Second Thoughts

The appeals service reports that just over half of completed appeals ended with the ticket cancelled. (Source: POPLA Annual Report 2025, appeals completed and cancelled.) That figure is accurate but it flatters the process slightly, because it counts appeals the motorist withdrew, and the service's own definitions note those are typically people who had already paid the charge. Strip them out and the share of completed appeals where the motorist walked away owing nothing is 45.8 per cent.

Either way, the interesting number is underneath. Of the 107,202 appeals completed in the year, only 67,680 were actually decided by an adjudicator. The other 39,522 were never contested. In 34,502 of those cases it was the parking company that dropped out.

Read the middle band. That is the share of appeals the operator abandoned once it knew someone independent was going to read the file. For one national car park operator it reaches 82.6 per cent. For another large operator running retail and supermarket sites it is 59.1 per cent. At the other end of the same chart, operators contest almost everything and win most of it.

The table below is the heart of the report. It is sorted by completed appeals, which is the only ordering that neither flatters nor punishes an operator for its size. Two columns matter most. Allowed is how often the motorist won when an adjudicator actually ruled. Dropped is how often the operator declined to find out.

The two columns tell different stories and it is worth separating them. A low allowed rate can mean an operator's tickets are sound. It can also mean the operator withdraws from every case it would lose, leaving only its strongest files to be ruled on. The cancelled column, which combines both routes, is the one that answers the question a driver actually has: if I challenge this, what are the chances I end up owing nothing?

Volume and outcome are separate questions. An operator can issue enormous numbers of tickets and see very few challenged, or issue relatively few and see them contested constantly. Dividing completed appeals by keeper enquiries in the same twelve months gives a rough challenge rate.

Across matched operators that rate runs from roughly 4 per thousand at the large airport and hospital operators to 20 per thousandat some smaller firms. In other words, some companies' tickets are five times more likely to be taken all the way to an independent appeal.

Britain has two private parking trade bodies, and each runs its own appeals service. One publishes an appendix naming every operator with its allowed, refused and uncontested totals. That appendix is the basis of this report. The other publishes a ten page annual report containing a section headed with the word outcomes which discusses them in prose and then ends without a single figure. (Source: The Independent Appeals Service Annual Report 2024 to 2025.)

What the second service does disclose is still useful. It received 34,383 disputes and recorded 8,907 discontinuations, of which 7,888 were conceded by the parking operator and 1,019 by the motorist. That gives an operator concession rate of 22.9 per cent of disputes received, against 33.1 per cent of appeals received on the other side. What it does not give, anywhere, is how often a motorist won.

The shape is a steady climb, a collapse in the first pandemic year, and then a recovery that has overshot everything before it. The final column is nine months rather than twelve and is drawn hatched for that reason. On a like for like basis, April to December 2025 ran 19.3 per cent ahead of the same nine months in 2024. Carried forward at the same rate the full year would land near 17.2 million.

A council parking ticket and a private parking ticket look almost identical through a windscreen. The public record behind them does not. For councils, both halves are published per authority: how many tickets were issued, and how many appeals were allowed, refused or conceded, each split by jurisdiction so parking can be read on its own. For private operators, only a proxy for issuance exists, and outcomes are published by one trade body and not the other.

The council figures also make a useful benchmark. In London, 49.4 per centof decided parking appeals went the motorist's way, on 24,899 appeals against 5,171,275 parking tickets issued. (Source: London Councils, Annual Appeals Statistics 2024-25 and Annual PCN Statistics 2024-25, parking only.) Outside London the tribunal allowed 3,363 of 7,482 decided parking appeals, which is 44.9 per cent, of which 1,892 were not contested by the council. (Source: Traffic Penalty Tribunal Annual Report 2024 to 2025, page 8, parking jurisdiction.)

• POPLA Annual Report 2025 and Appendix, operated by Trust Alliance Group, covering 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. Appeals decided by operator, and appeals not contested by operator. popla.co.uk/reports
• DVLA, Who DVLA shares data with, KADOE enquiry volumes, quarterly, filtered to the Car Parking Management business classification. gov.uk
• The Independent Appeals Service Annual Report 2024 to 2025, covering the same October to September period. theias.org
• London Councils, parking enforcement and appeals statistics 2024-25, published 27 October 2025. londoncouncils.gov.uk
• Traffic Penalty Tribunal Annual Report 2024 to 2025, England outside London and Wales. trafficpenaltytribunal.gov.uk

Published by Untap, July 2026. All underlying data comes from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the two private parking appeals services, London Councils and the Traffic Penalty Tribunal. Untap is a free service that helps people in the UK find money they are already owed. We do not file claims and we do not take a share of any refund.