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Parking

How parking is regulated

We are responsible for enforcing the on-street parking restrictions across the County but not those in Plymouth or Torbay.  Our civil enforcement officers (CEOs) patrol most principal roads daily.  As a driver, it’s your responsibility to check your parking place for any restrictions, and where required to make sure any ticket or permit is clearly displayed.

If you are unsure where to park:

Waiting and parking regulations are enforced through traffic regulation orders (TROs).

Most TROs are introduced to address specific traffic-related issues, for example, congestion, air quality, or impact to quality of life to nearby occupiers.

These are written legal agreements developed and approved in consultations with the residents, their councillors, the police and district councils to ensure a safe, free flow of traffic, to address the issues and improve the circumstances via effective parking management.

Devon County Council is a member of the Parking and Traffic Regulations Outside London (PATROL) Adjudication Joint Committee. PATROL provides information about parking tickets, how to pay them and how to challenge them.

Since April 2014 Devon County Council has provided an in-house on-street service, you can find out how our service has performed and how the revenue raised has been used in the reports below:

The way money is spent is agreed annually by the Cabinet and is published in our County Road Highway Maintenance Revenue Budget and On-street Parking Account.

Statistics

We publish our parking ticket statistics showing how many tickets have been issued in each town. These figures are always published in arrears.

Civil Enforcement Officers (CEOs)

CEOs or traffic wardens as they are often still called, enforce parking restrictions using powers issued by the Secretary of State under regulations within the Traffic Management Act 2004.

Our activities are mostly focused around business hours of 8am to 6pm, but we do frequently plan patrols to make additional visits to cover periods earlier or later than this.

CEOs patrol all streets with pay and display parking, double yellow lines and other parking restrictions, as well as off-street car parks. We check whether cars are parked appropriately and issue parking tickets to vehicles we believe to be parked in contravention of the traffic regulation orders.

CEOs have no power to remove a vehicle blocking or restricting a private driveway. We can issue a parking ticket (Penalty Charge Notice) when a vehicle is parked across a driveway stopping a resident from leaving the property, but not when a vehicle is stopping a resident from entering.

The police still have enforcement powers to deal with obstruction offences and dangerously parked vehicles. They can get an offending vehicle removed.

Once a parking ticket has been issued the CEO can’t withdraw or cancel it. You must challenge the ticket in writing.

Request parking enforcement

You can now request parking enforcement using our online service.

Please be aware that we do not offer a callout response service, if an officer is currently working in the area they will be asked to visit during their patrol.  All requests are used by the local managers when planning future patrols.

Parking services privacy notice

Devon County Council (DCC) will act as a ‘data controller’ for any personal data that you provide to us. As such, we will ensure that the data given us is processed in line with our organisation’s data protection policies and in line with your rights under the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK General Data Protection Regulations. To find out more about how DCC will use your personal data, you can read our Parking services privacy notice.


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