Thank you for your email received by us on 27 December 2018 asking for information about the NCP carpark at London Underground’s North Greenwich Station.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. You asked for:

data on the number of times that payment is made to the NCP against a UK registered VPN despite the fact that the vehicle was not present at the carpark. In other words: How many times have the NCP collected payment for UK registered vehicles not detected by the ANPR and thus appear on the ANPR database with a ‘SightingID’ of ‘0’ under the ‘sightings’ tab?

Please provide data for the year 2018 as a minimum.

NCP are responsible for the management of all Transport for London (TfL) station car parks, including receipt of payments and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems, whereby the following applies:

1. The ANPR system reads vehicle registration numbers (VRNs) on entry and exit from the car park.

2. Customers can select these on the screen at the payment kiosk in order to make payment.

3. Customers also have the facility to manually correct a VRN where the ANPR has misread a digit or letter. This may happen for a number of reasons, for example where a plate may be dirty or not conform fully to standards in terms of font/spacing etc.

4. Customers also have the facility to manually enter a VRN.

At each point, the customer either selects or enters their VRN confirming that a particular VRN is on site. At this point NCP accepts the payment that the customer has made. Similarly, a customer is able to pay via the Dash app or Dash website and need not be present on site at the time. In turn the customer may not subsequently attend the site, but payment is still accepted.

In instances where a customer has made a genuine mistake and brings this to our attention, NCP would investigate and resolve accordingly. If no payment is made by the customer by 04.30 the next day for a VRN that is detected by ANPR, a contravention review will take place and a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) may be issued. 

As the ANPR system does not capture vehicle VRNs that have not entered a car park, no statistics are available in this regard and therefore this data is not held.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
Information Governance
Transport For London