New parking rules for UK motorists have been introduced this week in the hopes of making things fairer for drivers.
Under the new rules in private car parks, which are monitored by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) or CCTV, drivers won't be hit with a parking charge notice if they pay in full before leaving.
To be clear, this won't apply to council run car parks, private car parks which don't have this monitoring technology or ones which aren't members of the British Parking Association or the International Parking Community, so it's not going to be for everywhere you can park.
These changes come after the case of UK driver Rosey Hudson, a woman who the BBC reports was taken to court over being asked to pay £1,906 because she took more than five minutes to pay for parking.
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She kept parking in a Derby car park with poor signal meaning she couldn't pay on her phone while the machine was 'completely out of order', so would walk to where the signal was stronger and pay for her ticket properly.
Excel Parking Ltd sent her 10 parking charge notices, with her paying the first one, before the total they demanded rocketed to £1,906 as each notice had a 'debt recovery' charge slapped onto it along with a £115 court fee and £80 costs for legal representatives, and then eight percent interest on top of that.
The woman had paid the proper fee each time she parked, but because she hadn't done it within five minutes she'd been slapped with a massive fee.
The company said the woman was 'the author of her own misfortune' because they had a sign up saying people only had five minutes from entering the car park to buy a ticket, but the case against her was dropped.
Other Brits have been in similar situations where they did pay the proper parking fee, but because they only had a short window of time to do it and signal was poor they ended up being fined for it.
The rule change should stop this from happening from now on, as paying the full cost of your parking before you drive off again ought to be enough to avoid a charge notice.
The Private Parking Scrutiny and Advice Panel (PPSAP, who knew such an organisation existed?) hope the change will help drivers who 'face genuine difficulties in paying in a short timeframe are treated fairly'.
However, there has been some criticism of the rule change for not going far enough.
Simon Williams, head of policy at motoring group the RAC, said the changes which came into effect this week were 'an attempt for the private parking industry to look fair'.
He said: "As there's no information on how the change will work in practice, we fear it will make little difference to drivers.
"It's also important to realise this is the industry's own code, not the Government-backed Private Parking Code of Practice, which was enabled by an Act of Parliament in 2019 yet has never come into force due to a legal challenge.
"We want to see the statutory code in operation as soon as possible."
Joe Harker