How to charge for parking on your church land in the UK — without ending up in court

~9 minute read · written by Mehrdad, founder of Mekavo

If you are a church warden, a PCC treasurer, or you sit on a committee that has been quietly arguing about the car park for the last two years, you already know the problem.

The car park is full on Sunday morning, half empty for the rest of the week, and somehow always full when there is a school run, a market, a hospital appointment up the road, or a 7pm football fixture down the lane. Your congregation cannot get a space when they need one. Strangers leave their cars for nine hours and walk into town. Notes get left on windscreens. Awkward conversations happen at the church gate. Nobody wants to be the bad guy.

Eventually somebody at a PCC meeting says: "can we just charge for it?"

And then everybody goes quiet, because the next thing to happen is usually a leaflet through the door from a parking management company offering "free, hassle-free enforcement", and that is when the real questions start.

This article is for the part of the meeting that comes after the leaflet. It is the honest version — what the law actually allows you to do, what the enforcement companies do not tell you about the reputational damage they cause, and the boringly straightforward way most small landowners are now solving this without going anywhere near a clamping firm.

Yes — you almost certainly can charge for parking on your land

Let us deal with the legal question first, because it is the one that paralyses most committees.

If you own the freehold of the land your car park sits on (or you hold it in trust on behalf of the church and the diocese has not put a restriction on commercial use), you have the right under English law to charge for parking — full stop. This is not a clever loophole; it is the same right that lets a private hotel charge non-residents for a space, the same right that lets a cathedral charge tourists £4 to park in the close, and the same right that the Supreme Court confirmed in ParkingEye Ltd v Beavis [2015] UKSC 67.

That case is the one almost every UK private parking operation rests on. It was a £85 charge for staying 56 minutes over a free 2-hour limit at a retail park in Chelmsford. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. ParkingEye won. The court ruled that a parking charge displayed on adequate signage forms a contract between the driver and the landowner (or their agent), and that the charge is enforceable as long as it is not "extravagant" or "unconscionable". The ruling has been the foundation of every UK private parking case since.

The practical effect: if you have visible signage at the entrance stating the rates clearly, and a driver chooses to park there, you have a contract. They owe you the agreed amount. That is the law as it stands in May 2026.

What you cannot do is more important than what you can. You cannot:

• Use clamps or wheel locks (banned on private land in England and Wales since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012)
• Demand DVLA keeper data unless you are a member of an approved trade body — and unless you intend to issue parking charge notices, you do not need to
• Charge a "punitive" amount that bears no relation to the actual loss; £100 PCNs survive court because the courts accepted the deterrent argument in Beavis, but if you start inventing £200 charges for a £2 hourly rate, you will lose
• Operate at all if you are on land where parking is restricted by the Highways Act, by a Section 106 agreement attached to a planning permission, or where a covenant on your title deeds prohibits commercial parking. (Worth a 30-minute conversation with your diocesan registrar before you start, just to rule these out.)

If none of those four blockers apply to your site, you are free to act.

The leaflet through the door — why most churches end up regretting it

The leaflet usually comes from one of a small number of UK parking enforcement companies. The pitch is always the same and it sounds good:

"We install ANPR cameras at no cost to you. We monitor the car park. We send out parking charge notices to anyone who overstays or doesn't pay. We collect the fines. You get a share of the revenue. Free, hassle-free, no admin."

What the leaflet does not tell you:

One. The cameras are only "free" because the company is taking the entire revenue stream from PCNs. They typically pay the landowner a small flat fee per month or a tiny share of "fines collected", and keep everything else. The economic model only works if a meaningful number of drivers fail to pay or overstay — which means the company has a financial incentive to make payment harder, not easier. Long grace periods get shortened. Pay-machines break down. Signage gets confusing.

Two. When the PCNs go out, your name is on them. Not the parking company's name. Yours. The notice will say something like "you have been issued a parking charge notice on behalf of [Your Church Name] for the sum of £100." A driver who is angry — and most are, justifiably or not — will not be angry at the parking company. They will be angry at the church. That anger gets posted on local Facebook groups. It gets repeated at the school gate. It is corrosive in ways that take years to undo.

Three. The trade press is full of cases where these companies have escalated to aggressive doorstep collection, county court judgments against vulnerable people, and, in the worst cases, charges that survive into someone's credit history for years. None of that is action you authorised. All of it gets attached, in the public mind, to your church.

Four. The Department for Levelling Up published a draft Private Parking Code of Practice in 2023 specifically because of this industry's behaviour. The cap on PCNs is being lowered, debt-collection-style add-ons are being curbed, and operator accreditation is being tightened. The model is under regulatory pressure precisely because it has been damaging communities. The trajectory is bad for landowners who are tied into long enforcement contracts.

This is why a growing number of small landowners — churches, village halls, small businesses — are looking for a third way. Not the do-nothing of the unmanaged car park. Not the hire-an-enforcement-company route either. Something in between.

The third way: charge people, but make payment easy and the system honest

The economic insight is simple. Most people who park in your car park during the week are not malicious. They are people who needed a space, saw an empty one, and reasoned that nobody would mind. If you give them an obvious, frictionless way to pay the going rate — and if the rate is fair — most of them will pay.

The remaining few who try to dodge it can be discouraged with one well-placed sign that says "this car park is monitored" without you actually needing the cameras. Most of them will assume the worst and pay anyway. The handful who do not — let them. The friction of pursuing them costs more than you will ever recover, and your reputation in the town stays clean.

If you take this view, the practical question is just: how do I make payment easy?

