MSA parking dodge faces clampdown
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• by David Craik Foreign trucks waiting for up to four days in Motorway Service Areas (MSAs) for loads without paying any parking charges have been the target of a clamping crackdown by parking managers CP Plus.
Grahame Rose, spokesman for CP which manages the parking at over 70 MSAs, says that the foreign offenders come mainly from Eastern Europe and Turkey. Our staff notified us that, type. A dozen vehicles would be in increasing numbers, these hauliers were not paying. There were two types getting away with it. The first were those who were staying overnight who had orders and loads. The other ones were Just sitting and waiting for days, using the park as if it was a depot.
"Our service station at Thurrock was a particularly bad example of this second sitting there at any one time," he says.
CP decided to tackle the charge-dodging at Thurrock and other problem sites through the use of "adhesive leaflets, translated Into 10 languages, setting out the parking charges and the enforcement measures for non-payment."
The leaflets proved successful in prompting payment in many cases but there were still a number of hauliers who persisted in not paying. "We began clamp ing those lorries which had still not paid," Rase adds. "There was a noticeable difference after we started doing this. There was a high degree of compliance at the sites. The word