Woman’s £1,906 bill over five-minute parking rule

15 comments

1. I’ve parked in this car park before. Their online payment system is dreadful. Absolute scammers.

2. She is the “author of her own misfortune”. What condescending, pretentious little arsehole wrote that little quip?  

   Seems like a brutal, unrelenting, and bullying company that nearby companies are aware of and MPs have contacted before regarding their terms and methods.  

   She paid every day. The machine was broken, so while she downloaded the app to try and pay, it took longer than five minutes to pay, so they sent her a PCN. She still paid for the full day ticket in advance and got a PCN! 

   Excel Parking, perhaps for anyone that wants to know who to avoid.

3. >Excel also claims Miss Hudson could have paid using cash at the machine, and said “there was at least one working pay machine on site”.

   Surely they’d know how many of the machines were working, not just taking a guess about it.

4. I work around a lot and I’ve lost count of the amount of poorly signed car parks. Always run by private companies. Always aggressive in their correspondence.

   And the apps… Boy do I hate the apps with the insane extra charge to send you a text.

5. She paid for a full day’s parking each time so surely it’s irrelevant if it took longer than 5 minutes. Hope she gets a sympathetic judge. These companies are predatory.

6. Sounds like an easy win in court.

   She paid a little late, but still paid. I thought these “fines” were supposed to be for companies to recover loss of earnings? There has been no loss for them here

7. I’ve had two pcns. Used the advice and templates from money saving expert. Got both overturned after ignoring them till they sent a letter before action

8. A faulty pay machine is not the customer’s fault. She took reasonable steps to attempt to pay and she did. The fact she was over the 5 minute threshold is irrelevant.

   This is bullying and extortion by the parking company and they know it – simple as that. This shit from the jumped up little Hitlers who run private parking companies needs to be ended.

9. I’ll never use an Excel carpark unless I absolutely have no choice.

10. Pure extortion, I don’t know if it’s possible but a judge should really turn around and whack them with a massive charge of some kind to dissuade them from such predatory behaviour in future.

11. My father in-law got “caught” because the IT equipment, their end, didn’t process the payment correctly. I sent them evidence from his browser history that he had visited their payment site and it must have glitched. They are criminals that need legislating. This was on M5, he had broken down in the service area so was going to go over the 3 hour waiting limit or whatever.

12. From the little bit of law I did ages ago:

    This is Civil law
    This is Contract law
    A contract needs to be knowingly entered into – the signs need to be clear and obvious

    Then it gets a bit grey….

    For a Contract to be enforceable, it needs to be fair (ish) to both sides – you can’t exploit someone/thing, and say “you signed a contract”

    Penalties need to reflect the losses incurred- you can’t charge £100 for a £3.30 loss (assuming no other costs were incurred)

    Pretty sure they don’t have a leg to stand on if it goes to court.

    BUT, as the Conservative government gave the parking companies a free hand if they signed up to the charter, who knows………

13. I was sent a parking fine because I’d accidentally put my personal number plate into the system instead of the hire car I was using (my own was automatically inputted by the app and I didn’t think to change it).  I explained to the company, so my fine was reduced to £20.  But why?  I had paid!  £20 for the cost of sending two letters about it?  

     A depressing thing when coming home from holiday this year was immediately being bombarded by signage and CCTV threatening you with fines if you don’t pay the ridiculous airport drop off fees.  Truly rip off Britain.

14. Parking enforcement companies are run by criminals all over the country. Legal extortion.

    Should not be allowed. 

15. Currently have a parking company taking me to small claims over similar nonsense and I’m fairly confident that I’ll get it overturned.

    In my view, in an unemotional, passive observer sense, the fines aren’t proportionate. In a system in which someone chancing it gets caught 10% of the time by an inspector, then you need the fine to be at least 10x the actual parking fee otherwise everyone would just not bother. You need high fines to act as a deterrent.

    Once you have ANPR cameras meaning that literally every single infraction is caught and punished, you don’t need any of this, you can just charge the original parking fee + a small amount for the admin of sending the letter out, which is what should really be happening nowadays.

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