UK private parking companies issued a record 14.5 million penalty charge notices in 2024-25, with 78% of recipients reporting the charge was unfair

Private parking operators in the UK -- led by ParkingEye (1.1 million DVLA data requests in H1 2024-25), Euro Car Parks (891,600), and Horizon Parking (439,896) -- are issuing penalty charge notices at record rates, having more than doubled their volume from 6.8 million tickets in 2018-19 to an annualized 14.5 million in 2024-25, totaling approximately 1.4 billion pounds in charges. Why it matters: 78% of Which? members who received a private parking fine felt the charge was unfair, so drivers lose trust in commercial parking enforcement as a whole, so 40% of those who believe their fine is unjust pay anyway rather than navigate the opaque appeals process, so private parking companies are financially incentivized to maximize ticket volume rather than improve signage or grace periods, so the cycle of aggressive enforcement and consumer harm accelerates without meaningful regulatory check. The structural root cause is that the UK government's Private Parking Code of Practice, legislated under the Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019, was withdrawn in 2022 after legal challenges from parking and debt recovery companies. This regulatory vacuum means the behavior of private parking operators has gone unscrutinized for years, while the DVLA continues to sell vehicle keeper data to these companies at scale -- just 10 firms made 64% of all 7.2 million DVLA data requests in the first half of 2024-25.