Alright, Rant Mode on.
Those of you who drive a car will probably all have had one. You’ve all come back to your vehicle parked in a street, or in a public car park, and found one of those little yellow bags containing a ticket stuck to your windscreen and tucked behind one of your windscreen wipers for good measure. You may even have been first made aware of your supposed transgression when an envelope dropped through your letterbox from a car park management company containing a notice screaming DO NOT IGNORE and showing you photographic evidence of your entry and exit to a car park complete with times and a demand for £100 “reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days of issuance of this notice”.
You have received a PCN, either a Penalty Charge Notice if it was issued by an agent of a local authority or a Parking Charge Notice if it was issued by a private company which has been contracted to ‘manage’ the parking. Note how the privateers use the letters PCN so they create the impression that you have somehow been legitimately penalised by an authority.
Whichever you have attracted, you’ll probably have greeted it with mix of annoyance, disbelief, affront and resignation or regarded it as a challenge to your ability to bat it off and avoid paying anything. I’ve had five in recent years, two of which resulted from the establishment where I parked having turned their car park over to a car park management company using cameras, and I had failed to spot the change or see the notice. That’s easily done on a dark, wet winter’s evening as it was at the department store car park in my local town when I drove in on the second day of the new camera operation.
On that evening, I hadn’t even parked if you take the definition of parking as leaving your car unattended while you wander off somewhere. My wife was in the store shopping, and it was raining so to save her walking to where we had parked earlier, I moved to the store’s car park to wait for her to come out. We are frequent customers there and I was on a nodding acquaintance with the usual car-park attendant. She came out and we left. A couple of weeks later I had the PCN demanding £100 for 17 minutes waiting in the store car park. After complaints to the store management and the car park management company concerned, the matter was resolved amicably on that occasion since it could be seen as a ‘teething problem’ with the new system.
On a prior occasion, a letter had arrived demanding payment of £100 (the reduced period having expired) a month or so after I had parked in a small residential car park in a nearby Hampshire village. The village is a popular destination and the parking spaces in the street and in the two small car parks soon fill up. As we were only there for a quick refreshment, half an hour or so, I thought what’s the harm, there are plenty of empty spaces. We partook of tea and cake and left.
I immediately responded to the letter saying this is the first I have heard about this; there had been no parking ticket affixed to my windscreen. The parking parasite company answered by sending me a photograph of my car with ticket attached. What had happened to it I do not know; there had been no ticket and that’s the truth. I replied that there were no notices saying that this was private land with restricted parking. There certainly were no notices either at the entry to the car park or in the immediate vicinity of where I had parked. I appealed.
The rejoinder came ‘appeal denied’ saying that there were signs, with photographs pointing them out. I revisited the site and found one immediately behind the space where I had parked, neatly hidden by bushes which had grown over it. Ah ha, evidence. Out came my iPhone.
I sought advice and acting on it, I downloaded the industry Code of Conduct and perused it. There it was – there must be a clear sign at the entry to the car park stipulating that it is private managed car park and outlining the conditions. I found another car park in our local town managed by the same parking parasite company where such signs were in place. Evidence again. Snap. Got them. A hidden sign and no signs at the entrance at the car park in question.
The second stage of appeal to an independent panel was duly upheld.
Next came a little fracas with the District Council. One Saturday morning I went into town to the market as usual and parked in my usual place on a street where there is half an hour of free parking available. One has to obtain a ticket from a machine for the free period. The ticket machine was ‘Not in Use’. I went to the other machine for the street but that was’ Not in Use’ as well. I could do it on my ‘phone but, guess what? No signal today and no public WiFi nearby.
Now, half an hour is long enough for me to visit the market and go to the butchers. I looked up and down the street to see if there was a parking warden around to explain matters to but there wasn’t. As I had other things to do elsewhere in town that morning, off I went. I came back to the car twenty minutes later to find a PCN on the windscreen.
When I got home, I emailed an appeal to the District Council, explaining that the ticket machines were not working, they could not rely on people to use ‘phones and I’d been well within the free half hour period anyway. I knew that because I had noted the time I parked and the time I got back. If you’ve worked in time critical roles all your life as I had, that sort of behaviour is a habit which never leaves you.
