A multi-channel offer that isn't as simple as it sounds
Stand in any of SKDC's pay-and-display car parks in Grantham on a weekday morning and three payment routes are on offer: the RingGo smartphone app, a contactless card tap, or coins fed into the machine. South Kesteven District Council presents this as a multi-channel service — and on paper, it is. The council's parking pages confirm that all machines accept cash and contactless card, while the RingGo app adds the option to pay, extend, and manage sessions remotely via a smartphone.
Yet the ordering matters. Council communications default to the app as the lead option. Cash and card remain available, but using them requires a resident to already know the alternatives exist, to locate a working machine, and to navigate a system oriented primarily around the phone in their pocket.
Whether those alternatives are genuinely accessible to every resident is a different question. SKDC joined the UK Network of Age Friendly Communities in April 2025, and its own accessibility audit of services including parking remains a work in progress. The gap between what a service technically offers and what a particular resident can practically use is where the real design question sits — and it is that gap, not the council's intentions, that the rest of this piece examines. SKDC is not uniquely at fault; the same assumption is embedded in car parks from Cornwall to Cumbria. That is precisely what makes it worth examining here.
What cognitive load actually means at a pay machine
Picture the sequence a RingGo payment actually requires. Open the app. Log in — which, if the session has expired, means entering a password, then waiting for a one-time code sent by text that expires within 30 seconds. Locate the four-digit car park code. Enter the vehicle registration. Select a duration. Add or confirm payment details. Tap through the confirmation screen. Wait for the green tick before walking away, because the app has been known to display errors after payment has already been processed — and a penalty notice cares only about what the enforcement officer's handset shows, not what the app eventually sorted out.
That is seven or eight discrete steps, each making its own demand on attention and memory. Working memory — the mental scratch pad used to hold and process information in the moment — has a finite capacity. Research into digital payment systems for older adults identifies the specific friction points that push against that limit: small fonts and low contrast that force the eye to work harder; multi-step authentication that requires holding one piece of information in mind while retrieving another; one-time passcodes that expire before a slower typist finishes entering them; session timeouts that restart the process from scratch and add anxiety about getting everything done before a warden appears.
Documented complaints about RingGo make the failure modes concrete. Users report login loops that cannot be broken without uninstalling and reinstalling the app; fees not disclosed until the final checkout screen; and payment confirmations that fail to sync with enforcement handsets — leaving drivers who have paid facing penalty notices regardless. These are not exotic edge cases. They are the points at which a system that works smoothly for a confident smartphone user becomes, for someone with reduced dexterity, lower-contrast vision, or less digital familiarity, effectively inaccessible.
The design assumption underneath all of this is that friction is temporary — that users will learn the app, remember their credentials, and adapt. That assumption does not apply equally across the population of any town.
How many people this actually affects in South Kesteven
The national data gives a useful sense of proportion. Age UK's April 2024 'Offline and Overlooked' analysis found that 4.7 million people aged 65 and over — more than one in three — lack the basic digital skills to use the internet successfully; 2.3 million, around one in six, do not use the internet at all. Good Things Foundation puts an additional frame on this: 77% of all UK adults without foundation-level digital skills are aged 65 or older. The Older People's Commissioner for Wales adds a directly relevant detail — approximately a third of over-65s do not use a smartphone.
These are national proportions. Applied honestly to South Kesteven — a district that encompasses Grantham, Stamford, Bourne, and The Deepings, with substantial older populations across both its market towns and surrounding villages — the arithmetic points to thousands of residents for whom the RingGo app presents a genuine barrier. No precise local figure is available, and inventing one would be misleading. But the national ratios are consistent enough across multiple sources that the direction of the estimate is not seriously in doubt.
The rural dimension sharpens the point. A resident driving into Grantham from Rippingale, Long Bennington, or Corby Glen is not an unusual case. They are the typical town-centre visitor: someone who has travelled specifically to shop, attend an appointment, or access a service, and for whom parking working reliably is not optional. That dependency makes the usability gap considerably more consequential than it might appear in an urban setting where alternative transport or a shorter walk to the machine is more likely.
