Hi DaisyMaisy The issue to consider is, is the existing parking suitable for disabled persons? You may have 300 spaces and on a busy day only 50 are used but if they're not wide enough or pose other additional hazards then there is likely to be an issue. Remember just because they're not all used doesn't mean that there will be spaces right near the store, people will typically park as close to the store as they can. Building Reg's M will give you a head start on this one.

It is the responsibility of the tenant to make parking spaces available. That means ' policing' them too. It's not just a case of painting some lines and saying you've complied. You have to show that you make arrangements for preventing abuse and monitoring them. Not always easy though! My local Sainsburys have a security take a wander every so often and stick big embarrassing signs on peoples cars. Then tannoy them in store asking them to move their car. Personally I'd take them out and shoot them...... but the boss was worried about that option!

Most retail parks do not include the Car Parking in the various leases and so remain responsible. Like all private parking enforcement is a real rarity and even Sainsbury are not saints.

Earlier this week while locking my bicycle outside a local supermarket I heard some shouting. I looked round to see that a contract security man in a yellow hi-vis jacket was being given verbal abuse by a driver who had just arrived and parked his car in the pick-up bay outside the store. As the driver and his companion had evidently just arrived to start shopping, the security man had asked him to move his car to the adjacent car park. After delivering his volley of verbal abuse the driver did move his car as requested - and nearly caused a collision by driving at speed across the path of another car. When I briefly commiserated with the security man about having to endure such verbal abuse from obnoxious inconsiderate people, he said that sometimes his work patrolling the pick-up bay and disabled parking bays (about which signs are clearly displayed to drivers) resulted in threats of violence and also assaults. At this I suggested that suitably placed CCTV cameras outside the store building might help to deter such behaviour and also to help identify and prosecute perpetrators. Alternatively or additionally, perhaps he and his colleagues should be equipped with covert mini-TV cameras of the sort used by under-cover journalists and investigators. Can any forum users involved with the retail and security sectors for example comment as to whether any employers provide covert mini-cameras to employees who face verbal abuse, threats and violence in the course of their work? If not, would this be worth considering or has it already been tried and found to be ineffective, too expensive or entail too many technical problems? Though I have no issue whatsoever with parking bays for disabled people - for which stores, etc should of course have arrangements to try to deter their misuse, I do wonder if there is any real justification for stores to have pick-up bays, i.e. for brief use by customers while loading their cars after shopping. The ones I see at stores usually appear to be misused by people who can't be bothered to walk any further than absolutely necessary between their cars and the store entrances. Such misuse negates the intended purpose of pick up bays, especially as it's not reasonably practicable for their use to be constantly/frequently monitored and enforced by store staff or contractors.

Bob Thanks for your information about traffic enforcement officers wearing visible video cameras. Just for clarification, do you mean traffic police officers, traffic wardens or both? Also, though I'm not mobility-impaired myself, I have some experience of selfish lazy people who misused disabled parking facilities when I chauffeured my elderly Mum who had a blue badge for her mobility impairment during the final few years of her life. In one case I parked across the fronts of 2 cars without blue badges in disabled bays while getting my mother's folding wheelchair out of the boot. The agile youngish owner of one car returned and wasn't too chuffed at being delayed from driving off for several minutes until I had finished getting my Mum into her wheelchair. However, at least I was able to park my car in the bay which he vacated instead of having to leave Mum in her wheelchair while I drove off and found a parking space elsewhere! It could be argued that I was remiss in using a disabled parking space which could have been better used by a solo disabled driver. In fact, if we visited a car park with a reasonable number of suitable vacant spaces, we'd tend to use them rather than disabled parking bays because it wasn't a problem for me to push my Mum around in her wheelchair. However, the common snag with many car parks is that their standard parking bays are too narrow, a fact compounded by the inability of some drivers to park sensibly in such bays. Hurrah for car parks which include some wider than normal 'comfort' parking bays which are not restricted to people with young kids and their pushchairs!