‘Car Park Sharks’ and Volunteer Vigilantes

Good afternoon readers — and welcome to today’s Tribune.

It’s impossible to definitively state which Sheffield company is the least popular, but I think you could make a strong case for Excel Parking Services (and its subsidiary Vehicle Control Services). Over the years, The Star has published article after article about furious drivers who these companies have hit with demands for money, who often insist they bought a valid parking ticket but unknowingly violated the company’s intricate rules.

While Excel Parking didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Tribune, the company has previously insisted to The Star that it is entirely within its rights to charge people this way — although this is hardly a surprising position. After all, the Excel Parking group made a total profit of more than £3m, after tax, last year and a large chunk of this money clearly comes from issuing their contentious Parking Charge Notices (PCNs). On the other hand, drivers would naturally claim to be the wronged party — no one leaps for joy at being asked to cough up £60, at minimum, whether deservedly or not. 

What I wanted to do, in today’s part-paywalled story, is try to get at the unvarnished truth by asking those best-placed to comment: the staff responsible for all those PCNs. How did they feel about the work they did? And what was it like to work for a company so reviled that a group of volunteer vigilantes are eager to bring it down?

Editor’s note: This story is a great example of one of the things we do best at The Tribune: taking a story being reported in other publications and going even deeper. One of Dan’s most popular stories from this year, about community tensions in S11, is another great example; other reporters simply didn’t have the time Dan had to roam the streets hunting for the more nuanced picture. That kind of in-depth work is only possible with the regular financial support of our paying members. If you think it’s valuable, please join them today.

Your Tribune briefing

🚗 20mph speed limits, more speed cameras and new crossings could be introduced on Ecclesall Road and Ecclesall Road South as part of £1.4 million plans to make the road safer. The A625 has seen 121 “road injury collisions” in the last five years, 75 of which have involved pedestrians and cyclists, and has been identified by the Road Safety Foundation as one of the 27 worst urban roads in the country for collisions. An online consultation period is open until midnight on November 7, and two in-person sessions are also being held from 2pm-5.30pm on Wednesday, October 16 at Ecclesall Library, and 4pm-7.30pm on Thursday, October 24 at the Jubilee Centre at City Church, Wilson Road, Broomhall. The proposals represent a significant rowback from previous plans to improve the road which included 12-hour bus lanes and so-called “red routes” to improve the reliability of public transport. To read our piece from last month about why the previous plans were dropped, click here.

❤️‍🩹 This fascinating piece in Now Then looks at Sheffield Council’s “quietly revolutionary” new public health plan. Instead of focusing on threats to health like smoking and drinking, the Fair and Healthy Sheffield Plan looks at the underlying drivers of illness, from inequality and insecurity to poverty and climate collapse. Director of Public Health Greg Fell says the plan is a roadmap to “shape our city around fairness, wellbeing and combating poverty.”

🏗️ This week, a panel of architecture experts will be visiting shortlisted entries in the 2024 Sheffield Design Awards. The public will be able to vote for their favourite in the People’s Choice Award poll, which opened this week. Nominated buildings include The Tribune’s new home at Leah’s Yard as well as three more elements of the Heart of the City development. Our favourite, however, is the wonderful David Mellor 1960s annexe house in Park Lane.

Things to do

🎸 Starting their 50th anniversary UK tour on Friday night at Sheffield City Hall are Squeeze. In the 70s and 80s hits including Cool for Cats and Up the Junction saw songwriters Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook hailed as the next Lennon and McCartney. Support on the night comes from Bolton’s very own Badly Drawn Boy. However, if jazz is more your thing, head to Crookes Social Club on the same night for Tori Freestone and the Alcyona Mick Quartet.

🎹 To the Octagon on Saturday comes Synthfest, an annual gathering of the biggest range of synthesisers in the UK, brought together by Sound on Sound magazine and Sensoria Festival. Over 60 companies will be exhibiting at the event, plus a range of soft-synth and virtual instrument developers. There'll also be a modular meet-up and a programme of talks on the day. The day runs from 10.30am-6.30pm and tickets are £17.99 (£25 on the door).

