So cross… parking fine

[CrochetMadRosie]

Does anyone have any ideas of where to go next please?

Back in the summer I was in hospital for 2 weeks. My family came to visit me every day paying the horrendous car park charges.

One day the cameras weren’t working and said that my husband had been parked for 24 hours. A security officer/ parking attendant was there and told him to just pay for the hours that he had been there.

Roll on a few weeks and he had a parking fine with photos showing that he entered one day and left the next.
We looked on the Money Saving Expert website and appealed with evidence showing that he paid on the first day and paid on the second day and hadn’t been there for 24 hours and they rejected it.

It went on to the next part of the appeal process and we provided further evidence of a time and date stamped video of my husband at home onto the evening of the first day from our blink camera (unfortunately the videos of him arriving home in the car were already erased from our other blink camera), but we’ve just heard that they have rejected it again!

I had two stays totalling almost a month in hospital over the last few months and we’ve paid almost £200 in parking fees and it is making me SO cross that they want even more of our money when we didn’t do anything wrong!
DH wants to pay the fine (now £170) and not go to court.

I’m looking for people we can contact now to at least feel like we’re not just accepting it!
I’ve so far got…
Our MP, PALS, the security team at the hospital, Rip Off Britain.

Any other ideas please? Thank you!

Do you have a dash cam?

You have appealed twice and you don’t have clarity on this rather important point?

Your husband seems to have presumed the cameras weren’t working. If they hadn’t been… there would have been hundreds of tickets issued.

You mentioned you were going to look on Fb… have you come across anything to indicate that others were afflicted by this camera not working scenario

have you contacted PALS at the hospital? Other than that join theFB group with Tony Taylor who is the expert who gets people off their parking tickets and is actually accurate and knowledgeable about the law which Martin Lewis etc aren’t they give the wrong information all the time!! Tony Taylor charges £16 to sort your ticket out and if he fails he will pay the fine for you

Sadly not but thank you for the thought!

@EvangelicalAboutButteredToast No, no dash cam…

@Ragtoe I’ve been really poorly and have left it to him to sort out… He was told by the parking attendant/ security officer that they weren’t working and as the ‘proof’ that the company have would mean that the cameras weren’t working we’ve believed that. We could have been more proactive at the time of appeal, but I was ill in hospital and he was obviously worried about me, doing everything at home and working full time. This seemed so obvious that we would win under appeal with the evidence we had that he’s paid on both days that we didn’t investigate further. Lesson learned!!

Thank you. Someone else has recommended him so we’ll definitely have a look.
We’ve got PALS on the list of people
to contact next. In hindsight (a wonderful thing!) we should have done this sooner, but I’ve been ill and he’s been busy looking after me and running the house. We were sure that we’d win on the appeal and I’m annoyed now that we didn’t do more before…
Thanks again for the suggestions.

Have you found others on social media impacted? It would have been many hundreds if cameras down in a hospital carpark

Do you use life360 or other tracking app that shows your phone movements, dash cam or anything else like that which could show he was somewhere with the car in that time

You're not the only one who can't make head nor tale of it.

Clearly the appeal process agreed with us!

I used to work in private parking dealing with appeals - they were ruthless . Send the details to POPLA who concentrate solely on the parking company proving beyond any lawful doubt that you were at fault . The uphold a lot of drivers appeals and the amount and case is frozen while they investigate . Good luck !

The postal address for a POPLA (Parking on Private Land Appeals) appeal is
POPLA, PO Box 1270, Warrington, WA4 9RL. You should use this address if you are sending a completed paper appeal form, but submitting online is often preferred as it can be faster.

• Address: POPLA, PO Box 1270, Warrington, WA4 9RL
• Preferred method: Appeal online via the POPLA website
• What to include: Your 10-digit verification code, your details, and all supporting evidence when appealing
• Important note: If appealing by post, you must complete and return a POPLA postal appeal form, and you are responsible for the postage costs.

@CrochetMadRosie Sorry if I’ve missed if anyone has already mentioned.

All privately managed car parks must be registered with an organisation that handles parking charges appeals when they have been summarily rejected by the company. One is POPLA (Parking on Private Land Appeals) for the companies who are members of the British Parking Association (BPA), the other, fornon members of BPA, is the Independent Appeals Service (IAS). Establish which one to use, gather as much detailed evidence as you can, and appeal through one of these. I would also suggest following up with PALS, or sometimes there is a separate travel/parking admin office within a hospital you can go directly to (there is at my nearest large hospital) that will get charges waived in these sorts of circumstances, so enquire about that too.

