Monday Musing: What do we know about parking?

It surprises people to discover that despite the British Parking Association being around for 52 years there’s still a lot we don’t know about the sector as a whole.  As new technologies are introduced to manage parking, find parking, and pay for parking, the actual parking space becomes somewhat imperceptible.

I’m frequently asked how many car parks there are, what the breakdown is between local authority and private, how many are at hospitals, retail parks or railway stations, or how many parking spaces are there in the UK?  But the simple truth is, no-one actually knows.  The best guess is 17,000 to 20,000 car parks, but that was many years ago and, like any market, it changes all the time.  Some car parks become regenerated and disappear just as new car parks are being created.  And anyway, who has the ability, or indeed the inclination, to count every single parking bay?!  (Estimated to be between 8m and 11m in case you were wondering).  There are apps that can find you a parking space, including private driveways, and the BPA awards car parks for being safer places, all of which are collated on a single website, but despite this we still don’t know the full extent of tarmac painted with white lines set aside for stationary cars.  As every researcher or analyst knows, data is spread across multiple platforms and never in one handy, central location, which would make the job so much easier.

It’s the same situation trying to find information about people who work in parking.  One can’t type ‘parking’ into a database to find every job title and discipline as there are so many jobs and professions that are associated with parking that aren’t obvious. However, we would like to know how equal, diverse, and inclusive the sector is so that we can make improvements.

I had an interesting chat at Parkex last week (the BPA’s flagship exhibition), where someone told me that they could never recruit people from ethnic backgrounds into Civil Enforcement Officer (CEO) roles.  I thought about that for a moment and supposed that if someone growing up had experienced racial abuse, they might make a conscious decision not to work as a CEO in a frontline role because they believed they would receive more of the same.  I’m surmising of course, there could be 100 different reasons, but if we don’t ask, we won’t know.  Unfortunately, CEOs do experience verbal and sometimes physical abuse and it doesn’t matter where someone is in the UK, where abuse is concerned it’s a statistic that’s equal north and south.  It’s not acceptable and we have been lobbying government for better protection, as have others in sectors with vulnerable front line staff (see our campaign page).  It has resulted in an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which received Royal Assent on 28 April 2022, to include:

(2) If the offence was committed against a person providing a public service, performing a public duty or providing services to the public, the court— (a) must treat that fact as an aggravating factor, and (b) must state in open court that the offence is so aggravated

This means it is an aggravated offence to assault someone who is performing a public duty or providing a service to the public, which applies to CEOs/ parking attendants/wardens, and a range of other similar public-facing roles.

But what about those who are not on the front line?  These people face a different set of challenges, and we want to know their experiences, such as obtaining training, promotions and working in higher management roles.  We are asking all our members and those of the International Parking Community (IPC) to take part in our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion research so that we can find out what perceptions they have, what is being done in their organisation to promote EDI and what improvements could be made. I encourage everyone to take the survey and put their name forward to be included in the qualitative interviews where there will be the chance to discuss lived experiences in more detail.  We really want this research to illuminate the whole of the parking sector and although anonymous, it will all be in once place.

To find out more email research@britishparking.co.uk