🪑 On Sunday Sheffield's Midcentury Home Market comes to The Steamworks on Randall Street. It’s a vintage marketplace dedicated to retro homewares, furniture, lighting and collectables from the 1940s-1970s. Explore a treasure trove of authentic midcentury pieces, meticulously curated including items from brands such as Hornsea, G-Plan, Ercol, Knoll and Eames. The market will run from 11am-4pm and entry is priced £4 before 12 and £3 after.

‘Car Park Sharks’ and Volunteer Vigilantes

When Andy Taylor, a 55-year-old IT specialist from Milton Keynes, talks to me about his “colleagues,” he doesn’t mean the people from his actual job. In the context of our phonecall, he’s referring to his fellow admins from a Facebook group with more than 800 members called “Excel Parking & Vehicle Control Services,” named after two highly contentious Sheffield companies. Every day, frantic drivers from up and down the UK describe receiving letters demanding money from these companies; Taylor and his “colleagues” spend hours of their free time trying to help. “You can beat Excel at court,” reads the group’s header image, alongside a photo of a woman outside a courthouse, smiling at the camera with her middle finger raised. 

“Please help!!!” begins a typical post from this week, in which a mum with two small children describes ignoring the threatening letters she received from Excel Parking at first. Yes, she’d parked in one of their car parks but, after double-checking her bank transactions, she also knew she’d paid for the privilege. A follow-up post a few hours later reveals where she went wrong. At the multi-storey car park in question, Excel Parking has a rule — stated on their densely-written signs — that drivers must buy their ticket within 10 minutes of driving in. By the time she’d found a space, wrangled her children out of the car, walked to the only ticket machine, waited for her turn and paid, 12 minutes had passed.

The original charge was £100, although she could have paid just £60 if she’d coughed up promptly. Now, following the addition of a “debt recovery fee,” she was told she owed £170 — and that the amount would only climb higher and higher if she continued to hold out. It’s obvious from the tone of her posts that she feels hard done by — after all, she had paid — but also petrified at the thought of letting things spiral further out of her control. 

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of either Excel Parking or Vehicle Control Services (VCS). If you have heard of them, there’s a good chance you despise them. For years, The Star has written article after article about furious drivers who have been burned by their Parking Charge Notices (PCNs), from the widow that had to sell her car to pay them off to those who have triumphed against them in court. On the other hand, you could make the argument that they’re a Sheffield business success story — though you probably won’t see them on a council powerpoint presentation any time soon. Their profits have grown from less than a quarter of a million in 2002 to more than £3 million in 2023. 

I’m told much of that growth is down to one vital legal change. The group earned more than £1m in profits for the first time in 2016, the year that a landmark Supreme Court case — ParkingEye Ltd v Beavis — set a precedent in favour of private parking companies. Before then, a former member of Excel Parking’s legal team explains, the law was unclear on whether these companies could legitimately charge people for breaking their rules. After all, their PCNs are not actual fines, unlike the Penalty Charge Notices handed out by council workers, but rather invoices for breaching a contract with the parking company. Given no driver signs anything, there was previously ambiguity over their legal force. “Each judge would have a different opinion on whether parking charges were valid or not,” he explains.

When ParkingEye Ltd triumphed against a driver in the UK’s final court of appeal, it effectively legalised the parking charges, by confirming that “a contract could be made by conduct” — namely, through the motorist driving in. Suddenly, the former employee says, old PCNs that Excel Parking had chosen not to pursue, on the grounds they were unlikely to succeed, had a far better prospect of victory in court. He says his caseload nearly doubled overnight.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the drivers burned by PCNs before and increasingly after this change, those whacked with demands for money by Excel and VCS. (Tribune founder Dan Hayes had to write his fair share of these articles in his days at The Star and recalls an Excel Parking spokesperson once accusing him of having a personal vendetta against the company). But I was more intrigued by two other groups. The first is the staff responsible for charging people hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds for their parking mistakes — how did they feel about what the work they did? The second is the growing army of vigilantes who, like Andy Taylor, want to bring companies like Excel Parking down.