When parking stops people going out at all
Documented evidence of the downstream harm arrived most clearly in a report from the Older People's Commissioner for Wales, which found that the shift to app-based and cashless parking systems had 'discouraged individuals from going out altogether.' That phrase — not going out — marks the point at which a payment friction becomes a social consequence. Several older people in the study described receiving penalty charge notices when digital systems were inaccessible and they could not complete payment through no fault of their own.
The same pattern has been named in a context with a direct parallel to Grantham. When Worcester City Council moved five of its car parks to RingGo-app-and-phoneline-only payment — the same platform running across SKDC's car parks — Age UK Worcester's chief executive Clare Thomas said the change was 'one more example of how older people without access to technology are being excluded,' and linked it directly to worsening social isolation. Same app, comparable council scale, the same population of older residents who have driven into a town centre because they needed to be there.
Beyond the practical difficulty, qualitative research with adults aged 65 and over identifies a second layer of harm. Digital exclusion produces low self-esteem, emotional distress, and withdrawal from civic life — outcomes that a failed parking session can contribute to, but that accumulate across many similar moments. There is also what researchers describe as a 'double burden': when an excluded person must ask a younger stranger or a family member for help paying at the machine, the original access problem acquires a dignity cost on top of it. Needing assistance to park in your own town centre is not a neutral inconvenience — and the evidence suggests, for some people, it becomes reason enough not to make the journey at all.
The structural argument: a de facto obligation to go digital
There is a useful distinction, drawn in peer-reviewed work published in 2025, between a formal requirement to use the internet and what researchers call a 'de facto obligation' — the effective compulsion that arises when digital is the default, alternatives are harder to find, and using them carries the faint stigma of not keeping up. Nobody tells an older resident in Grantham they must use RingGo. But when the app is promoted first, when the machine interface is less intuitive, and when asking for help means struggling visibly at a pay-and-display column, the practical effect can amount to the same thing.
This framing matters because a service that works technically for the majority can still discriminate in effect if it systematically disadvantages a protected group. Age and disability are both protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. The question is not whether SKDC intends to exclude anyone — it almost certainly does not — but whether the accumulated design choices produce that outcome for a portion of its parking users.
No publicly visible equality impact assessment for SKDC's RingGo rollout has emerged. That absence is notable. The council's Age Friendly Communities Survey signals that it recognises a gap in how residents aged 50 and over experience transport and connectivity. But a survey that collects views and an assessment that measures what a specific service design does to specific groups are different instruments, with different levels of accountability attached.
What genuinely accessible parking looks like
Genuinely accessible parking is not about retaining cash as a token gesture. It means designing the non-digital route to the same standard as the digital one: clear signage from the car park entrance to the machine, maintained hardware that accepts coins without jamming, displays in a font size that does not require leaning in to read, and — where staffing allows — a straightforward option to pay in person.
Design audits that test this should involve older residents directly, not simply run through a technical compliance checklist. A car park that passes a regulatory box-tick but defeats a visitor from Folkingham or Corby Glen on her first attempt to read the tariff display has not met the more important standard.
That kind of resident — driving several miles into Grantham because she needs to be there — is the person whose experience reveals whether a multi-channel system is genuinely so or only nominally. The Older People's Commissioner for Wales identified exactly this gap: systems that were technically available but practically inaccessible. SKDC's Age Friendly Action Plan is the document that should answer whether the same gap exists here. It has not yet been published. Local residents, and Age UK branches in the district, can reasonably ask what it will say about parking specifically.
The broader design argument is also the most practical: reducing friction for older users tends to reduce it for everyone. Parents with pushchairs, visitors unfamiliar with the town, anyone paying in a hurry — all benefit from a system clear enough to use without prior knowledge of how it works. Designing for the edges sharpens the centre.
- [1] Qualitative Exploration of Digital Exclusion and Technology Adoption Experiences Among the Elderly. (2025). https://doi.org/10.66298/kerwa.2025.6.3.217 https://doi.org/10.66298/kerwa.2025.6.3.217
- [2] The Double Burden: The Digital Exclusion and Identity Crisis of Elderly Patients in Rural China. (2024). https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8106 https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8106
- [3] The Elderly Digital Divide: Digital Exclusion Versus the Right not To Use the Internet. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-025-10334-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-025-10334-4