Why rip-off fees could not save Britain’s biggest car park owner

Despite the threat of nearly 700 job losses, the collapse of a company with a reputation for routinely ripping off drivers was widely celebrated.
Within hours of NCP’s Japanese owners calling in administrators at PwC, motorists were rejoicing on internet message boards and social media channels.
“Haha!!!! That’s what happens when you charge £30 for 2 hours parking,” said one Facebook user.
Some expressed shock at how a business renowned for its high prices could come unstuck.
“I’ve no idea how they can be broke with the rip-off ticket prices,” said one.
Others pointed out that those same high prices may be precisely the reason why it had fallen into administration. In central London, NCP charges as much as £60 a day for parking.
“To be avoided if possible, which is probably why they have gone bust!” another joked.
The shocking reality is that despite charging extortionate sums to use one of its car parks, NCP had not been profitable for years – the result mainly of it being treated as a get-rich-quick scheme by a succession of private equity firms over the last 25 years.
Filings submitted to the High Court on Monday fail to address whether NCP had effectively priced itself out of existence. Nor do the documents discuss the recklessness of past owners.
Backers Tokyo-based Park24 blamed a combination of the pandemic and Vladimir Putin.
Yet the ghost of the extreme financial engineering that had saddled NCP with increasingly punishing costs it could no longer meet had not been expunged entirely.
“Persistently high inflation” had led to “rising inflation‑linked rent payment obligations,” Park24 said.
PwC added: “The high concentration of long-term, inflexible leases has meant the company has been unable to reduce costs…resulting in ongoing trading losses.”
Incredibly, the issue is a hangover from an agreement struck in 2003 shortly after the company fell into the hands of buyout fund Cinven. Founded in 1977 from the British Coal pension scheme, Cinven was the first of a series of private equity owners that would go on to treat NCP as little more than a giant cash cow.
Just 18 months after the firm had snatched the car parks giant from under the nose of rival venture capitalist Apax Partners, Cinven subjected the business to an aggressive sale-and-leaseback deal in which a big chunk of NCP’s property assets were separated from its operating arm.
The ploy was a classic financial engineering tactic of the pre-financial crisis private equity boom in which hundreds of deals were financed by selling off the assets of the companies that had been acquired. The returns were generally used to quickly pay down debt or to fund large dividend payouts to investors.
One hundred NCP car parks were packaged up and sold to an investment vehicle backed by the Royal Bank of Scotland. The move raised £600m, enabling Cinven to repay most of the £700m it had borrowed from RBS to bankroll the £820m it paid for NCP the previous year.
In 2005 the firm offloaded the company to rival private equity house 3i for £550m, netting three times its money. Cinven boasted that the break-up of NCP had enabled it to “return 70pc of the original investment to investors ahead of the sale”.
What executives were less forthcoming about was that the sale-and-leaseback had also left the business stuck with a high rent burden. At the time, the rent on those 100 car parks was £41.5m a year, and the leases on them did not run out until 2037. It was a form of financial purgatory that the company made several failed attempts to escape from in the intervening years.
Yet in many ways, Cinven was merely copying the blueprint laid out by NCP’s previous backers. The business was bought by US tourism giant Cendant in 1998, and within a year it had offloaded NCP’s Green Flag roadside recovery unit for £250m. Cendant reportedly went on to extract more than £200m from the business in the form of dividends and property sales.
NCP’s sale to 3i saw the company hollowed out once more. Barely 18 months after buying the business, it was split up again, with 3i selling its car parks to Australian investment house Macquarie for £790m.
The firm banked a £235m profit – equivalent to three times its investment – and held onto the part of NCP that ran parking enforcement services on behalf of local authorities. In 2010, that business was sold for £120m.
Weighed down by £500m of fresh borrowings that Macquarie took out to finance its takeover and a pile of onerous rental contracts on nearly 130 car parks, NCP was eventually forced to beg its banks and landlords for a bailout.
A messy financial restructuring was hammered out in 2012 in which its main lenders agreed to write off £500m of borrowings in return for a 15pc stake in NCP.
As part of the deal, Macquarie was forced to inject £50m of fresh capital into the business. NCP’s biggest landlord, Israeli investment group Delek, also agreed to an annual rent bill reduction of £9m down to £40m.
It was only a temporary reprieve. When Macquarie sold NCP in 2017 to Park24, its executive Martin Stanley said: “We have worked to ensure that NCP is in the best possible position for continued growth.”
Yet just months later, Jo Cooper, the NCP chief executive, admitted that the company suffered from an image problem. Using its car parks was a “grudge purchase”, she told The Telegraph. “We’re second only to the tax man in terms of the ways people want to part with their money,” Cooper half-joked.
By 2021, despite borrowing £100m from shareholders that year, Park24 was in arrears on its rents and threatening to pull the plug on the business unless landlords agreed to a reduction and wrote-off half of what they were owed.
Pandemic lockdown restrictions had triggered a 40pc plunge in turnover in 2020, leaving it £257m in the red. Meanwhile, the company’s annual rent bill had long since ballooned past the £100m mark. “Without a fundamental shift in arrangements with landlords, there can be no certainty that NCP will survive,” the operator warned.
A costly restructuring deal was eventually struck that reduced its rent obligations but not by enough. Rental payments remained “the largest element of cash outflow”, it said, and the company was forced to borrow a further £180m from its parent company.
Still, it remained heavily loss-making, racking up a further £91m of losses that year, followed by £22.4m in 2022.
In 2023, NCP reported a slight uptick in turnover of £186.5m from £173m the previous year. The company’s “pricing and operational strategies” had led to an increase in customer numbers, finance chief Hideyuki Nagahiro said. Yet revenue was still 20pc lower than the year before Covid, and NCP finished the year £28.2m in the red.
By the end of 2025, total losses since the pandemic stood at more than £400m, debts had spiralled to £350m and it was sitting on 350 car parks, compared with an estimated 950 at its height.
Another round of rent payments due at the end of this month proved to be the nail in the coffin. “Demand has not recovered to historic levels, particularly across city-centre and commuter locations,” leaving the company with “insufficient cash available to meet its financial obligations,” PwC said. It will now seek buyers for all or parts of the business, with parking sites to remain open for now.
There was no mention of the part NCP’s reputation for eye-watering charges played in its downfall. The company has also faced criticism for levying punitive fines.
Last February, NCP apologised and quashed a string of incorrectly issued fines after a grandfather was wrongly asked to pay a £100 penalty charge for a 14-minute stay in Darlington, County Durham. Signs at the car park stated parking was free for 90 minutes.
In the end, it was left to the internet to deliver its verdict on the reasons for NCP’s demise.
“Maybe if they weren’t so ridiculously expensive, people may be able to afford to park in there [sic] car parks,” one Facebook user said.
“Good riddance!” said another.
A spokesman for Macquarie said: “Macquarie has had no role in NCP’s ownership for nearly a decade. When we sold our stake in 2017, the business was stable, well‑capitalised and delivering consistent growth.” Cinven and 3i declined to comment.