Fleets should push for standard national PCN format, says FleetCheck

Fleet operators should push for the introduction of a standard national format for penalty charge notices (PCNs) in order to reduce administrative burden and improve processing efficiency, according to FleetCheck.

The fleet software specialist says documentation issued by local authorities, private parking companies and police forces currently varies significantly in format and layout, creating unnecessary complexity for fleet managers handling rising volumes of PCNs.

Callum Haymon-Collins, COO at FleetCheck, said the issue had become an increasing frustration for fleet operators, with some businesses now employing dedicated staff purely to manage PCNs.

“Handling PCNs is a major bugbear for fleets and one that seems to be a greater burden year-by-year,” he said. “Quantities are rising and some of our users are having to employ people purely to deal with them.

“A key complaint is that every issuer of PCNs appears to use their own format. This makes them slow for people to manually process because they often have to read every document in full but also reduces opportunities for automation.”

Haymon-Collins said there was significant potential for technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline PCN management, but the lack of standardisation was making development more difficult.

“The wider the variance in document formats, the harder it becomes to engineer technology that produces consistently accurate results,” he explained. “It’s certainly possible and something that we are working on but identical documentation would speed development considerably.”

According to FleetCheck, a standardised format could also benefit the organisations issuing PCNs by reducing payment errors and improving response accuracy from fleet operators.

“The diversity of PCN designs creates problems for those collecting fines, too, because it leads to a generally higher level of errors in fleet responses and a need for ongoing dialogues,” Haymon-Collins added. “Standardisation would also be a boost for them.”

However, he acknowledged that implementing a national standard would require coordination across the sector, potentially led by an industry body.

“The main difficulty fleets will face in pushing for a standard national format is the question of who might facilitate this happening?” he said. “Probably the most obvious candidates are one of the industry bodies. Certainly, the evidence we see suggests that it would be a hugely popular move with fleet managers.”