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One of the UK’s biggest car park operators has become the latest victim of pandemic-era changes to shopping and working habits, falling into administration and putting nearly 700 jobs at risk.
Administrator PwC said that National Car Parks, which expanded in the 1960s by converting second world war bomb sites in London, would continue trading while it assessed options. The company has 340 car parks and 682 staff.
PwC said NCP’s performance had deteriorated “over a number of years” since the pandemic, adding that “demand for parking has not recovered to historic levels, particularly across city centre and commuter locations”.
“Continued shifts in commuting and customer driving patterns” had hit occupancy, it said, while the company’s “long-term, inflexible leases” had made it harder to cut costs.
NCP’s total revenue was £186.6mn in 2023, according to its most recent filings at Companies House, while its operating loss increased to about £9.8mn, up from £8.4mn in 2022.
Zelf Hussain, a partner at PwC who has been appointed as joint administrator, said the firm would “explore all options, including the potential sale of all or part of the business”. All of NCP’s sites would be assessed, with the possibility of closures.
The company was founded by Colonel Frederick Lucas in 1931 with a small car park in London.
It grew rapidly after it was bought by Donald Gosling and Ronald Hobson who combined it with their business, Central Car Parks, in 1959. They had spotted the opportunity of converting city bomb sites into car parks, having paid £200 for their first bomb site in Holborn, central London in 1948. NCP was sold to US company Cendant for £800mn nearly 40 years later.
That deal almost broke down at the last minute after Hobson objected on the basis that he wanted to keep a single parking space for himself in central London off Oxford Street. He wanted to maintain his weekend habit of packing a flask of tea and driving there in his Bentley to try to predict where people would park.
NCP has changed hands multiple times since then. In 2007, it was bought by Macquarie, which later sold it to its current owners, Japan’s Park24 in 2017.