With an estimated 33m vehicles on the road in the UK, car parking spaces are at more of a premium than ever. For shopping centres, supermarkets and retailers operating in town centres or near railway stations, determining who are the genuine customers and who are the freeloaders wishing to use the facilities as a convenient alternative to more expensive car parks, is no mean feat.

“There are a number of ways of dealing with it,” explains Grahame Rose, development director at car park and facilities management company CP Plus. “The simplest way of dealing with it is by putting a time limit on parking. So if it’s a problem with commuters it’s quite easy to deal with because you can put a time limit of say three hours which is more than enough time to shop but it isn’t enough time for a commuter to be able to park in the car park, get on the train and go to work.”

Advancements in technology however, mean that seeing a car park attending trudging down aisles noting down number plate details is unlikely. These days, this will be taken care of by putting in place an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system at the entry and exit points of a car park. This will log a vehicle through its number plate as it enters a site and log it as it goes out. Any vehicle that stays over the maximum stay time would then be sent a charge through the post.

The initial outlay for such equipment is likely to be in the £25,000-£30,000 range, although in the long term this will be more cost effective than employing car park attendants using hand held computers, explain Rose. But there were some unforeseen benefits of the manual system, he says. “What it did do was enable the attendant to deliver the ticket to the vehicle. There are some organisations, including a number of supermarkets, who are very anti camera systems because they don’t like the fact that the ticket is delivered through the post.”

In such cases, CP Plus has come up with a solution. Its combined system uses both cameras and manual efforts to come up with a solution to cater for everybody. They have mounted ANPR cameras onto both sides of a golf buggy which is then driven around the car park, picking up the number plates as it passes. As the hours pass, the cameras pick up on any number plate that has been there longer than the maximum stay time and a ticket is printed which the operators then put on the vehicle.

Despite the new high-tech approach to issuing tickets, genuine customers need not be concerned, says Rose. “We’re not out to trap people, we just want to free up space for legitimate customers to be able to park. We are really after people who are abusing the car park – people that are parking to go on the train or parking to go into the town centre.”

As Rose points out, other methods can be deployed too. Redemption schemes are popular at shopping centres and certain supermarkets. Here you would typically have a barrier or pay and display machines and every customer would have to pay. Then if a receipt was taken into the shop, either all or part of the fee will be refunded.

Times are invariably tough for retailers at the moment, and making sure they are getting the most from their facilities is clearly at the forefront of centre managers’ minds. However, Rose says it is more a question of space than money. “I think what they are getting concerned about is that there are enough car parking spaces for their customers. If you’ve got a supermarket where nobody can park easily because it’s filled up with commuters then that supermarket will suffer quite badly.”