Parking Live

"You Have to Experience Every Part of the Job.”

• Modaxo • Season 1 • Episode 8

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In this powerful episode of Parking Live, hosts Matt Darst and Jade Neville sit down with one of the most influential voices in UK parking and curbside management: Richard Walker — Head of Strategic Parking, Recycling, Refuse & Fleet; Chair of the BPA Board of Directors; and Past President of the British Parking Association.

Richard has been a driving force behind Beyond the Uniform, a campaign rewriting public perception of civil enforcement officers and directly reducing abuse against frontline teams. What began as a human-focused storytelling initiative has become a movement — one that has already shown measurable impact, including a 73% drop in reported incidents in Harlow.

Richard shares:

  • The frontline experiences that inspired the campaign 
  • Why every parking leader should “go out and do the work” themselves 
  • The emotional and physical toll assaults take on officers 
  • How press and public engagement reshaped the narrative 
  • The human stories — including Ria and Tanya — that brought the campaign to life 
  • The training, support systems, and welfare practices his teams use every day 
  • How empathy, storytelling, and visibility can shift an entire industry 

This episode is a reminder that there is always a person behind the uniform — someone’s colleague, sibling, parent, or friend — and they deserve to return home exactly as they arrived.

If you’re a city leader, parking manager, or anyone working alongside frontline teams, this conversation offers critical insights into safety, culture, and responsibility.


Host & Producer: Jade Neville and Matt Darst
Executive Producer: Julie Gates
Producer: Chris O’Keeffe
Editor: Patrick Emile
Associate Producer: Cyndi Raskin
Brand design: Tina Olagundoye
Social Media: Tatyana Mechkarova



Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Modaxo Inc., its affiliates or subsidiaries, or any entities they represent (“Modaxo”). This production belongs to Modaxo, and may contain information that may be subject to trademark, copyright, or other intellectual property rights and restrictions. This production provides general information, and should not be relied on as legal advice or opinion. Modaxo specifically disclaims all warranties, express or implied, and will not be liable for any losses, claims, or damages arising from the use of this presentation, from any material contained in it, or from any action or decision taken in response to it.