The answer that most small landowners arrive at, in 2026, is software with a QR code on a sign. Driver arrives, scans the code, picks how long they want to stay, pays through their phone, parks. No app, no account, no kiosk, no machine to break, no cameras. The money lands in the church bank account directly. You take a small platform fee — the going rate is around 5% — and that is the whole system.

This is, broadly, what we built Mekavo for. And it is what every other software-first parking platform on the market does too. The differences between us and the larger UK platforms are mostly about the size of the cut they take and how much of it they hide from the driver — but the underlying mechanism is the same.

What "doing it right" actually looks like at a typical church

Imagine a 50-space car park behind a parish church in a small market town. Sunday mornings the congregation fills it. The rest of the week it is mostly empty until people doing other things in town start parking there for free.

Doing it right looks something like this:

1. Set the rate at fair-for-the-area. If the council car park 200 metres away is £1.20 an hour with a £5 daily cap, your rate should be in that range or slightly under. You are not trying to maximise revenue per driver; you are trying to maximise the number of drivers who pay. Cheap-and-paid beats expensive-and-resented every time.
2. Put one good sign at the entrance. Big enough to read from a car. Rates clearly stated. QR code that takes the driver to a payment page in 1 tap. Maximum stay (if you want one) clearly stated. Nothing else. Do not put up four signs with different threats on each.
3. Honour the Sunday congregation. Either pause the system Sunday mornings, or set up a "free for parishioners" code that members of the congregation know. The point is that the people you serve never have to think about it. (Permits / free codes are on our near-term roadmap; for the moment, manual pause is the lever.)
4. Pick the receipt channel that suits your community. WhatsApp receipts are invisible-friendly and work for older drivers who do not check email; email receipts are easier for office workers. We default to email for the GB launch; you can switch per-site.
5. Be visible about what you do with the money. If the car park revenue is going toward the roof appeal, put a small line on the sign that says so. Drivers pay more willingly when they know what they are funding. Anecdotally this is the single biggest lever on payment compliance we have seen.

That is the whole operation. There is no enforcement company. There is no clamping. There is no PCN. If a driver parks for an hour and does not pay, you have lost the price of an hour. If they parked there every day and never paid, you would notice their plate showing up in the dashboard with no payment, and you could deal with it quietly — not via a £100 charge that ends up on Facebook.

The realistic numbers

Take that 50-space car park. Assume the church gives Sundays back to the congregation for free, so we are charging on the other six days. Assume only a third of the spaces get used on a typical weekday, at an average stay of 2 hours, at £1.20 per hour. Assume — being conservative — that only 70% of those drivers actually pay (the rest dodge it, walk past the sign, or stay too short for it to be worth their while).

• ~17 paying drivers per weekday × 2 hours × £1.20 = £40.80 per day
• × 6 days × 50 weeks = ~£12,200 a year of gross revenue
• Mekavo's 5% fee = ~£610 a year
• Card processing fees come out of our 5%, not yours
• Net to the church: ~£11,600 a year

That is the same order of magnitude as a full-time annual roof appeal, sustained year on year, from a car park that was previously generating £0 and a steady stream of complaints. With no cameras, no kiosks, no enforcement company taking 70% of the upside.

Numbers vary wildly by location, of course. The numbers above are not promises; they are illustrative of what the third-way model looks like when it works. A market-town church will see different numbers from a Hackney parish, and a cathedral will see different numbers again.

What we built — and what we did not build

Mekavo is software. We do not own a single car park anywhere in the country. We are not a parking operator, not an enforcement company, not a clamping firm, not a member of the BPA or the IPC. We do not issue parking charge notices and we do not chase debt. We have no DVLA access and we have no plans to get any.

What we do is run the rails: the QR code, the driver payment flow, the bank-direct payout to the landowner via our regulated payment processor, the receipt to the driver, and the dashboard that shows you what is happening at your site. We charge a flat 5% software fee per session — taken from your share, never added to the driver's price. There is no monthly subscription, no setup fee, no equipment to buy. If you have a printer, you can be live in minutes.

The legal model is the same one that JustPark, AirGarage, RingGo and every other parking-software platform uses: the landowner is the merchant of record, the platform is the payment facilitator, the driver pays directly via the platform's regulated payment processor. We did not invent this; it is the standard marketplace-SaaS pattern (think Shopify, Booking.com, every modern marketplace). We just apply it with a smaller fee and without the predatory bits the bigger players have layered on over the years.

What you should do this week if this is interesting

Three small things, in order:

1. Check the title deeds. Make sure no covenant or planning condition on your land actually prohibits commercial parking. A 30-minute call to your diocesan registrar will rule this out for free.
2. Check the council car park nearby. Note the hourly rate and the daily cap. That is your benchmark — you will want to be at or slightly under that price.
3. Get on the Mekavo waitlist at mekavo.com/gb/parking if you want us to walk you through setup when we open the next batch. We are deliberately bringing on UK landowners in small batches so each one is set up properly. There is no charge to be on the waitlist, no contract, and no auto-replies — Mehrdad personally gets in touch within 4-6 weeks.

And if Mekavo is not the right fit for you, look at any of the other software-first platforms. The principle matters more than the brand: charge fairly, make payment easy, do not hire a company whose business model depends on driver mistakes.

Written by Mehrdad, founder of Mekavo. Mekavo Ltd is registered at Companies House (#16477044) in Leicester, UK. This article is general guidance, not legal advice — consult a solicitor for your specific situation, especially if your land has unusual restrictions on its title.