Shop till you drop and don't worry about your parking

Cwmbran Shopping Centre awarded CP Plus a three year contract in 2008 to manage its short stay parking facilities.

The centre, which provides free parking in all its car parks, is based five minutes drive from the M4 and is one of the biggest shopping centres in the South of Wales. CP Plus manages over 1,300 short stay car parking spaces across a mix of multi-storey and surface car parks. The centre has a particularly high level of daily visitors and CP Plus has been given the responsibility of monitoring the misuse of, and managing all the short stay car parks.

The shopping centre had a number of issues that were affecting its car parks. The area is an open town centre with four multi-tenanted office blocks, residential occupants as well as 170 shop units. The core issue that the area faced was shop and office workers were parking in the best spaces, hindering and limiting desirable access to car parking spaces for customers. CP Plus’ task was to allow shoppers to park for free, but to identify car park users who used the car park for more than four hours, such as staff members.

CP Plus was tasked with monitoring all of the short stay car parks serving the shopping centre. However the centre’s management were uneasy about customers receiving a Charge Notice through the post which ruled out the possibility of using the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras on the entrances and exits. The challenge was therefore to identify a new solution that would enable them to monitor car parking in a cost effective way.

To solve this conundrum, CP Plus developed an innovative system, adding ANPR cameras to a golf buggy. The cameras pick up vehicle registration numbers as CP Plus staff patrol the car parks in the buggy. The system identifies cars that have been there for longer than the advertised maximum four hour stay time and CP Plus staff can generate a Parking Charge Notice from the system and place it on the vehicle.

The buggy also acts as an aide for shoppers, helping people with their shopping or getting to their cars. This additional service improves customer experience and provides added value for all visitors.

Cwmbran Shopping Centre was the first location in the UK where the ANPR golf buggy was put into action. Developed by Gavin Povey, Head of Development at CP Plus, the concept has since been rolled out into other parking locations facing similar issues.

Gerry Hutchings, Centre Manager at Cwmbran Shopping Centre, said: “We think this technology is fantastic. This scheme works very well for us; it is a great system that means the small minority that cause bother don’t impact on the wider community by making them all pay for parking when it isn’t necessary.”