Scammed, ‘entrapped’ and led down a bureaucratic rabbit hole
06:00, 28 Jun 2026
A sign on the A4 Portway south-east bound, warning drivers about the Clean Air Zone(Image: Google Maps)
A couple driving through Bristol have suffered a Clean Air Zone nightmare, driving into the zone by mistake before paying the charge to a sham website and then making a legitimate payment but for the wrong date.
James Faulkner and his wife were travelling from Witney near Oxford to Glastonbury on a day trip at the end of May earlier this year. When they got off the M4, they were faced with the familiar sight of gridlock on the M5.
Seeking a workaround, they travelled along the Portway, crossing the Plimsoll Bridge before carrying on their journey southwards, briefly passing through the Clean Air Zone as they did so. Mr Faulkner said signs early on the Portway gave the impression he would only be charged if he went into the city centre.
“We came to signs that were saying city centre clean air (and) we weren’t going to the city centre,” he said.
“It looked like on the map that my wife was looking at, that we were just gonna skim across (the edge of the city) then go back out into the countryside again.
“Then suddenly it went round a bit of a corner, and there was a sign saying clean air zone. I just felt it was entrapment, and a bit of a dirty trick, really, that’s how I felt about it.”
The Faulkners are not the first people to be caught out by the so-called ‘Portway CAZ Trap’. In 2024, Gloucestershire man Adam Soble challenged being charged the fee in similar circumstances, and won.
To make matters worse for the couple from Witney, when Mr Faulkner’s wife went to pay the charge on their arrival in Glastonbury, she searched ‘pay Bristol clean air zone’. The top link on her search engine took her to an unofficial website, cleancityair.co.uk . She paid £14 to that website rather than the charge amount of £9. The website appears now to have been taken offline, with a ‘500 Internal Server’ error message when you try to access it.
The unlucky couple’s bank advised them to cancel the card they used to pay the apparently sham charge and refunded them the £14. Mr Faulkner said he thought more needed to be done to raise awareness of the prevalence of such websites.
“What they (the council) need to do is warn people about it, because honestly, if I fell for it, someone else could fall for it, and then they’re not getting the money paid, and then, of course, it leads people to being fined,” he said.
To round off a miserable experience travelling through Bristol, Mrs Faulkner then went on the Bristol City Council website to pay the official toll once the dust had settled with the fake charge. Unfortunately, she paid for the wrong date by mistake.
Mr Faulkner said his attempts to get a refund had led to an infuriating journey down the BCC bureaucratic rabbit hole. He said he had been passed between two different departments, was sent links to submit evidence that did not work and made failed attempts to have the matter resolved by BCC chief executive Nick Hibberd via email.
In one of those emails, Mr Faulkner wrote: “This whole experience has been traumatising and extremely stressful. I will never forget this day, and I never want to come back to Bristol.”
Bristol City Council generally does not refund people who mistakenly pay the Clean Air Zone Charge for a date when they did not travel. BCC was contacted for comment.