In the last year I’ve had three completely erroneous parking charges waived, two for me, also in a privately run hospital car park, relatively easy to resolve, and one in a theatre carpark, similar situation, machine not working etc, awful unscrupulous company, they just want you to be intimidated and worried and give up, so I just doubled down because that’s me, and one where I helped my son who received one in his uni car park, again relatively straightforward.

A private Parking Charge Notice is not the same in law as a Penalty Charge Notice as issued by a local authority. I do appreciate with the worry it may feel easier just to pay, but please don’t give them your hard earned money, you don’t owe them a penny 😊. Hope this is helpful.

@DestinyIsAll Absolutely correct. So many people don’t seem to understand the distinction between ‘Penalty Charge Notice’ and ‘Parking Charge Notice’. People keep referring to ‘Parking Charge Notices’ as ‘Fines’ when they absolutely are not, and are a completely different kettle of fish to ‘Penalty Charge Notices.’

This confusion seems to be a deliberate deception by the parking companies to scare people into paying. They have used the same acronym, only changed one word, and the notices they send look very similar to a genuine ‘Fine’.

These companies are theiving bastards.

Stick to your guns, respond to every threatening letter with the same response - "we have clearly shown you that we were not parked in the car park for 24 hours and that we paid each day for parking. If you wish to take us to Court then please do so, but we will submit a defence and counterclaim"

The company I work for has had a few of these over the years and our experience is that they send very scary letters in the hope you will cave in. If you play brinkmanship with them then they either just quietly drop it and you don't here anything further, or if it does go as far as them issuing court documents they drop it on the day. We currently have one in the pipeline and we submitted a defence and counterclaim. With the court date looming they are now asking US to drop it as they know they will lose and will have to pay our costs.

I know from problems that friends have come across with some of these parking companies in my city. Just what a bunch of money, grabbing, low life these parking people reslly are.

Often owned and run by questionable people. Little more than criminals really.
Many through companies registered abroad.

Some also run security companies based around the grounds ifv shopping centres outside or where their car parks are They are useless and ignore commplants .Money for old rope

They love to bully people and know that some people. don't have the time to question and pay up. And will just try it on.

Good luck with your appeal.

Hope you win
👍

They definitely do not publicise it! My dad was in hospital for a week and someone mentioned it to me on like day 5! Would have save a good £100!

That's insane that they wont accept the evidence! My husband and i had a similar thing a few years ago. There's a fairly remote KFC near us (remote as in you would only be on the car park if at KFC) and it has a 2 hour free parking window. I was driving home one day and my boot wasn't shut properly so literally span in there for a minute to shut it and leave. The next day my husband took the DC for dinner. We got a ticket saying we were there for 24 hours (lol KFC eating rampage). We literally just called them and they dropped it immediately!

No really advice but I hope you are both feeling better and get it sorted.

If this is the same system as both my local hospitals use, then I cannot see how it has happened. Your registration is recorded on entry, then when you leave the site the pay machine asks for your registration. It shows you a time stamped photo of your car entering the car park and the charge. You cannot pay less than the charge - it’s just not possible. The proof of time of leaving is the payment. It’s irrelevant as to whether the camera happened to not be working when you left - the whole payment system would have to be down.
I assume that OPs DH forgot to pay when he left the first time so when he left the next day it charged him for 24 hours. Not paying for the first entry has overridden the second entry.

Blimey your use of hyperbole is stunning!

But these systems normally have an exit barrier to prevent you leaving without paying, so how would he have got out without paying?

The entire story is flawed.

The point is that he did pay, but the camera didn't record him leaving. So the parking company's systems are saying that he left the car there overnight.

And if the OP had worded it like that to begin with, more of us would have understood.

The OP says he paid on both days, so I don't think that can be the whole issue

And based on how it's been written here, I can understand why an appeal has so far failed. I can't make sense of it.

Sometimes unfortunately it's just a case of paying up and not doing it again. The principle of the matter is irksome because you know you did nothing wrong. But when you factor in the costs of anyone you hire to fight your case, the fine looks a hell of a lot cheaper in comparison.

State violence for you. It's not fun, is it? Yet people are happy to pay tax.