The email came back from the council rejecting the appeal and stating that the ticket machine had been tested by a warden one minute after I had parked and he had then observed my car for ten minutes before issuing the PCN. This, I knew, was a blatant lie. There had been no warden in the street. The Council also said that, if I had no means of obtaining a ticket, I should have moved my car to somewhere else where I could do so. My response refuted their story about the warden testing the machine and told them their suggestion about moving to another car park was not an acceptable response when you are short of time. I re-stated my case and surprisingly, the Council backed down as a ‘goodwill gesture’. Another ‘win’.
My current joust with the parking parasites is a good one. In early April we went to Pembrokeshire and, before going to our hotel, we visited Saundersfoot where I parked in the camera-controlled harbour car park. On paying £3 for two hours, I made a mistake when I keyed in my car registration number but realised it immediately after the event. Nothing could be done, there being no attendant on the site. So, anticipating a spot of bother, I kept the ticket.
The DO NOT IGNORE letter duly came. I appealed straight away, sending a photograph of the ticket showing that I had paid for two hours within five minutes of entering the car park and left fifteen minutes before the period expired. I pointed out my human error, two letters of my registration were wrong. I expected that to be the end of the matter.
It wasn’t. What came now by email was a demand for £20 to cover their administrative costs of requesting my data from DVLA and sending me the payment demand. I had two weeks to pay, or it would be £100. I saw red and decided I would leave it as long as possible before dealing with it.
When I returned to it, the email had disappeared from my inbox. Was it one of those with a self-destruct time limit on it? Is that even possible? I don’t know. All I do know is that I couldn’t find it anywhere, not in my inbox, not in the bin, not in spam, not in any file anywhere. So, I contacted the parasite company’s ‘customer service’ email addressed to request they resend it which duly came several days later. Again, I delayed to the last possible moment before activating the second-stage appeal process with an organisation called POPLA ( Parking on Private Land Appeals). This time I sent the photograph of the ticket and a photograph of the parasite company’s demand letter which showed that I had paid within five minutes of entering the car park and left within the period I had paid for. That is where I am at the moment.
Who, or what, is POPLA? It is an organisation set up in 2012 by the British Parking Association (BPA) Ltd as the Independent Appeals Service for members of its Approved Operator Scheme (AOS). POPLA is independent in the sense that it is operated by a different party, but it is paid for by members of the BPA AOS. The service was originally provided by London Councils, but as of October 2015, is being run by Ombudsman Services Ltd., a private dispute resolution company.
So, in the first stage of appeal the parasite company is marking its own homework and in the second stage it is – marking its own homework but at one level removed.
I took advice from a family member who is in the legal profession. His opinion: ‘just pay their £20, it’s an expensive hobby you’re embarking on’. Too late. Besides the whole thing offends my sense of natural justice. I see it as a tort, extortion, demanding money with menaces – the threat of bailiffs and/or court summons. We’ll see how the second appeal goes but right now I feel encouraged by the success of young Rosey Hudson in her fight against Excel Parking.
It would have been great if the late Karen-Ruth Skölmli had lived to complete her Sovereign Natural Empowerment course as she was planning to provide a guide for how to deal with parking charges, speeding fines and the like under Common Law but it was not to be. However, there is a wealth of information available on the internet such as Parking Cowboys and in YouTube videos about how other people have gone about fighting off the parasites.
As an aside, we are well used to councils using parking ticket machines that do not give change, so they benefit from people not having the exact money if they wish to use cash. By the same token pay-and-display car parks require you to guess how long you will be parked which often results in over-payment for the actual period. Since the move to paying by credit card or phone over the internet it should have been entirely possible to pay on exit from barrier car parks for the EXACT period of time one has been parked, to the second. An hourly rate could be displayed and the charge made on exit for the actual period parked, for example, one hour and twenty-nine minutes. Not two hours, one hour and twenty-nine minutes pro rata. Why hasn’t this been done?
Another factor one notices going about towns is that the local authorities are employing a lot of migrants as parking wardens. Now, I don’t think this is a good idea, for obvious reasons. It has happened because they will do the work for less than a native Briton, but it is surely a potential local flash point as protest about our replacement reaches boiling point.
That’s local government but the worse aspect is without doubt the behaviour of the parking parasite companies who use CCTV. My hatred of them is visceral, and I would happily see the ‘Bladerunners’ target the private car parks they control once they have finished with Khan’s ULEZ.
I hope no one here is, or has been, a director of a parking parasite company.
Rant Mode Off.
