Industry body seeks talks with EU on truck parking security

Rising numbers of thefts from parked trucks across Europe have led to a call for the European Commission to work with industry on standards for secure parking areas.

The Transported Asset Protection Association (TAPA) says “the lack of secure parking places [represents] the biggest threat to the safety and security of drivers, trucks and cargo in Europe.”

TAPA, which represents manufacturers and logistics providers, and has seen its membership soar in the face of the growing theft problem.

The EU’s Safe and Secure Truck Parking Areas (SSTPA) standard is designed to make it easier to bring parking areas up to scratch, and was adopted in June 2019.

It was developed in light of an EU-funded study which revealed that the lack of SSTPAs is a major concern in the EU, with almost 90 per cent of drivers and transport operators stating that the current parking supply is insufficient.

Site operators have a chance to access a pot of €60m from EU funding schemes to bring their facilities into line with the standard.

TAPA’s Incident Information Service (IIS) reported recently that cargo worth more than €80m (around $87m) was stolen from supply chains in the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region in the first nine months of 2019.

European Parliament research has previously estimated that cargo crimes cost businesses in Europe some €8.2bn a year.

“Our membership is at its highest-ever level because cargo crime is also at its highest ever level,” says TAPA’s head of EMEA Thorsten Neumann.

While TAPA launched its own set of updated security standards – called Parking Security Requirements (PSR) – Neumann insists that “we are not looking to compete with the EU SSTPSA, we simply want to add value to it.”

Aligning the PSR with the SSTPA standard would “help the Commission accelerate the growth of safe and secure parking places in Europe and eliminate any confusion in the industry between the two standards,” says TAPA, which says it is prepared to adapt the PSR to achieve that goal.

By the end of 2020, its expects to have 80 PSR certified sites and to be able to offer certification support to the industry.

Neumann thinks industry is cautious about adopting the SSTPA standard because its predecessor – known as the EU LABEL project - failed to attract many parking sites and certifications were not maintained.

“We confidently believe a mutually-recognised PSR standard, aligned with the EU SSTPA Standard, will receive broad industry support because it makes no sense to have separate standards.”