What actually changed in Grantham's car parks
On 24 April 2023, RingGo signage appeared across South Kesteven District Council's car parks in Grantham. The blue-and-white branding went up at Wharf Road (260 spaces), Watergate (100 spaces), Guildhall Street (88 spaces), Conduit Lane (47 spaces), and Welham Street Multi-Storey — every major SKDC-run site in the town, along with equivalent parks in Stamford.
What changed is worth stating precisely, because the common assumption — that councils are stripping out cash machines and forcing drivers onto apps — does not apply here. SKDC retained its physical ticket machines, which continue to accept both cash and contactless card payments. RingGo was added as an additional layer, not installed as a replacement. The correct description is a hybrid model.
For those who prefer not to use the app, alternatives exist. RingGo can be accessed by calling 020 3046 0010 or by sending an SMS, meaning a smartphone is not strictly required. Grantham's car parks, as of the April 2023 rollout, offer more ways to pay than before — not fewer. The question the rest of this article examines is whether adding digital options is as neutral as it sounds.
The free parking catch
The free parking offer sounds straightforward enough: one hour per vehicle per day at most SKDC car parks in Grantham, two hours at Wharf Road. The catch is that it is not automatic. Nothing registers your arrival; no system waives the charge by default. To claim the free period, a driver must actively start a session — either through the RingGo app or at a physical machine.
For most drivers, that is a minor inconvenience. For someone without a smartphone who also finds the machine confusing, it is a genuine barrier to a benefit that notionally exists for everyone.
The phone and SMS routes noted above do provide a workaround, but they require prior knowledge — the number to call, the process to follow — that is not immediately obvious from a car park sign. Arriving without that knowledge means the free hour may simply go unclaimed.
This is a design problem rather than a policy one. The entitlement is real; the mechanism for accessing it is weighted against exactly the people least likely to navigate it confidently.
The fee irony — who actually pays more
The irony in the fee structure is worth pausing on: the people who adopt the app often pay more than those who do not.
RingGo charges a convenience fee on top of the standard parking tariff, set by agreement between RingGo and each individual council or operator. Rates vary by location; one widely reported example puts the charge at around 30p per session — turning a £2.50 four-hour tariff into £2.80 via the app. North Devon Council formalised this kind of premium from 1 December 2024, adding a fixed 10p charge per RingGo transaction, a sign that such fees are becoming a standard feature of cashless parking nationally rather than an anomaly. SKDC's specific arrangement for Grantham sites has not been made public, so the 30p figure illustrates the typical range rather than a confirmed local rate.
Optional SMS reminders — expiry alerts for those who prefer not to rely on in-app notifications — carry separate per-message charges that also vary by location.
The disclosure timing compounds the issue. The convenience fee does not appear on car park signage or on the headline tariff screen; it surfaces on the location details page inside the app, after a driver has already committed to the process. Comparing the true cost of app versus machine requires knowing where to look.
The structural result is that digital adoption, in this configuration, costs more. The driver who walks to the machine and pays cash avoids the surcharge entirely. The one who reaches for a smartphone pays a premium for not doing so.
Who finds the hybrid model hardest to use
Around 18% of people aged 65 and over in the UK — roughly 2.3 million — do not use the internet at all. Among those aged 75 and over, 49% cannot complete the eight basic tasks considered necessary for functioning online. Roughly a third of over-65s do not use a smartphone. These figures are not marginal in a market town like Grantham, where the population skews older than the national average.
Older age and poverty are the two strongest predictors of digital exclusion, and they frequently coincide. A resident who is both older and on a lower income faces a compounded disadvantage when a public service adds a digital layer: more likely to lack the device, the data plan, the confidence, and the support network that makes navigating a new system manageable.
The consequences can extend beyond inconvenience. Evidence gathered by the Older People's Commissioner for Wales found that app-based parking changes had, in some cases, stopped older people going out altogether — because parking access underpins GP appointments, volunteering, and social contact. Those findings relate to Welsh towns rather than Grantham directly, and serve as the closest available proxy rather than a local survey; but the dependency they describe is plausible wherever older people rely on driving to reach a town centre.
Brighton & Hove's equality impact assessment adds a caution about the standard policy response: lack of motivation to get online — not lack of skills — was found to be three times the more common barrier to being offline. Digital literacy training addresses the wrong problem for a significant majority of non-users. What would actually close that gap is a question the current system design leaves unanswered.
Why councils are doing this — and what comes next
The shift away from pay-and-display machines did not begin as a policy choice in most places — it began as an engineering problem. Older ticket machines depended on the 3G mobile network to process payments and transmit data. When UK network operators switched off their 3G infrastructure, councils faced a forced decision: spend on new hardware, or move to app-based systems and reduce the machine estate.
The financial case for reducing machines is not subtle. Each unit carries costs for cash collection, routine maintenance, and repair after vandalism. The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames removed all its pay-and-display machines and estimated savings of roughly £1.8 million by not replacing them. More than 20 English councils have now replaced machines with app-based systems; eight — mostly in London — have removed machines entirely.
SKDC's current approach, retaining physical machines alongside RingGo, keeps the hybrid model intact. No announcement has been made about removing Grantham's machines. But the financial logic that has pushed other councils further is the same logic SKDC operates under, and the pattern nationally suggests that a hybrid position is often a staging post rather than a settled destination. Whether that holds in South Kesteven is an open question.
What the hybrid model asks of Grantham residents
For most people parking in Grantham today, the current arrangement is functional. Machines are still there, cash still works, and the addition of RingGo has not removed anything — it has added a layer. That distinction matters.
For a minority of residents, though, the friction is real even if it is not absolute. Navigating the system without a smartphone means knowing to call a number, send a text, or use a machine confidently — none of which is obvious from the signage alone. Prior knowledge does a lot of quiet work that good design should not need to rely on. And the residents most likely to lack that prior knowledge are often those whose mobility depends most on being able to park easily: older people, those on lower incomes, and anyone for whom a car journey to Grantham represents a significant decision.
SKDC has not, as far as public records show, published an equality impact assessment for the RingGo rollout. York and Brighton carried out formal assessments when making more radical cashless moves; it is not clear whether South Kesteven has done comparable work here.
The design question the system leaves open is straightforward: if machines are eventually removed — as they have been elsewhere, for well-documented financial reasons — what provision would remain for those who cannot or choose not to pay digitally? That is not a crisis today. But it is the moment when the design gap would stop being manageable friction and start being a barrier.