Fleets should push for a standard national format for all penalty charge notices (PCNs) to help cut the administration burden, FleetCheck has suggested.

The fleet software specialist said PCN documentation issued by local authorities, private parking companies and police forces varies widely – which makes them much more difficult for fleets to process.

Callum Haymon-Collins, chief operating officer, said: “Handling PCNs is a major bugbear for fleets and one that seems to be a greater burden year-by-year. Quantities are rising and some of our users are having to employ people purely to deal with them.

“A key complaint is that every issuer of PCNs appears to use their own format. This makes them slow for people to manually process because they often have to read every document in full but also reduces opportunities for automation.”

Haymon-Collins said optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to create tools that could dramatically reduce the time spent on each PCN, adding that greater standardisation would make this easier and more precise.

“The wider the variance in document formats, the harder it becomes to engineer technology that produces consistently accurate results. It’s certainly possible and something that we are working on but identical documentation would speed development considerably.”

And FleetCheck said that issuers of PCNs could be induced to adopt a standard approach by promoting advantages such as faster and more accurate payments.

“The diversity of PCN designs creates problems for those collecting fines, too, because it leads to a generally higher level of errors in fleet responses and a need for ongoing dialogues. Standardisation would also be a boost for them.”

Haymon-Collins added that the main difficulty fleets will face in pushing for a standard national format is the question of who might facilitate this happening.

“Probably the most obvious candidates are one of the industry bodies. Certainly, the evidence we see suggests that it would be a hugely popular move with fleet managers.”

The Association of Fleet Professionals (AFP) has said that fleet managers view parking fines as increasingly onerous – the recent government consultation on private parking suggested the number issued had risen from 1.9 million in 2012 to 12.8 million in 2024.

The industry body also said there is feeling that parking companies are becoming less and less flexible in response to queries and appeals.