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Do parking appeals actually work?

49.4%

Yes, about half the time. Independent adjudicators decided 21,246 London parking appeals in 2024-25 and allowed 10,496 of them. In 58.5% of the appeals that were won, the council put up no defence at all.

Most people pay a parking ticket because they have no idea what their odds are. The odds are published. They are just buried in tribunal spreadsheets that nobody reads. Here they are.

London PCN appeals, 2024-25

When a London council rejects your formal representations, you can take it to an independent adjudicator at London Tribunals, free. These are the outcomes of every such parking appeal decided in 2024-25.

OutcomeAppealsShare
Allowed, the driver won 10,496 49.4%
of which the council did not contest 6,143 58.5% of wins
Refused 10,750 50.6%
Total decisions 21,246

The single most useful number on this page: in 6,143 of the 10,496 appeals that succeeded, 58.5% of them, the council simply did not contest the appeal once it reached the adjudicator. Those cases were not close calls. The council had already decided not to defend the ticket, and the only thing standing between the driver and a cancelled PCN was the appeal itself.

By London borough

Your odds depend a great deal on who issued the ticket. Same tribunal, same law, very different records.

AuthorityAppeals allowedDecisions
Hillingdon 83.1% (143) 172
Redbridge 70.1% (1,265) 1,804
Westminster 66.1% (617) 933
Hounslow 66% (239) 362
Lambeth 57.4% (659) 1,148
Lewisham 57.3% (188) 328
Havering 56.1% (348) 620
Merton 56.1% (171) 305
Greenwich 54.7% (215) 393
Haringey 53.6% (392) 732
Barnet 52% (254) 488
Barking and Dagenham 51.9% (384) 740
Newham 50.4% (810) 1,607
Croydon 50% (204) 408
Kensington and Chelsea 49% (121) 247
Brent 47.6% (236) 496
Harrow 47% (228) 485
Waltham Forest 45.7% (268) 586
Richmond Upon Thames 45.2% (85) 188
Bexley 44.6% (86) 193
Transport for London 44.3% (1,829) 4,125
Hammersmith & Fulham 43.6% (132) 303
Ealing 42.1% (147) 349
Kingston Upon Thames 40.7% (92) 226
Camden 39.8% (229) 575
Bromley 39.6% (78) 197
City of London 38.9% (56) 144
Enfield 35.7% (86) 241
Islington 35.7% (393) 1,102
Tower Hamlets 32.9% (144) 438
Wandsworth 31.9% (121) 379
Hackney 30.5% (104) 341
Southwark 29.3% (161) 549

Not shown as a percentage because too few appeals were decided to mean anything: Sutton (42 decisions).

England outside London, and Wales, 2013/14 to 2024/25

London has its own adjudicators. Everywhere else in England, and everywhere in Wales, appeals go to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal, which publishes its own record. It covers parking, bus lane, moving traffic, clean air zone, river crossing and littering penalties. Across 319,614 appeals with a recorded outcome since 2013/14, drivers came away paying nothing in 54.4% of cases. We hold enough data to publish a rate for 203 authorities, 15 of them in Wales.

That 54.4% is lifted by the river crossings. The Dartford Crossing alone accounts for about a third of every appeal the tribunal has ever decided, and the Mersey Gateway loses more than four in five of the appeals against it. Strip both out and look only at penalties issued by councils in 2024-25, the way the tribunal’s own annual report counts, and the rate is 40.3%, with parking on its own at 41.9%. Those are the figures used in the outside London guide. Neither number is more correct than the other; they answer different questions, so both are on the site with the scope spelled out.

66.3% of those wins were never contested. The authority chose not to defend the case at the tribunal at all. That share swings enormously between councils, from under a tenth of wins at some to over four fifths at others, which is why the individual pages below are worth a look before you write.

Where drivers win most

AuthorityAppeals wonOutcomes
York City Council 93.8% 715
Mendip District Council 83% 188
Milton Keynes Council 82.9% 889
Mersey Gateway (Merseyflow) 82.2% 25,024
Gloucester City Council 79.7% 143
Coventry City Council 77.3% 3,093
Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council 76.1% 402
City of Wolverhampton Council 75.1% 1,329

And where they win least

AuthorityAppeals wonOutcomes
Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council 36.1% 613
East Hertfordshire District Council 34.7% 288
Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council 34.3% 166
Durham County Council 31.4% 357
Portsmouth City Council 31.2% 780
Torridge District Council 26.7% 1,936
Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council 25.7% 565
North Northamptonshire Council 24.6% 142

Who issues the most, and what happens when you fight it

Authorities also report how many penalty charge notices they issue. Set that against how many are appealed and the picture changes: almost nobody challenges a ticket, and the few who reach an adjudicator do better than the silence suggests.

