Parking · rights · charges

About this site

Who publishes ParkingCharges.co.uk, how every figure is sourced, what we are not, and how the site is paid for.

UK-specific guidanceSources shown on every guideReviewed 8 September 2026

This site exists because of one piece of bad luck in the English language. Two completely different documents are both called a PCN — a Penalty Charge Notice from a council, which is a civil penalty created by statute, and a Parking Charge Notice from a private company, which is an invoice for breach of contract. Almost everything you should do next depends on which one you are holding, and almost nothing written about one applies to the other.

Everything here is built around keeping those two apart, and around telling you where you are: England outside London, London, Scotland and Northern Ireland run genuinely different systems, and advice that ignores that is worse than no advice.

Last updated 8 September 2026

Who publishes it

ParkingCharges.co.uk is published by Skaar Media AS, a Norwegian limited company run by Simon Skaar, registered in the Foretaksregisteret under organisation number 931 122 398 at Stronda 4, 4329 Sandnes, Norway.

We say that plainly because you should know who is telling you this. We publish parking information in several countries, and we started with our own: the same confusion between a public penalty and a private invoice exists almost everywhere, and the method we use here was built on it. What we bring to a British reader is not local intuition — it is the discipline described below.

How we work

These are commitments you can check on any page rather than claims you have to take on trust.

  • Every amount comes from a primary source. Legislation, official guidance, or the authority's own published figures — not from another advice site. The sources are listed at the bottom of each page with the date we read them.
  • We check that the law we cite is still in force. We have cited a revoked instrument once, found it ourselves, and replaced it. Reading the section is not the same as checking its status, and we now do both.
  • What we could not confirm is marked, not guessed. Where a figure exists but we could not verify it against a primary source, the page says so instead of printing a plausible number. If you see “not confirmed” on this site, that is deliberate.
  • One figure has one source. A penalty charge is stored once and read everywhere it appears, so the same amount cannot say two different things on two pages.
  • Pages carry the date they were last checked. Parking charges and parking law both change. A page with an old date is a page we have not rechecked, and we would rather show you that than hide it.

What we are not

  • Not lawyers. Everything here is general information about how the systems work. It is not legal advice about your notice, and we cannot tell you whether your particular appeal will succeed.
  • Not an appeals service. We do not submit appeals, we do not charge for anything, and we will not take a cut of a cancelled charge. Appealing is free, on both tracks, and you can do it yourself.
  • Not connected to anyone who issues these notices. No council, no private parking operator, no trade association, no debt recovery firm and no government body has any relationship with this site or any say in what it says.

How the site is paid for, and what that does not buy

Advertising. That is the whole of it — nobody pays us to be mentioned, and no advertiser sees a page before it is published or has any influence on what it says.

We do not carry advertising on pages where we tell you that a paid service is unnecessary. Our appeals pages say that anyone charging you to submit an appeal is selling you something you can do yourself. Running advertisements for those services on those pages would make the page its own counter-example, so that rule is written into the site rather than left to judgement.

When we get something wrong

We will have. Parking rules are fragmented, they change without announcement, and some of what councils publish is out of date on their own websites. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and change the date on the page.

Tell us about a mistake →

Read next

Common questions

Are you connected to my council or to the parking company?
No. We have no relationship with any council, private parking operator, trade association, debt recovery firm or government body, and none of them has any say in what this site says. If a page is critical of how something works, that is our own view of the published rules.
Is this legal advice?
No. It is general information about how the parking systems in the United Kingdom work, written from primary sources. Whether a particular argument wins on your particular notice is a question for you, the adjudicator, or a solicitor if the amount justifies one.
Why is a Norwegian company writing about British parking?
Because we publish parking information in several countries and the underlying confusion is the same in all of them: a public penalty and a private invoice that look alike. We do not offer local intuition. We offer sourced figures, marked uncertainty and dated pages, and you can check all three.
Can you appeal my ticket for me?
No, and you should be wary of anyone who offers to for a fee. Appealing costs nothing on either track — the council appeal goes to a free tribunal, and both private appeals services are free to motorists. What we can do is set out the stages and the deadlines so you can do it yourself.