The National Parking Platform is a big, exciting deal and you should know about it

How the government nearly squandered an enormous opportunity

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The strange thing about government is that changes of Prime Minister are big, important moments – but often things remain almost exactly the same as before.

We can all see this when it comes to big stuff, like foreign policy, where regardless of who is in Downing Street, America, China, and Russia all continue to exist – meaning that whoever is in charge is going to pursue more or less the same strategy.

However, this is also true below the surface, where sometimes the civil service chugs on almost regardless of the transfer of power. For example, take the government’s digital identity scheme, or the plans for a GOV.UK app. Work on both of these programmes began under the Tories, and with relatively few tweaks they are being rolled out by the current government.

But of course, this isn’t always the case. Changes of government will necessarily shake up priorities in some areas. And though this is obviously a good thing for democratic reasons, it can almost inadvertently knock the deep state’s detailed and carefully planned long-term projects off course.

For example, I understand that Boris Johnson’s government was very close to legalising private e-scooters. This is a much-needed new regulatory regime that would clarify the status of a new class of vehicles that are both ubiquitous on our streets and technically illegal. However, even though legislation was basically ready to take to Parliament, Boris getting kicked out of Downing Street and the chaos of Liz Truss meant that nothing actually happened.

So today, several years on, e-scooters remain annoyingly illegal, and presumably there’s a document titled something like “escooter_law_final_FINAL_v3_approved.docx” buried deep within the Department for Transport (DfT), waiting for someone to remember that it exists.

Then there was the transition from Rishi Sunak to Keir Starmer.

You might remember that when Labour entered office, one of the first things it did was desperately search government departments for easy things to cut after Rachel Reeves discovered a £22bn “black hole” in the public finances.

One such programme that found itself on the chopping block was another DfT programme – Rishi Sunak’s “Plan for Drivers”.

On the surface, this must have sounded like a slam-dunk decision for the new government. The Sunak Plan was less a credible set of policies, and more a cry for help.

This is because in reality, it was a desperate and – as we now know – doomed attempt to win over motorists, with eye-catching but mostly meaningless promises to do things like “review” government guidance on 20mph speed limits, and consult on whether to let motorbikes use bus lanes.

In other words, it wasn’t serious policy – it was a briefing notes with talking points for the Minister to use on Good Morning Britain.

Except for this one thing. And the new government didn’t appear to notice that in dumping the Plan, it was throwing one particularly important baby out with the bathwater.

This was a serious DfT programme that had been worked on for years by serious people, and it was called the “National Parking Platform” (NPP).

And as far as I can tell, Labour seemingly accidentally killed it.

This was very bad – and I said so at the time. When the Plan for Drivers was announced, I wrote about why the NPP is a great idea, and more recently talked about what a foolish decision it was to pull funding for it on The Abundance Agenda.

However, now I have an excuse to write about it again, as this week there was some surprising good news.

Few people noticed, but on Wednesday DfT announced that the National Parking Platform lives again “at no cost to the taxpayer” – with the bill now being picked up by the British Parking Association, an industry body, instead.

And this is brilliant news, as I genuinely think the NPP is a transformative idea that could tangibly improve our lives with relatively little effort.

So here’s why it actually matters, and why you should care about parking data.

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The struggle is real

The big problem with parking at the moment is, well, almost everything.

When you drive somewhere, all you can do is hope that there’s going to be a space when you get there. And if you’re not so lucky, you could find yourself driving around for ages, looking for somewhere else to park up.

Then once you arrive, you need to pay for parking. In the olden days, this would usually entail paying at a kiosk with cash. But in our modern, cashless society, you’ll more likely find yourself paying using an app on your phone.

These are the parking apps I currently have taking up space on my phone.

What makes this particularly annoying is there are multiple payment apps. If you’re lucky, the car park you arrive at uses one of the apps you already have on your phone like, say, RingGo. But if you’re unlucky, you might find yourself having to download another new app over a slow 3G connection, and then faff around creating a new account and entering your credit card and vehicle details.¹

But this isn’t just about personal convenience. Car parks as they exist now are also a challenge from a systems perspective.

