Why are ParkingEye giving incorrect financial information to the courts?

ParkingEye are fond of stating the following as part of their claims to the courts.

"The Average payment by motorists who have been issued with a Parking Charge by ParkingEye is circa £63. Circa 84% of this payment (circa £53) covers ParkingEye's costs. This information has been taken from ParkingEye's company accounts and are [stet] publicly available."

The Prankster makes the reasonable assumption that this statement is referring to their 2011/12 accounts, which are the latest available. The number of requests made to the DVLA by ParkingEye during their 2011/12 accounting period was 629,181, and can be found from this freedom of information request. We can assume that most of these will result in a parking charge notice being issued - ParkingEye are not allowed to make requests to the DVLA unless they intend on issuing a parking charge notice.

There will be some requests where this is not possible - a stolen vehicle for instance. The Prankster has spoken to other car park operators who feel that this would be a very small number, certainly less than 5%.

Let us be generous and assume 5% of requests do not result in a parking charge notice. This leaves 597721 parking charges issued.

The entire cost of running ParkingEye's business in 2011/12, taken from their accounts, is £9.3 million. This means the maximum cost of issuing a charge is total cost / number of charges, or £9.3m / 597721 .

This comes to £15.56.

However, not all the cost of running a business is applicable to issuing parking charges. Therefore the true cost of issuing a charge is less - possibly a lot less.

Here is a snapshot from ParkingEye's web site showing they provide other services apart from enforcement.

None of the costs involved with the provision of these services can be attributable to enforcement costs. Thus, ParkingEye will need to apportion the costs of ANPR, communications, servers, and the like. As the number of enforcement incidents is far less than the total number of motorists, the apportionment will need to take this into account, and the true costs of enforcement will only be a tiny fraction of the whole.

The Parking Prankster has previously published a list of job titles of ParkingEye employees (currently redacted)*. The list showed that large numbers of employees have nothing to do with enforcement. Salaries of these employees cannot be counted against enforcement costs, and similarly other costs such as building rent and insurance, if not counted as normal running costs, must also be apportioned.

Taking all this into consideration, it is likely that the true cost of issuing a parking charge notice is more like £5 to £10.

The Prankster wonders why ParkingEye continue to send this apparently false figure of £53 to the courts. The Prankster also wonders why in some court cases the figure magically changes to £55.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

*The Prankster is currently in dialog with ParkingEye regarding the unredaction of the list of employees, in the public interest.