Last week Dd (8 months) suffered an allergic reaction and was taken to the hospital. DH followed in the car and parked without paying (we live on the border and our usual hospital is in Scotland where parking is free, but this is our first emergency and we were taken to the nearest hospital which is in England). Either way the last thing on DH mind was the bleeding parking.
Thankfully Dd was ok, but a week later DH and I are reflecting on what to do about the parking fine. Our options as we see them are:
A) pay the fine and draw a line under this incident (£40).
B) contest the fine as it was an emergency and we have a hospital note with time and reason for admission (if contest is denied fine will go up to £80 as takes 35 days to review).
C) don't pay and just ignore the fine. A colleague of mine said as we live in Scotland we don't need to tell the parking company who was driving (apparently this loophole was closed in England) and since they don't know who was driving it's very costly/time consuming and not worth the company's effort to raise a case to claim the fine.
My head says to go for option A) as I don't want things like this hanging over our head. But my heart says option C) as it's ridiculous anyone should need to pay for parking at a hospital and the fine is just an arbitrary number pulled out of the company's backside (not quite but you get the point).
WWYD?