5 dingen om te weten over Jamal Ikazbans aankomst op parking.brussels

La DH reported on 5 September that Jamal Ikazban, a former PS alderman in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean and a longstanding critic of Brussels mobility policy, is set to become chair of parking.brussels. Ikazban told the newspaper that he wants to reassess parking prices across the capital. The appointment places a politician who has repeatedly challenged the agency’s enforcement practices at the head of its board, although the Brussels government and parking.brussels had not published a detailed appointment decision or policy programme when this article was prepared.

For residents, commuters, businesses and staff working around the Belgian and EU quarters, the immediate issue is not simply who receives another regional mandate. Parking rules affect everyday access to all 19 Brussels municipalities, while differences between local zones, permits and enforcement procedures have long made the system difficult to navigate. The Brussels-Capital Region says parking.brussels is responsible for bringing greater coherence to regional policy, assisting municipalities and managing enforcement where communes delegate that work. Municipalities nevertheless retain important powers over the rules applied on their territory.

Ikazban’s first challenge will be separating political ambition from institutional authority. The chair leads the agency’s board but does not replace its director-general, Floris Tack, whose executive mandate began in February 2024 under a Brussels government decision. Any broad change to the regional tariff framework would therefore require more than a declaration by the new chair: it could involve the board, the regional government, Mobility Minister Elke Van den Brandt and the municipalities, depending on the measure concerned. No timetable, financial assessment or proposed tariff scale has yet been disclosed.

The call for a price review lands after several difficult years for the agency. Figures supplied by Van den Brandt to the Brussels Parliament and reported by BRUZZ show that parking.brussels carried out about 44 million checks and issued more than 2.2 million payment demands in 2025. Motorists challenged roughly 346,000 of them, and approximately 177,000 were cancelled. Van den Brandt attributed those cancellations partly to a tolerance policy and partly to errors. Those figures do not mean that every cancelled demand resulted from an agency mistake, but they demonstrate the scale of the administrative and public-confidence problem facing its next board.

Ikazban has already adopted a sharply consumer-protection-oriented position. During earlier parliamentary scrutiny, he described disputed scan-car practices as a form of “racket” and pressed for tighter limits on the use of bailiffs to recover unpaid parking charges. His framing is that enforcement must remain proportionate and understandable, particularly when an initial charge can accumulate substantial recovery costs. People with disabilities have been an especially sensitive constituency: parliamentary proceedings record recurring disputes over the digital registration needed to ensure that scan cars recognise disability parking exemptions.

A different perspective comes from Van den Brandt and supporters of automated control. Their argument is that scan cars greatly expand the volume and consistency of enforcement, helping prevent long-term occupation of scarce street space. In a 2024 parliamentary debate reported by BX1, Ecolo’s Isabelle Pauthier argued that technical failures should be corrected without discarding an enforcement tool that had substantially improved control capacity. DéFI and Les Engagés similarly favoured repairing the system rather than abolishing it.

That disagreement reflects the larger argument surrounding Good Move, Brussels’ regional mobility plan. Opponents, including sections of the PS, have portrayed higher parking costs and restrictive circulation plans as socially unfair to households and workers who still depend on cars. The Region’s stated strategy instead seeks to move vehicles from streets into off-street facilities and recover public space for other uses. Official 2024 data put the publicly accessible on-street supply at about 250,000 spaces, alongside an estimated 620,000 off-street spaces, only around 25,000 of which were public.

Analysis: Ikazban’s appointment signals a political effort to make parking policy more responsive to affordability and service complaints, but it does not by itself overturn Good Move or lower a single tariff. The decisive tests will be whether he publishes a costed review, reduces erroneous payment demands, improves appeals and disability exemptions, and reaches workable agreements with municipalities. Until the government confirms the mandate and the new board adopts formal decisions, Brussels motorists should continue to follow the existing rules and prices.