Before the act came into force, there was a mixture of ways in which off-street parking—private parking bays—was signed out; as in, how the bays were drawn on the tarmac or other surface. There were no signs up saying that the bays would be enforced and there was no enforcement—actually, there is still no enforcement. You might see a sign in a supermarket car park saying, “You will be fined £100 if you park here,” but I have never seen an enforcement officer in a private car park and I have used a wheelchair for nearly 40 years. I might be wrong, but I think that those signs are put up as a tick-box exercise.
There is no consistency in private car parks. When I phoned some local authorities for a straw poll, I asked them why they thought that that was the case, anecdotally, and two main reasons were given. One was that private car park owners, whether supermarkets or owners of actual car parks, did not want to spend money on putting proper markings in place. The other reason was that they did not want to fine the majority of their customers.
I have had personal experience of that. I went into a supermarket and said, “Look, out of X amount of disabled parking bays, nearly half of the cars in them have no blue badges. Can you do something about it?” and they said, “No”. I said, “Why?” and they said, “Because we look after our customers.” I said, “I’m a customer,” and they said, “Yeah, but you’re in the minority.” It was not an unusual experience to go to use a supermarket’s car park on a Saturday and find that, out of 14 cars in disabled parking bays, six had no blue badges. The people who were coming out were obviously not disabled and did not have mobility problems of any kind.
The bays are not enforced, which is a huge problem, and it will not happen unless legislation is put in place.