The airport also has a rather excellent text message service that tells you the status of departing and arriving flights. That was designed to allow picker uppers to arrive to collect "just in time".
The whole area outside arrivals (esp. T1) was always a mess. Lazy and mean picker uppers would clog it up circling rather than using any of the adjacent car parks (surface or multi). It was dangerous for pedestrians, and prevented emergency vehicles ever getting in or out quickly.
Something needed to be done, and it has been. Fact is, there isn't enough space for all the cars that people would like to bring in. There is an excellent public transport hub right in the middle of the airport, plus a selection of taxi products (ok so the black cabs are a rip off), which arriving pax should make more use of. There is little need for many picker uppers to even drive in, in the first place. MA is using price and capacity management to allocate a scarce resource, just like the locos do, so what's the big deal?
Free and easy drop off/pick up is a privilege, not a right.
What utter tosh. This is a money making scheme devised by the airport. There is plenty of space at T2 (and T1, before the layout was changed to accommodate paid for parking) to allow for short wait pick-ups. T3 could get busy, but was by no means unmanagable.
There are ways and means to avoid this petty charging, but I'm not going to post them here, lest they be closed.
Rip-off Britain at its best!