NCP National Car Parks
Read all reviews for NCP National Car Parks →
Unfair & Poorly Communicated Process
UPDATE: NCP got in touch with us and refunded £110 and charged us £60, so changed to 4 stars! Original review: We parked in an NCP car park where every single payment machine was out of order — all were covered with black cloth and unusable. There were no signs giving instructions what to do next, and after checking around, we noticed none of the cars had tickets displayed. We assumed parking was temporarily free or not enforced. To be safe, we took a photo of the covered machine in case any issues came up later. Months later, we noticed that we received a parking fine along with a few notices from Trace Debt collectors — but only discovered them after the appeal period had passed because all the notices arrived in plain envelopes that looked just like any other junk mail. Like most people, we get several unmarked letters a week, so it's so easy to miss them. Even our kids said "they could make it a bit obvious that it's an important letter - do they want us to miss it on purpose so they get more money". Having digging through all the notices we realised our fine went up to £170 as it had been some time and we were seen as "ignoring the fines". When we contacted both NCP and the agency explaining our case, we were told there was nothing they could do because we hadn’t appealed within the 28-day window — even though we didn’t know it was a parking notice in the first place. We fully understand the importance of following parking rules, but this was not a case of ignoring a fine — it was poor communication and a lack of transparency. Some simple improvements like using clearly marked envelopes for parking fines and increasing the payment/appeal time to at least 2 months would prevent this situation entirely and seem more just. Instead, the whole system feels like it's designed to catch people out, not help them resolve honest mistakes.