For example, imagine you’re a local authority. You want all of your town centre car parks to be used with maximum efficiency: You want people to park up as quickly as possible, and not have them driving in circles, clogging up your roads. And if parking spaces can be used more efficiently, then you don’t need to have as many of them, as not as much slack would be required in the system. So if you can find a way to manage the same number of vehicles with fewer spaces, you can return more of the street to pedestrians and cyclists.

The genius of the National Parking Platform

Enter the National Parking Platform, which DfT began work on in 2019. In essence, it is a data platform that acts as connective tissue between the car park operators, parking app providers, and customers. And, amazingly, it makes all of the problems described above basically disappear.

I included this diagram, which is somehow both too simple and too complicated in my earlier post about the NPP, because illustrating a piece about a data platform is surprisingly difficult.

The way it does this is, primarily, by severing the link between car parks and payment apps.

Instead, the NPP is a system where, in principle, any payment app can be used to pay for any car park.

It does this first by maintaining a central register of car parks, granting each one a nationally unique ID number (so it works a bit like a postcode), then the platform sits in the middle of transactions, to connect the different parties together.

So this means that the motorist can tap the ID number of the car park into their app, and behind the scenes the NPP will ensure their payment and booking reaches whoever runs the car park. So once you’ve got one payment app, you’ll never have to faff around with another ever again. Brilliant. No wonder this functionality was the focus of the government’s press release about the revival of the NPP.

But I think what makes the NPP really interesting is what happens next. Because once you’ve got a data platform aggregating the nation’s car park data in one place, you can start to do some really clever stuff that wouldn’t have previously been possible.

Here’s another largely impenetrable diagram.

For example, with every car park feeding data to the NPP, suddenly it becomes pretty easy for, say Google to make Google Maps display how many space are free at your destination – or for Ford to make your car’s GPS system redirect you mid-journey if where you’re heading is already full.

Similarly, from a local authority perspective, by using real-time data collected in one place, demand can be better matched to supply - creating those sorts of efficiencies that can keep traffic flowing. And I wonder if the NPP could even unlock new business models or new capabilities, to enable car park operators and local authorities to treat parking spaces as more than just a simple boxes that contains lumps of metal.

For example, as I speculated in my earlier piece, perhaps in the future you could be driving to a city centre, but suddenly see an alert on your car’s dashboard warning you that spaces are low. But don’t worry – your parking app has also offered you a discount on using the Park & Ride on the outskirts of town instead.

And don’t tell the Daily Mail, but I think it’s easy to imagine how such a system could make it possible to use surge pricing for spaces, or even offer discounts based on the driver or their vehicle. For example, maybe electric cars could park for cheaper? Or the elderly could get a discount?

A compelling solution?

What I love about the National Parking Platform is simply how elegant it is.

By wiring together infrastructure that already exists in a new way, we can create a powerful new data platform that unlocks new functionality, and makes our lives better.²

However, what I’m curious about now is whether the NPP will have the power to get every car park owner on board, now that it is no longer a government-funded project. As it will only be truly useful when a critical mass of car parks work with it.

As things stand, I don’t think the answer to this is entirely clear. The DfT press release says that “The new agreement will see the parking sector working with councils to run the platform on a not-for-profit basis” – so does this mean that local authorities will be compelled by the government to work with the new platform? Or will it be merely an option?

And similarly, what about privately owned car parks? There’s no reason why, say, supermarkets and big-box stores couldn’t also have their car parks listed on such a system – in fact, that is what we should want to happen. So what mechanism or leverage will the NPP have to make them?

I’ve asked DfT about both of these things – and I’ll update this piece if I get a reply.

But in any case, I’m delighted that the NPP lives again. It’s a good idea that is exactly the sort of thing the government should be supporting. Let’s just hope we don’t change Prime Minister again before it is finally rolled out.

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1. I suspect my London-based audience may struggle to relate here, but let me assure you – once you hit your thirties and move to the suburbs with a car, this quickly becomes one of the most annoying things in your life.

2. And maybe it will have an open API, so bedroom hackers can build the parking equivalent of these fan-made live Tube maps.