AuthorityPCNs issuedAppealedAppeals won
Birmingham City Council 3,737,571 19,200 (1 in 195) 54.4%
Bristol City Council 2,728,031 7,769 (1 in 351) 57.1%
Cardiff County Council 2,042,155 3,721 (1 in 549) 45.6%
City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council 1,703,815 8,020 (1 in 212) 45.3%
Leeds City Council 1,663,982 1,779 (1 in 935) 48.3%
Reading Borough Council 1,513,979 4,907 (1 in 309) 59.8%
Sheffield City Council 1,402,032 6,447 (1 in 217) 58.9%
Leicester City Council 1,202,593 1,489 (1 in 808) 46.5%
Liverpool City Council 1,173,277 3,466 (1 in 339) 46.6%
Coventry City Council 1,008,567 3,093 (1 in 326) 77.3%
Cambridgeshire County Council 987,163 662 (1 in 1,491) 44.6%
Southampton City Council 917,133 972 (1 in 944) 52.3%

Issuance figures are the ones each authority supplied to the tribunal, over 2013/14 to 2024/25. 50 of the 203 authorities here have never supplied one, so they are left out of this table rather than shown as zero.

Where the parking money is really fines

Councils report parking income to the government and say separately how much of it came from penalty charge notices. For most, fines are a minority of the take. For some, the parking operation is very nearly an enforcement operation.

AuthorityFrom finesShare of parking incomeAppeals won
South Gloucestershire Council £463,000 91% 42.4%
Rochdale Borough Council £973,000 73% 46.4%
Thurrock Council £1.4m 70% 62.3%
Leeds City Council £8.6m 66% 48.3%
Lancashire County Council £2.4m 65% 61.1%
Salford City Council £1.6m 59% 56.7%
Trafford Borough Council £1.7m 52% 68.2%
Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council £688,000 50% 36.1%
Derbyshire County Council £644,000 50% 55.7%
Hampshire County Council £2.4m 49% 42%

Income figures are for 2024-25 and come from each council’s revenue outturn return to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, published under the Open Government Licence. Welsh authorities are absent from this table because Wales reports parking as a single service with no penalty income line; their income and surplus are on their own pages, from StatsWales. Councils that put their whole on-street income in the penalty box and nothing in the other box are left out too, since there is no way to tell a genuine all-penalties operation from an unsplit return. A parking surplus is not profit: on-street surpluses must be spent on transport under section 55 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984.

Every authority

Alphabetical, with the share of appeals drivers won. Each one opens that authority’s full record, broken down by penalty type and year by year.

Authorities with fewer than 100 recorded outcomes across the whole period are left out rather than shown with a percentage a single case would swing. Each authority page splits its record by penalty type, because a council can be hard to beat on parking and easy on bus lanes. Source: Traffic Penalty Tribunal appeals data.

Private parking charges

A charge from a private company is not a fine, and it goes to a different appeals body. Operators in the British Parking Association use POPLA:

The other half of the industry publishes nothing. Operators who belong to the International Parking Community use the Independent Appeals Service (IAS) rather than POPLA. The IAS does not publish recent, comparable appeal statistics, so for roughly half of all private parking charges in Britain there is no published figure for how often drivers win. That is worth knowing before you decide whether to bother appealing: the absence of data is not evidence that appeals fail.

Outcomes reported by readers

The official figures above cover tribunals. They do not capture the tickets cancelled earlier, at the challenge or representations stage, which is where most successful appeals actually end. So we also collect what readers tell us. This is a small sample and is shown separately from the official data, never mixed into it.

No reader reports yet. If you have appealed a ticket, the form below takes about thirty seconds and gives the next driver something the official figures cannot: what happens at the earlier stages, before a case ever reaches a tribunal.

Appealed a ticket? Tell us how it went

30 seconds, anonymous. It helps the next driver know their odds.

Anonymous: we store only your answers above, never your name or ticket details.

Haven’t appealed yet? Build your free appeal letter → then come back and tell us how it went.

Where these numbers come from

A percentage is shown for an authority only where at least 1 appeals were decided, because a borough that decided a dozen appeals all year can show 80% or 20% on chance alone. Tribunal figures cover appeals that reached an adjudicator, so they exclude tickets cancelled earlier at challenge or representations stage. Reader reports are self-reported, shown only above five decided outcomes, and are never combined with the official figures. None of this predicts your case: it tells you the odds are far better than most people assume.