FEATURE THE BIG INTERVIEW
Freeing up resources
AFTER 50 YEARS IN PARKING, LIBERTY SERVICES OFFERS A WEALTH OF EXPERTISE. CHAIRMAN GAVIN REDDIN TALKS TO SARAH JUGGINS ABOUT SPOTTING GAPS IN THE MARKET AND CALLS ON THE BPA TO TAKE A MORE LEADING ROLE
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www.britishparking.co.uk
hen Alan Reddin left the army in 1945 with a demob payment in his pocket, little did he know that he was about to sow the seeds of a family business
that would eventually corner most of the market in providing printing solutions for the car parking industry and, 60 years later, would be a one-stop shop for parking. Liberty Services began life in Surrey as a general
printing firm, named to commemorate the liberation of Berlin by the Russians in April 1945. Te company soon evolved into a specialist
provider for legal documents on behalf of many police forces around the country. By the 1950s most of Liberty’s customers were police forces, which were more than happy to pass the onerous and potentially
error-strewn task of transferring hand-written parking tickets into typed legal documents to a firm that was fast becoming a specialist in that field. From the 1980s, decriminalisation of parking led
to an unprecedented growth for Liberty Services. By now the majority of its business was concerned with parking operations, and there were very few regular printing contracts. Te switch in responsibility for parking from the police to local authority control led to the deployment of civil enforcement officers and a 10-fold increase in parking tickets issued.
Parking becomes big business Alan’s son Gavin Reddin, chairman of Liberty Services, explained: ‘Te police had other things to concentrate on so parking was never high on their list of priorities, but while it was never seen as a revenue raiser, the local authorities realised they could make money from parking enforcement that could be invested back into the transport network. ‘Suddenly, where we had been issuing 10,000 parking notices for the police forces, we were issuing 100,000 for local authorities.’
JULY 2010 37
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