £100, reduced to £60 if the driver pays within a fortnight. That is identical to the cap in the sector’s code, which means the price of a breach has not moved at all under statutory regulation.

The fourth item is the appeal discount. The government’s code states that charges should be reduced to £20 on appeal under four circumstances: not displaying a parking permit despite holding a valid one, entering the wrong vehicle registration into a parking machine, not entering a registration at all, and not displaying a UK disabled parking permit despite having one. The sector’s code already said charges should be reduced to £20 under those same circumstances.

The fifth item is one place where the text diverges in a way that favours the driver. Under the government’s code, charges should be cancelled on appeal where the driver or a passenger suffers the onset of illness, where the driver or a passenger is delayed by an overrunning medical appointment, where the driver is delayed by childcare arrangements, and where a vehicle has broken down. The sector’s code said such charges should be reduced to £20 rather than cancelled, which is the difference between a discount and a withdrawal.

The sixth item is the one that produced the four-figure totals in the first place. Parking operators will still be allowed to add a £70 fee for pursuing an unpaid parking charge to each parking charge if drivers do not pay, as well as court fees and legal costs. The escalation that turned ten notices into £1,906 is therefore intact in the statutory version, and the government’s proposed remedy sits in a future consultation rather than in the code itself.

The seventh item is the enforcement lever, and it is the place where the government claims the sharpest break with the past. Operators who do not comply will lose access to the official database linking vehicles to registered keepers, which in practice means they can no longer issue parking charges at all, because without that database there is nobody to bill. This is meant to happen already: operators must belong to one of two industry bodies representing parking operators to access that data, and they can theoretically lose membership if they break the rules.

The eighth item is institutional rather than financial. The government promises a fully independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board, and its existence is the strongest argument that the statutory code is a different animal even where the wording is the same.

That distinction is the one Jack Cousens, head of roads policy at the AA, put at the centre of the change. The benefit, in his reading, is that the code is now backed by the government rather than by the parking sector that wrote the previous one. “That means, if there are any changes to be made, it will come via the government and indeed via the independent scrutiny panel,” he said. “Up until now, the private industry have held the pen on changing the code of practice. Now the pen is firmly in the hand of the government.” The long-running debate this code finally tilts is not a debate about five minutes. It is the argument between an industry writing and enforcing its own rules and statute: whether an industry that profits from enforcement can be trusted to write the standards it enforces. The pen changed hands; most of the ink did not.

The motoring organisations that campaigned for a statutory code have read the same text and drawn a narrower conclusion. Both the AA and the RAC welcomed the code, and both believe it does not go far enough. The AA wants a single independent appeals process, on the argument that a driver’s representations should be heard by a body independent of the operators and their industry bodies that represent parking operators, rather than by the industry “marking their own homework,” as Cousens put it. Simon Williams, head of policy, said the organisations had long called for the banning of fees for pursuing unpaid parking charges added on top of parking charge notices, and for a single independent appeals body to replace the two industry-run ones, and that neither had been included.

The one piece of the fee stack the government has promised to revisit is exactly the piece that produced the largest numbers. It says it will consult as soon as possible next year on private parking fees for pursuing unpaid parking charges, including on whether to cut the existing £70 cap or scrap the fees altogether. Until that consultation reports, the £70 stands, and so does the ladder that turns a £100 charge into a court claim.

Who Quietly Wins When Government Holds the Pen

The campaigner closest to the Derby case is unconvinced by the arithmetic of the announcement. Lynda Eagan, who helped Rosey, said she has been “screaming at the TV every time I see someone saying ‘we’ve got these new things’.” Her reading of the text is that the changes are marginal: “They’ve tweaked a few things here and there, but it’s not actually going to make an awful lot of difference to people.” And the question she puts to the government is quantitative rather than legal: “How, when not much has really changed, is that going to reduce the number of parking charge notices?” That question has a precise form.

The department that wrote the code rejects the charge that little has changed. A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “We don’t accept these claims. We’ve introduced a new Private Parking Code of Practice that will have statutory force and independent oversight.” The same response points to the cancellation of the £20 charge in circumstances outside a driver’s control, such as an overrunning medical appointment, and to strengthened requirements for appeals as the concrete gains for motorists.

Five Minutes and a Nineteen-Hundred-Pound Demand (Image 2) — AI-generated image

The industry’s own assessment is warmer than the campaigners’, and it is worth reading closely for what it defends. Alison Tooze, chief policy officer at the British Parking Association, said the code “strikes the right balance between stronger protections for motorists and effective parking management, helping keep communities, businesses and local economies moving.” She singled out the retention of the £100 parking charge as important, and gave the reasoning behind that defence: “Evidence shows that meaningful deterrents support compliance and good behaviours, helping ensure parking remains available for those who need it and enabling parking to be managed effectively.” The second industry body representing parking operators is still reading. A spokesperson for the International Parking Community said the body has long supported a code that raises standards and is now reviewing the government’s version in detail to understand what it means for motorists, landowners and operators alike. The same statement sets the condition for acceptance: “Any changes must remain fair to motorists while staying workable, so that compliant motorists are not disadvantaged by those who choose to ignore the rules.” The AA, which fought for the code, is keeping its position conditional. Cousens said the organisation is hopeful that the oversight board could make a difference to some drivers, and that it might stop some of the more spurious claims at source. He added the caveat that carries the weight: “but we will be watching.” There is also an ally nobody thought to ask for. The two things the industry most needed to defend — the £100 charge and the £70 recovery fee — both survive in the text, and the £100 charge survives with a minister’s signature on the document rather than a trade body’s.

There is a second, quieter gain for the operators, and it runs through the DVLA lever. Under the new arrangement, access to keeper data becomes a licence that can be withdrawn for non-compliance, which sounds like a threat to the industry and functions as a shield for its reputable half. An operator that follows the code can tell a driver, and a court, that it holds its data access under government rules, while the operator that ignores the code can be cut off from the only route to billing anyone. Enforcement discipline, in other words, is being used to sort the industry rather than to shrink it.

The British Parking Association defends the deterrent level, the International Parking Community asks for rules that stay workable for landowners and operators as well as drivers, and both are now reviewing a text they will help administer.

Sources

BBC — Quote source (original article)

Five Minutes and a Nineteen-Hundred-Pound Demand