Welcome back to Parking Live, the podcast where we explore the people policies and innovations, reshaping curbside management and parking operations. I'm Matt Darst, and over the years working with cities across the U.S. One thing has become incredibly clear. You can't deliver great outcomes unless the people on the front line feel safe, supported, and respected. And I'm Jade Neville. I started my career as a frontline civil enforcement officer, myself and my day-to-day job now takes me across UK and Europe, spending much of my career working with councils, operators, and on street teams. And right now those teams are facing some of the toughest conditions we've ever seen. Over the past three years, the Northeast Essex partnership has seen a rise of 175% in verbal and physical assaults on civil enforcement officers. But the hopeful part, and this is really important to hold onto, is that change is possible. Since the launch of the Beyond the Uniform campaign, Harlow has seen a 73% drop in reported incidents, and across the Northeast partnership area, there's been a decrease in 23%. That's what happens when communities come together to see the human being behind the uniform. And that brings us to today's guest, someone who's been a driving force behind that shift, and has an impressive list of titles. We're joined by Richard Walker, head of Strategic Parking, Recycling, Refuse and Fleet, chair of the BPA Board of Directors, and past president of the British Parking Association. Richard's been a leading voice in protecting frontline teams, shaping industry standards and pushing conversations that don't happen frequently enough. To be honest, I've personally learned a lot from Richard and some of his initiatives are even being deployed in the United States. Yeah. I ca completely agree, and you would meet very few people with less feathers in their cap than Richard Walker. He's one of the champions of Beyond the Uniform Campaign and has built the initiative around empathy, storytelling, and real world impact. Richard's passion for frontline welfare and his commitment to raising awareness against abuse of civil enforcement officers is at the heart of today's conversation. We will be exploring how the campaign started, the challenges it confronts, and the difference it's already making on the ground, along with what comes next. Richard, it's a pleasure to have you on parking live and from one past president to another. We're very pleased to have you here. I'm wondering what inspired the Beyond the Uniform campaign and how does it aim to support and protect your teams? Yes. What inspired it? I think you carry through your career a bit of sense of what you've been through. I know Jade started out as a CEO at one point as well, and I started out as civil enforcement officer doing things that, back at Ipswich at the time, had a go at doing a bit of patrolling on street. And you remember, you take with you what you learned there and how people were with you. And you hear of different incidents and different things have happened to my staff over time. There's something that stays with you about it, I think, and that's what inspired me. You know, it's just to try and shine a spotlight on our precious frontline worker and do something for them. Our workers are I said precious there. Without them we wouldn't be anything. If we didn't have people patrolling and we didn't have their skill and dedication to the task we wouldn't be anything. We wouldn't be anymore. And it's the incidents that happened sort of off the ball with them really, I think that is what led to the start of this which developed into a bit of a campaign at the end. And having become president of the parking association, it gave me a bit of a vehicle or a bit of a platform to do something about it. And things really sort of conspired together, I suppose, both of being president and having that platform. And some of the backup work that the British Parking Association had been doing with its frontline workers, also some of the work that some of my colleagues in Cornwall have been doing, and this campaign that patrol the parking people who look after our adjudicators had started up. Everything sort of conspired really into this perfect storm. And, it was for somebody to step forward, I suppose, and promote this and do something with it. And how does that transfer into being something that the frontline worker can take on? Or how does it protect them? Well, I think from the start, it was about trying to get beyond the uniform, which was the title of our campaign for us. It's something beyond just being out there and patrolling. People are somebody's brother or sister or mother, father, uncle, aunt, or whatever. There's a real person wearing the uniform, and that's what we wanted to get to. We wanted to find this real person beyond the uniform. Behind the uniform, if you like, and celebrate that. And giving them a personality or, you know, showing the real person behind the uniform, beyond the uniform I think really resonated with people. It certainly did with press, and we were invited into one or two places to talk a bit more about that. That we'll sure will come on to as we go through the course of this. I've got a bit of a two-parter question. From an ex civil enforcement officer to another, what advice would you give parking managers who haven't been in those roles before? Almost like a learning, if you will, from our experiences on the street, that you could then impart to those managers to help support their frontline teams. And the second part to that question would be, to somebody who does have a platform, what advice would you give them in order to push this really important topic more? To a new parking manager or a parking manager's probably not experienced it, I'd say go out and do all the work. Either I think behind my desk's here somewhere that says, there's varying grace that you either do or say things, I badly paraphrase Aesop, things that you're not prepared to do yourself. You should do every part of every job. You should at least experience it at some point. Even if that means you need to have your head down the drain and unblocking things, I've done that in a car park before. If it means you need to get in a vehicle that you don't know and move it, you need to do that. If it means helping somebody in some way, then you need to do that. You need to have experienced everything. You've got to really want to be able to do