Prior to 2012 in both Australia and the United Kingdom, land owners who wanted to enforce a parking charge on private land could only pursue the driver of the vehicle at the time it was parked on their land.

The reason for that was that in civil law, the driver is the person the land owner had a contract with. Therefore the owner or manager of the land needed to be able to identify the driver of the vehicle. The land owner had no recourse against the vehicle owner if that owner was not the driver. And it was very easy for vehicle owners to simply claim they weren't the driver, even if they were.

The Protection of Freedoms Act changed this in England and Wales when the Act was introduced in 2012. The Act contains new laws to deal with parking on private land. Section 56 of the Act introduced a change in law to make the keeper of a vehicle liable for parking charges incurred on private land if the keeper of the vehicle does not know the identity of the driver at the time. This law therefore made it easier for land owners to enforce parking changes on their land because they no longer had to prove who parked the car on their land. The land owner could simply take legal proceedings against the keeper of the vehicle if that keeper was unable, or refused, to identify the driver.

In stark contrast to the United Kingdom, Australia passed legislation in one state the same year to make it impossible for private car park operators to obtain the names and address of vehicle owners. So in Australia, there was a situation that rather than make it easier for land owners to enforce a parking fine, it became harder (probably impossible) for them to enforce these fines, because following the introduction of the legislation, the land owner could no longer find out the name and address of the registered keeper.

Introduced in the Australian State of NSW in late 2012, the legislation specifically prohibits private car park companies from obtaining the names and addresses of vehicle owners from the NSW Roads and Maritime Services department which maintains the names and addresses of vehicles keepers. Called parking fines in Australia, the legislation was created to stop vehicle owners from being harassed by private parking companies.

In introducing the bill in 2012, NSW Minister for Roads and Ports, Duncan Gay, said "some private car park operators are serial abusers of the preliminary discovery process through which the RMS has been obliged to release driver details". He said that "instead of using the process to mount a potential court prosecution, operators have been using it to support a business model of posting mass demands to customers and relying on a proportion of them paying”.

References and background:

- Johnny Smithson's parking fines website ( https://sites.google.com/site/unfairfines/companies/council-parking-fines), has a blog about the new legislation in Australia which includes links to government websites that discuss the legislation. See  https://sites.google.com/site/unfairfines/editorial/new-laws-for-parking-companies

- United Kingdom department of transport document on the new legislation.
 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/9155/guidance-unpaid-parking-charges.pdf