Fleets should push for standard national PCN format, says FleetCheck

Fleets should be pushing for a standard national format for all penalty charge notices (PCNs), FleetCheck is suggesting.

The fleet software specialist says PCN documentation issued by local authorities, private parking companies and police forces varies widely – and this makes them much more difficult for fleets to process.

Callum Haymon-Collins, COO, said: ‘Handling PCNs is a major bugbear for fleets and one that seems to be a greater burden year by year. 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.’

There was potential for optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to be used to create tools that could dramatically reduce the time spent on each PCN, he added, and greater standardisation would make this easier and more precise.

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

Convincing issuers of PCNs to adopt a standard approach could be achieved by promoting advantages such as faster and more accurate payments.

‘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. Standardisation would also be a boost for them,’ added Callum.

‘The main difficulty fleets will face in pushing for a standard national format is the question of who might facilitate this happening? 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.’