Capita splashes £57.5m on Eye-of-Sauron car-park watchdog biz

Beware doggers, fare dodgers and fly tippers

Crapita Capita has snapped up a reputation-boosting biz: the integrator will splash £57.5m on ParkingEye, which sells technology to monitor car parks to ensure nobody gets a freebie or goes dogging.

Lancashire-based ParkingEye provides "remote enforcement, management information and alerting systems", and its intellectual property includes an automatic number-plate recognition system.

It checks that only paying customers are using parking spaces, and identifies those that should be slapped with a fine - fly tippers and trouser fly-fondlers, beware.

Capita will pay £23.9m for the business - which serves Aldi, Morrisons and British Land among others – and a further £30.9m by February.

Capita CEO Paul Pindaer said it will flog ParkingEye's car park management and "enforcement" business to new and existing customers in leisure, local government, NHS, education and retail. He said its new parking wing has "synergies" with its other "cash collection and payment processing business".

"[It] will allow us to offer clients the benefits of a well-managed car park, creating availability for customers, citizens and patients," he said.

Well, quite, and no doubt managers at hospitals – where parking fares can be exorbitant – are rubbing their hands at the prospect of squeezing more cash from people visiting sick or dying relatives.

ParkingEye employs 160 people, manages 830 car parks and is forecasting profits of £8.1m on projected turnover of £25.8m in the year to 31 August 2014. The most recently filed accounts for ParkingEye at Companies House show that in the year to 31 August 2012 it had a turnover of £13.9m and an operating profit of £4.47m. ®