Should we just suck it up and pay this parking fine?

[Bananaram]

DH recently used a pay as you leave car park. He used contactless, heard the little beep and then the machine seemed to freeze after being stuck on the little spinning circle of death before eventually coming up with an error message. DH checked the online banking and saw a pending payment for £1.50 from that day (price of the parking) so thought all had been paid and left

We then receive the letter saying he didn't pay and we have a £100 fine (£60 fine if paid within 2 weeks)

DH called the bank and they said they could see the payment but it was rejected by the vendor. He appealed the fine and attached the letter from the bank that confirmed this and they have rejected the appeal saying they could not find the details of the payment and said it was his responsibility to ensure it had been paid. Considering payments can stay as pending for days, I'm not sure how long he was meant to stand there to ensure the payment had gone through. They have said he can appeal their decision and would need to provide the last digits of the card he used. Is it worth wasting more time and energy fighting this or should we just pay while it's at £60?

Feeling mighty peeved at them!

What people are missing is that paying the fine within the reduced rate timescale doesn’t mean you cant appeal. I received a parking fine, paid it immediately, appealed and received a refund.
If someone goes into a shop, buys something and the machine comes up with an error message, should they just walk out with the goods without trying to pay again? Because in effect this is what’s happened here. The OPs DH knew there was a problem as the machine showed an error message. For the sake of £1.50, I would have taken the time to ensure the payment was made correctly - by phoning the number thats always on the side of the machines - before walking away.
The system of parking payments is pretty crap nationwide IMO, but that doesn’t mean we should tell everyone to not pay a parking fine because it’s unfair.

With this much evidence I'd be continuing to fight. You can suggest that an appropriate resolution would be to reduce the fine to whatever the parking charge would have been. An offer to pay something might be enough to get it looked at by a real person with the authority to make a sensible decision.

Just coming back to this thread to update (nearly 5 months later 😁)

It took ages but after they rejected our appeal, we took it to POPLA who sided with us and overturned the fine Due to the evidence we had provided from our bank confirming the charge was still a pending transaction on the date we received the fine and the transaction on our bank statement that clearly shows the name of the Car park on the day we received the fine.

Just updating in case anyone is ever in a similar situation and comes across this thread!