Cornwall Council's parking team looks after one of the largest and most operationally complex estates in local government, spanning well over a hundred car parks across a county that serves both a year-round resident population and heavy seasonal tourism through the summer months. When the council chose JustPark as its mobile payment partner in 2018, the goal was straightforward: give drivers a way to pay for parking that didn't rely on cash. Eight years on, that starting point has grown into a partnership that now sits behind most of how Cornwall's parking operation runs day to day, and the story of how it got there is a useful reference point for any local authority thinking about how to modernise without ripping out what already works.

Starting with the fundamentals

The problem Cornwall was trying to solve in 2018 will be familiar to any council. Cash was becoming a smaller and smaller share of how drivers wanted to pay for anything, and the council's parking estate needed a way to offer people something other than the coins in their pocket. The card readers that most drivers now take for granted at the pay-and-display machines weren't added to Cornwall's estate until 2023, which meant that for the first five years of the partnership, JustPark was doing something significant. It was, in effect, the only way anyone could pay for parking in Cornwall without cash.

Josh Macdonald, who oversees parking at the council, is direct about what that meant on the ground.

"Bringing JustPark in meant we could offer drivers more than one way to pay, at a time when the machines in our estate could only take cash."

Josh Macdonald, Cornwall Council, Strategic Parking Manager

Today, cash is only a small share of Cornwall's parking transactions, and it continues to shrink each year. JustPark's On-Demand product carries most of what has replaced it, working alongside the newer card readers that the council eventually added to its machines.

Growing into a wider operation

What started as a way to accept non-cash payments has broadened over the years into something much more substantial for the council. JustPark now gives Cornwall's essential care workers a way to book parking sessions inside resident-only zones when they're out doing home visits and community care, so the people delivering that care can focus on the visit rather than on where they can legally park. Council staff use JustPark for wider work journeys through a centralised billing setup, which means employees aren't out of pocket at the point of parking and every session reconciles back to internal budget codes automatically, cutting out the expense-claim admin that comes with the alternative.

And when Cornwall's councillors wanted a way to make regular parking meaningfully more affordable for the residents who use the council's car parks most often, JustPark built the Wallet for them. It's a preloaded balance that unlocks a lower rate on every session, aimed squarely at the people who park with the council week in, week out. In Truro city centre, drivers using the Wallet pay a fraction of the standard day rate, and it has become a genuine reason locals default to JustPark over any other payment channel available to them.

Josh describes the Wallet as a product that JustPark designed around what Cornwall's elected members were trying to deliver.

“It was a bespoke product created for us, for the delivery of what our councillors and elected members were working towards. Had we not been able to provide it, we would have been in a tricky place with our parking tariffs and our commitment to our residents.”

Josh Macdonald, Cornwall Council, Strategic Parking Manager

Bringing the data together

For a council managing an estate of this size, one of the more persistent frustrations has always been that parking data lives in different places. Different payment channels write to different systems, and building a real picture of how a site is performing used to mean opening several spreadsheets and reconciling the numbers by hand every time senior leadership asked a question.

JustPark Insights gave Cornwall a single, real-time view of occupancy, revenue and price plan performance across the whole estate, and importantly it pulls in data from the council's other payment providers too, not just from JustPark's own transactions. When performance at a site starts moving in an unexpected direction, the team can now see it quickly and understand what's driving it, which is the difference between reacting to a problem months after the fact and being able to adjust while there's still time to change the outcome. It has moved Cornwall's parking team from a data-poor way of working to one where they can have proper strategic conversations with their leadership, and it has kept the council on the front foot with the kinds of tools other authorities are only starting to catch up on now.

A partnership, not a supplier arrangement

One of the reasons this setup works as well as it does for Cornwall is that JustPark hasn't behaved like a distant technology vendor. The council has a named account manager and a responsive operations team behind them, which means small requests are easy to make and larger changes are quick to deliver. When Cornwall added new car parks to its estate this year, onboarding came down to a simple web form and a short turnaround. When the council needs a change made, a question answered, or a configuration adjusted for a specific parish request, it happens in days rather than weeks.

That day-to-day accessibility is what Josh points to first when he's asked how he'd describe the partnership to another local authority.

“There's so much focus in the parking space on having every app going, but we've found real benefit in having a reliable single product we can depend on, that users can depend on, and that we can work with to give people an offering that meets everybody's needs. There's a lot to be said for partnership, and for the fact that if there's ever an issue, we've got the account team on hand to get it resolved very quickly.”

Josh Macdonald, Cornwall Council, Strategic Parking Manager

What comes next

The next chapter of the partnership is already underway. Cornwall is planning to use JustPark's Reservations product to open up reserved bays that currently sit undersold on annual leases, breaking them down into day-by-day availability so those spaces start earning rather than sitting idle. It's another step in a partnership that has moved steadily outward from a single payments product to become the backbone of how Cornwall gets people paying for parking.

For any local authority weighing up how to modernise its own operation without disrupting what already works, Cornwall's story makes a straightforward case. Pick a partner that will build with you rather than sell to you, start with the problem you actually have today, and let the relationship grow into the more strategic ones as they emerge.