to ignore private parking fine?

[yellowDahlia]

So - I received two parking fines for the same car park, the two overstays happened within a week of each other at a similar time of day.

I appealed the first notice, no joy, so paid it within the initial period - £60.

BUT I didn't even realise there was a second one, assumed the extra letters were reminders, until I get a letter saying the fine was now £100. Emailed to NCP explaining my error and appealing the fine.
In the meantime I get another letter saying it had been passed to debt recovery and was now £160! I have since written to them explaining the error, saying I would be willing to pay the £60 and that I don't think it's right to be penalised for the rise in the charge while waiting for more correspondence from NCP.

I really, really don't want to pay £160 for a 15 minute overstay in a car park, this doesn't seem fair. But the letters from debt recovery are all very official and serious and I don't want to keep receiving messages saying the fine is going up and/or I'm going to be taken to court

What should I do?

Pay it because this WILL NOT go away and the fines and penalties will keep increasing. You'll have a bailiff at your door with a high court order if you don't.

Private car parks are entitled to enforce fines, so don’t just ignore it. I think you will struggle to appeal it now that it has been passed to a debt recovery firm, but you could try contacting the firm directly to see if you can come to some kind of arrangement with them.

As above they won’t go away, if you ignore them you could quite easily get a CCJ

I always ignore them 🤷‍♀️ It’s a risk as could end up with a CCJ, so I won’t tell you to do the same...

Go to Money Saving Expert - they have a section that deals with this kind of thing and there's some excellent advice there

I have emailed the debt recovery company too but they've said they won't settle it - they want the full amount.

I could cry, it was a genuine mix up on my part and it's such a lot of money just for a stupid mistake

Check the MSE forums, or google it. I had a similar thing - I was in an out of town type car park in a different city, never parked there before, and I didn’t think it was a pay car park. Looked just like car parks at IKEA of whatever. Didn’t see any signs. Anyway, apparently a camera on the entrance/exit caught me and I hadn’t bought a ticket from a machine when I’d only been there a few minutes, picking something up. I was really confused when I got the fine.

Anyway, I googled it and that particular car park has a lot of unhappy ‘customers’ and my google search brought up lots of legal info about appealing these. They’re not from the DVLA, not legally enforceable in the same way. I ended up paying mine, as my car is leased and lease company charged me £20 to forward all the fine correspondence, so I would have ended up paying much more. But there was lots of advice on how to appeal private parking fines.

Please pay it. Have you seen Can't Pay ? They will send in bailiffs - they have no morals.

I've been thinking about it this evening and it's frustrating but I'll pay. I dropped the ball here and it's not really surprising - I've been juggling too much and feel overwhelmed a lot of the time with work, family, daily tasks... something was bound to give. I was careless about parking and didn't pay attention to the details - and this is the price I've got to pay.
But it's not my health, or my job or anything wrong with the kids - it's just money. So I'm going to suck it up, pay and get on with my life.

And I'm never going to use that car park again!

Excellent decision, op. Something seemingly small like this debt may not appear to be a big deal, but it can REALLY mess up your future in terms of credit rating, etc. We've all done daft things like this so try not to feel poorly about it.

You should post on www.pepipoo.com as there are motoring lawyers familiar with the process there.