The car parks will survive just fine.

From The Daily Telegraph (£):

Japanese-owned NCP, which operates across 500 sites and employs more than 1,100 people, has written to landlords asking them to write off tens of millions of pounds as it scrambles to strike a deal with landlords by April.

“Without a fundamental shift in NCP’s commercial arrangements with landlords, there can be no certainty that NCP will be able to survive,” the operator warns in leaked proposals seen by The Sunday Telegraph. Turnover, which in 2019 was £227m, fell 65pc during the pandemic as the Government’s lockdown restrictions kept the public indoors. The impact of Covid will hit profitability in 2021 with the next year’s outlook looking “uncertain”, landlords were told.

All NCP do is collect location rent. A parking space for a day is a few pounds in the cheapest areas, all the way up to £30 a day for a space in central London (pre-Covid, it might be less now). NCP started with bomb sites which they bought or rented. In higher value locations, it made sense to build multi-storey car parks (inlcuding hugely expensive underground storeys) if the extra income exceeded the construction costs (this is the only difficult bit, but once it’s built it’s built).

So NCP don’t have much of a bargaining position now. The landlords can just insist on the old higher rent which NCP won’t be able to pay. As a result, the leases will be terminated. The landlords now own the multi-storey car parks (whether they paid for the construction or not). They can keep on the few staff they need to manage each site (they probably have to under TUPE rules) and can just collect the parking fees, which in the long run, will be more than the rent would have been anyway. People who park there won’t notice a difference, except the signage and uniforms having changed.

NCP (the legal entity) might cease to exist, but their ‘business’ was just a leveraged bet on being able to collect more rent (parking fees) than they have to pay in rent.