The Department for Transport says it is working with the parking industry to “explore options for taking forward delivery of a national [parking] platform”.
The comments, reported in the Guardian Newspaper, follow suggestions the government is going to withdraw funding for the scheme with a minister seemingly blaming “the dire financial position Labour inherited from the Tories”.
The National Parking Platform has been under development at the DfT since 2019, and in October 2023 the then-Roads and Local Transport Minister, Richard Holden, wrote to every local authority Chief Executive urging them to join the new National Parking Platform.
The idea behind the platform is to remove the need for a number of different apps, providing simplified and improved customer service, a data exchange to enable multi-seller payments, a way of sharing parking information and standardising technical and commercial relations.
The DfT is now looking at letting the private sector run the platform without taxpayer funding, and the report says it understands the sector “is both willing and able to deliver it without taxpayer funding”.
The Guardian says that, in an answer to a written question, the transport minister Lilian Greenwood said the Labour government supported the NPP concept, but “we are of the view that it could and should be delivered without the need to rely on public funding”.
(Picture – Highways News)
