‘I GOT TWO PRIVATE CAR PARK TICKETS – HERE’S HOW I GOT OUT OF PAYING THEM’
Have you been charged unfairly by a private car parking company? Email [email protected] and let us know what happened.
Internet forums are full of debate over how to get out of paying parking tickets from private car parks – and whether these tickets are enforceable at all. So when I got not one, but two, private parking tickets in the space of two months, I decided to put this to the test.
I am happy to report that I wriggled out of both – and I’ll tell you how.
On a rainy day in early October, I pulled up in a car park in Muswell Hill, north London, and rushed out with my seven-month-old son to a bring-your-baby film screening at the local cinema.
I did pay for parking, but in my haste and under the load of a wriggling baby and associated paraphernalia, I entered the car park code incorrectly by one digit. Instead of typing 59485 and paying £3.90 for four hours, I typed 59486 and paid £1.80 for three hours.
This was unbeknownst to me until a parking ticket arrived in the post, hitting me with a £60 fine. My appeal – on the basis that I had paid but had made an honest mistake – was rejected.
At this stage, I could have complained to Popla, the ombudsman for private parking, but a friend told me that private car parks eventually give up chasing unpaid tickets, so I did nothing.
Over the coming months, increasingly aggressive letters landed on my doormat, first from the car park operator and later from a debt recovery agency. My £2.10 honest mistake had turned into a £170 fine.
Meanwhile, I had incurred another private parking ticket. This one was from the car park of a leisure centre in Hendon, where I had parked for less than an hour to take my children – a babe-in-arms and a two-year-old – to soft play on a Sunday morning.
I’ll admit, my excuse here is less solid. Payment included scanning a QR code on my phone, which I did, but I must have got distracted or lost signal before the payment went through.
Again, the first I knew of this unpaid 50p was a letter asking me to pay a £60 fine, which later rose to £100 before developing into a series of threatening debt recovery letters demanding £170.
If you feel that it cannot be fair for a parking transgression of a few pennies to turn into an aggressively-enforced fine worth hundreds of pounds and the repeated threat of bailiffs knocking at your door, the law agrees – or it did, until pressure from the private parking industry put an end to that.
The Private Parking Code of Practice, which became law in February 2022, capped fines and banned debt recovery fees. Greg Knight, the Conservative MP who introduced the bill, spoke out at the time against private car parks’ “poor signage, unreasonable terms, exorbitant fines, aggressive demands for payment and opaque appeals process”.
However, this legislation was “temporarily” withdrawn – although it has yet to return – just four months later following a legal challenge from parking firms that took issue with the cap on charges and ban on debt recovery fees – which, you could argue, is the strongest case for why the Code must exist.
Last month, the main private car park industry bodies published their own code of conduct, no doubt in an attempt to stave off the resurrection of official legislation. Don’t be fooled by this apparent magnanimity – the self-regulated cap on charges is twice as high as the Code’s and there is no restriction on adding debt recovery fees.
When the law was introduced in 2022, private parking operators were issuing around 22,000 parking tickets a day. In the two years since, that daily total has risen to 35,000. More than 32 million tickets have been issued since the legislation was passed.
‘I took the car parks on’
After months of ignoring debt recovery letters plastered in red ink and all caps – which a less obstinate or more easily spooked person may have given in to much sooner – I was forced to respond when one of the car park operators sued me. The charge had risen to £263, meaning the total amount payable for both tickets now added up to £433.
At this point I enlisted the help of Gary Rycroft, The Telegraph’s Ask A Lawyer columnist.
I put my defence to the civil court (note – it is not a criminal offence and the worst that can happen is you have to pay the fine plus costs) and offered to pay the £2.10 discrepancy between the costs of the car park I used and the one where I paid by mistake.
This was accepted by the court, saving me £58 on the cost of the original ticket. I did have to pay £125 in court fees, but this was still less than the overall debt recovery charge and, more importantly, a moral victory.
Deciding I didn’t want to be sued again, I wrote a strongly-worded letter to the car park that had issued my second ticket. I made it clear that I would not be paying the £170 fine, which was 33,900pc more than the original cost of parking.
I said the car park’s claims on its website to be “compassionate”, “fair” and “ethical” directly contradicted its actions of issuing penalties 340 times higher than parking fee.
I promised to write to the leisure centre which employed this company to run its car park, telling them about its unsavoury practices. And in recognition of time passed – six months by this stage – I offered to pay £20.
Two days later, they cancelled the ticket and charged me nothing.
I wouldn’t advise you to ignore the letters as long as I did, or let it get as far as the small claims court. But if you get hit with one of these hated private parking tickets, don’t be bullied into paying it straight away. See them as invoices relating to a breach of contract, rather than legally enforceable fines.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in the 2015 Barry Beavis case that £85 was not an excessive charge for staying 56 minutes too long in a car park, it is harder to argue that the fines are disproportionate. But this doesn’t mean you have no choice but to pay it.
Check if there’s a mistake on your ticket, retain evidence of mitigating circumstances and take pictures of unclear signs or bay markings. Write to the car park operator and tell them you won’t pay and why.
If that doesn’t work, appeal through the car park’s official channel and if that fails, check if it belongs to a trade body and appeal there. If you have still had no success, and you believe the ticket was unfair, you will have to decide whether you have the energy to fight it in court, should the parking company pursue you.
I resolved to take the car parks on – and saved myself hundreds of pounds.
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