The charge on your windscreen isn't the only thing that has a record
If First Parking has sent you a charge, you're not appealing into a void. The company's track record at POPLA, the independent appeals service for BPA operators, is published every year. Two years of it are worth fifteen minutes of your attention before you decide whether to bother appealing at all.
First Parking LLP is a BPA Approved Operator that uses POPLA for its independent appeals stage, running ANPR-based enforcement across education, healthcare, hospitality, residential and managing-agent sites. That much is on the public record at Companies House and on First Parking's own site. What's less visible is what actually happens once a driver's appeal gets there.
What POPLA's own figures show
POPLA publishes an annual report with an appendix breaking results down by operator. Here's First Parking's row for the two most recent years:
| Year | Submitted | Allowed | Refused | Not contested | Allow rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023/24 | 387 | 54 | 252 | 48 | 17.65% |
| 2024/25 | 692 | 108 | 444 | 127 | 19.57% |
Source: POPLA's 2024 and 2025 Annual Report appendices.
Two things move together here. Appeals against First Parking submitted to POPLA rose from 387 to 692, up 79% in a year. And the allow rate, the share of those appeals POPLA decided in the driver's favour, rose too, from 17.65% to 19.57%.
The number of appeals POPLA formally allowed doubled outright, from 54 to 108. That's a cleaner comparison than the percentage, because it isn't affected by how many more people appealed in the second year.
There's a third figure worth reading alongside those two: appeals First Parking didn't contest. That went from 48 (12.4% of submissions) to 127 (18.35%) in the same period. A "not contested" result means First Parking stepped back from the appeal before POPLA had to rule on it, not that POPLA decided against the operator. More than one in six appeals ended that way in 2024/25, against roughly one in eight the year before.
None of this means most appeals succeed. In both years, refusal was still the most common outcome by a wide margin: 65% of appeals refused in 2023/24, 64% in 2024/25. An allow rate ticking up is a direction, not a guarantee, and POPLA's decision in someone else's case says nothing about what happens in yours.
What the trend is actually worth to you
What it tells you is that more drivers took a First Parking charge to POPLA in 2024/25 than the year before, and slightly more of them had it cancelled or saw the operator walk away from the fight. That's a real, published trend, not a reason to expect any particular outcome.
If you've got a First Parking charge and you're deciding whether an appeal is worth the fourteen days it takes, Revenger builds the appeal from the operator's own obligations and the evidence you upload. The first appeal is free, and if it needs to go further, POPLA included, there's a one-off £5 credit rather than a subscription.