the job at its fullest. And once you've experienced a few of those things, even if that's only spending a shift or two out with people, go and try and do it yourself. You know, have your head in the machine when the sleet is coming past you horizontally in February. And, find out what that means to the people who really do the job, you know. You have to be there to experience this, I suppose. Go and stand outside the school and see what goes on when people are getting a bit desperate with things. And some of the language that is used in inappropriate circumstances, but you've got to go and really experience that. So I say to get anybody go, and go and experience the full role, the full part of the job. And to anybody with platform, it's really important, isn't it? I started off by saying it's our precious frontline worker without whom we'd be nothing. They're the people who earn the income that pays our wages through people who are breaking the law. You know, they're precious and they should have a spotlight shined upon them. And I'd say to anybody on the platform to promote that really. You should in life, I think remember everybody on the way up, whoever they are, and be able to promote any of those jobs that you've seen or done at whatever level you're currently enjoying yourself. What I've really liked about this campaign, Richard, is that it gives us this really rare view into the person. The individual behind a uniform and it puts a face to these workers. Is there a particular story that you can share that captures the heart of this initiative? As we've gone through this, there's been two or three things that have come out. I've worked with some of my colleagues on the way through this campaign, and some really heartfelt stories have come out as part of this. As we recorded the first radio session that we did, a prerecording in advance of our press release going out to launch the campaign, one of my CEOs had just been assaulted. I'm sure she won't mind me saying her name's Ria. And, she'd been seizing a disabled badge from a vehicle that shouldn't have been using. It was a van, parked where it shouldn't have been. And, she'd sort of grown, inquisitive about why this vehicle. And, all of a sudden the driver had come back to the van and with Ria trying to seize the badge from the person. By seize, I mean, we're allowed to ask to identify the badge and take some details of it, I don't mean to have a tussle. So Ria was looking, you know, to find the details from the badge in order to take this away. And the person grabbed her by the wrists and pinned her up against the van. And outta nowhere this came. And you can imagine the sort of the shock and Ria was quite mentally scarred by this. You know, not just physically, but mentally scarred by it, to the point where she'd been signed off sick, but had agreed to come in as part of this and appear on the radio. And she recalled with so much power how she was feeling at that time. You know, it was only a few days previously, but she agreed to come in and share her story and how it made her feel. It was a really powerful story that she gave there. She'd been diagnosed with a mental illness as a direct result of being pinned up against this van by somebody she couldn't overpower and was on antidepressants at the time. Now this story evolves through the whole campaign. It had affected to the point that she couldn't go out the house at one time. She couldn't put a bin out at night, you know, when it was bin collection day or whatever. She couldn't go to the end of the drive for fear that this person would be there. And during the course of this campaign, I saw her recover from that. Over successive times that we'd met to share stories and things. To the point where when I did her return to work interview, and I can feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up now, she'd returned to the very spot where she was assaulted. She was doing her return to work interview at the place where she'd been assaulted to the point where she couldn't even leave the house. That's the sense of power behind what some of these people are like, the front line. You know, you've gotta be a very special person to be a frontline officer. And, there's one of the really powerful stories that came outta that. Somebody who's overcome that adversity that, through no fault of their own, was just thrust upon them. So that was one of the things that made me want to make something of this campaign. There's another incident as well where another one of my colleagues, who's named Tanya, she came with me to be on the radio as part of this campaign as well. And she recalls, you know, people will say, oh, you know, hope you get cancer. And all the rest of it transpires, Tanya has had cancer, you know, so you can see how well that might have gone down. And Tanya gives a really powerful message in relation to these sorts of things. And this is where you start to see the real person behind or beyond the uniform. You know, it's real people's lives have been impacted by the way they're being treated by members of the public who either don't know better or do know better and just do it for a joke or really try to go outta their way to have an impact on people. Oh, I think Matt will agree that hearing stories like that are, it's moving and it's horrible to hear. No one should ever have to go through anything like that in their day-to-day lives in doing a job. Just doing a job. And just to wanna point out the fact that you said the hairs on your neck at the back of your neck were standing up. Mine were too. I could almost kind of get into that mindset of having to do that again. Having been exposed to that as well, I could imagine how that would feel and extremely hard to do. What kind of training and support systems are in place to help officers feel safe and valued? I mean, we have all sorts of incidents and things that go on. You might have a day that goes really well, and you come back to the office at night and you'll share that with your team. You know, it is really important to decompress at the end of the day. It is not just our frontline workers out on patrol, of course, it's people who might be in my technical team, who might be alone in the car park, repairing machines. I mentioned the machines thing earlier on, it might be people on the end of telephone line who can't get away from it and they don't even see the perpetrator. So it's really important to decompress. We use