Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

It is very important that local areas can determine that themselves. It is not the Government’s intention to impose that on local areas, because it may vary across an area. It is very important that local areas can determine that themselves and fit it around their overall local transport strategy—that is key. There is a great difference between local authority car parking, where the money might be recycled into local services, and private parking. Sometimes there are agreements between the private parking companies, sometimes there are not. This is a matter for local determination.

[Lord Spellar (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a previous Transport Minister and pay tribute to the work of colleagues such as the noble Lords, Lord Kirkhope and Lord Brennan, in introducing and working with legislation. I make it clear to the Minister that companies have been stringing the Government along for many years and we are getting bogged down in process, but their business model totally depends on access to the DVLA register. It is only permissive for the Government to provide that information, to get them out of GDPR. Why do we not make it clear to the industry that we are going to get this solved, otherwise we will shut off access and its business will collapse straight away?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I would not take quite such a harsh view as my noble friend. On how the Government respond to the industry, there is a big industry here and we know that, as a result of the national code having to be withdrawn, it produced an update to the industry code, so the industry is trying to do something towards regulating itself, which we should commend. We will take account of that industry code when we draw up the national code to deliver better protections for motorists. My noble friend is quite right that we must make sure that the worst practices are dealt with, and the code will aim to make sure that they are.