a lot of humor in that. And it probably goes a little bit too far on occasion, but it's really important to get that out of your system before you go home so you don't take it with you. And it extends from that sort of thing right up to the more serious stuff. I mentioned that we had somebody assaulted out of nowhere. A chap who hadn't even been issued with a penalty. Somebody came out of a house and thumped him and broke his jaw and knocked him out. Just like that. So there, there's the extremes. You know, you need to get rid of the day-to-day grind and all the rest of it before you go home. In the middle of all of that, we've got various other levels. So, those are probably the two extremes. In the middle, if something happens and we ask people to come back to their base, principally to get off, you know, and away from it to be able to decompress so they don't do anything else silly, you know, that they're, they've been affected by something that's just happened to them. So they come back to the base, but also write down what's happened to them contemporaneously. So if we do need to use it for any evidence at all, then they've got a contemporaneous note of exactly what happened and we tell 'em not to use the report, but to use the actual words and things that were said to them and how they felt and all the rest of that. So we have what we call a violent and aggressive report form where they can get all of that outta their head and onto a piece of paper straight away. And the coming back to the base thing means that they're with somebody and they're off and away from the incidents and nothing else can happen to them in that day. And they're only allowed then to go out if they feel comfortable with doing that. Some of 'em might go out on patrol again straight away. Some of 'em might go home depending what's happened, during the course of day. Above that, if it's deemed to be such a thing that's a crime against the person, then we'll ask them to go and report that to the police. And they get full support in doing that. And I had a letter to go with the person to the police station as well to say, you know, this has happened. The person who's presenting themselves here, we stand by them and we want the strongest penalty against the perpetrator. And we also have our employee assistance program, so they can make use of that. They can take counseling and all the rest of things depending on the level of seriousness. It sometimes just helps to speak to somebody who's completely unconnected with the incident, just completely separate from your situation. So the telephone line they can use, if it builds and grows from there, they can avail themselves of other things that can help. Turning quickly back to the Beyond the Uniform campaign, I'm wondering what's the public's response been? Have you noticed any changes either empirical or anecdotal in, their attitudes? Yes, the reason we started this is because we'd noticed something of an increase in particularly verbal abuse, but any sorts of abuse against our staff. And this was particularly centered around, we've got a town called Harlow, which is across into the west of the region that we cover. And we've seen an increase year on year on year, sort of 35% one year and 135% year on, on the first year with that. And having conducted this campaign between January and March, 2025, the reported incidents we've got, we saw a 73% decrease in the number of recorded incidents, and 60% on year, on year, on year from the previous year before that. And that set that against an increasing trend. It was pretty hard hitting, I think people like a public interest story. And, we were on the radio talking about sort of the progression through how things went with our campaign in a bit. But yeah, again, set against this increasing trend of more and more and more abuse. To see a decrease can only be attributable to having conducted this campaign. Encouraging to hear that the statistics are going in the right direction now, but it's also quite scary to hear that they were going up and there was that trend that year on year trend of it increasing. So something definitely had to happen. Could you talk us through that campaign a little bit more in a bit more detail, Richard? How does it start and what's the main ethos behind it and what's the future for it? Is it going to expand? Yes. We were set a bit of a challenge as part of the competition by the patrol group, the parking and traffic regulations outside London group that look after our parking adjudicators. They'd run a competition back in 2024. And we'd applied for this because of the background I sort of gave you there, it looked interesting to me and our staff and we said, yeah, we'd like to have a go at this and put in our initial ideas for this. And we were jointly awarded together with Brighton and Hove council some money to have a look at doing a campaign. And with them we jointly looked at various media things that we could do and how we could approach the subject. And we came up with this Beyond the Uniform campaign. I said we'd come up with a press release to sort of introduce it to the media and we didn't know quite what would get out of it. But, having said that, the media do like a public interest story, you know, they like a human interest thing. And it took off rather more than we could ever have hoped for. We had the press release issued, under embargo to start with, we're talking back in December now, 2024 before we'd launched it and the radio immediately interested in this. We were given a, as live, but prerecorded interview with one of the roving reporters from BBC BBC Essex. They came along to our headquarters, our own house in Colchester, and did a little piece with myself and one of my colleagues in one of our rooms. Then we went outside and that's when some of the other people were starting to share some of these other stories, with a bit of traffic noise in the background and things, and we thought, oh good, they'll probably use that on the show. And on the day the press release was unembargoed, we were asked if we'd like to go and appear on breakfast radio live on BBC Radio Essex. So we popped down to Chelmsford, which is about 18 miles or so south, to cover this on BBC Drive Time Essex live in the studio. And the person there behind that was asking myself, and Tanya came with me as well, and she started on some of the stories that she'd been given as well. And they asked me a little bit more about it then. And, sort of said, well, what were you heading for and what would you like? And I said, we probably want actually some regulations to protect our frontline workers. That's, that would be the best thing to come out of it. But we'd like to keep in touch, you know, and do a little bit of story about this and see where we get to with the campaign. The following day, BBC television news contacted us. We thought, oh, you know, we'll have 10 minutes with us probably on a roof of a carpark somewhere. And indeed they did. They came and interviewed me, and again, Tanya. But Tanya went out with them for over an hour and we thought, oh, you know, there's probably a bit more than we'd expected here. The coverage of it. And we got that evening onto the prime slot on the 6:30 PM news, regional news program, which covers all of East Anglia. So you've got Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex and bits of Cambridge. And so we were on for about seven or eight minutes and their prime time slot in the evening. Tanya walking around Colchester and talking to the various people. I got interviewed by a podcast in Harlow, which was our target sort of market as well for this. And then we had some public facing events that we took up as well in Harlow in a shopping center where we're giving out a little bit of merch and just getting people to talk to our staff, you know, having a one-to-one with people and they chatted through things with a few hundred people who were passing there. And then there was a bit of a follow up where the radio presenter came out into Colchester and went out around on patrol with Tanya. And that got coverage over the course of a couple of hours on, again, on the drive time show, just to do a bit of a follow up. And, he actually was there when a few things happened. You know, people driving off. People talking about, well just gimme the penalty then and what's deterrent here and all those sorts of things. That's quite interesting to see how the thing developed outta this human angle that we'd given it. I think that's incredibly important, isn't it? the press coverage for parking is not always a positive one. And the stories are not always broadly covered in a way which kind of shows both sides of the story. And I think that this is an incredibly important way of being able to show that one, there's people behind that uniform and two, that actually parking restrictions are there for a reason and people are managing them for a reason. And it's ultimately all down to people's safety. It's down to safety, it's down to vehicles moving, it's down to access. It's down to multiple different factors that can easily get lost when we're reviewing one side of the story. So that's incredibly important. And had you, do you feel like the press have been quite a useful aspect of this then when it comes to public perceptions and trying to sway people's views on frontline officers, particularly in parking? Yeah, far and away more than I'd ever imagined it would, I think. You just don't know how a campaign's going to land with them. And set against some of the daily newspapers who like to have a go at anything to do with parking. You're just making money and all the rest of all these jibes, I'm sure that has some impact on how my officers are portrayed as well and what people think of them. You know, if day in day out you're being told we were just there to make some money. Well, we wouldn't be doing a job at all if everybody complied, would it? It's compliance that we're after. And you're right, the whole thing about keeping traffic moving and all that, that's the whole point about why we're there. But yeah, I was, I was pleasantly surprised by the way that particularly the BBC had taken this up and the human interest behind it, the beyond the uniform piece, isn't it really, you know, showing there to be a real person there. And I think that struck a chord with them, and with some of the others that interviewed me as well to say, you know, actually we are somebody's family here. And they deserve to go home in the same state that they arrive for work in the morning. So that really just struck a chord. And, the way that the interviewer on the BBC program, he talked about Ria's incident as well, and he was quite forceful in the way he put that forward. And he promoted it. There's a clip of some Coventry civil enforcement officers being assaulted completely outta the blue again, just sort of thrown off their feet and all the rest of it. They showed that at the start of the clip they did on the television. So, to give that power. I think really the stories shine through there, don't they? You know, the human interest part of it is to the fore. And they just went with that. Well, Richard, this work is really special, and as someone who's worked in government, I can tell you it's near and dear to my heart. I want to thank you so much for joining us today and discussing what you and your team are doing to protect and support our frontline officers. Yeah, absolutely, Richard. I mean, it's this campaign. It reminds us all that one, there's a person behind the uniform and also two, there's so much more going on in parking than parking tickets and fines and charges and everything else that happens behind it. So I want to encourage anybody who's listening to this to make sure they, if they wanna get involved, that they seek out additional resources and we'll, no doubt, we'll share resources for the Beyond the Uniform Campaign and the Frontline Officer Welfare Support that has been provided by the British Parking Association on the group that you mentioned earlier on as well. So if anybody wants to get involved that they take up those opportunities to do so too. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for listening. I'm Julie Gates, executive Producer of Parking Live. This show is hosted and produced by Jade Neville and Matt Darst. Recorded by Patrick Emile and edited and produced by Chris O'Keeffe Parking Live is being brought to you by Modaxo. Passionate about moving the world's people. You can follow U.S. on LinkedIn. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit U.S. online at parkinglive.buzz sprout.com. Thanks for joining U.S. at Parking Live, where the curb meets the conversation.

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Jade Neville

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Matt Darst

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