UKH

Is POPLA legit? 

My wife and friend arrived at a car park in dark. Couldn’t read the instruction signage so checked with the venue how to pay. They went back to signage with a torch (there was lighting triggered by a sensor that went out very quickly). They then went back to the car and dowloaded the app. App downloaded, they tried but failed twice to pay, but eventually did - £5.

Turns out she took 26 minutes to pay and your allowed ten!  They are now demanding £100. Robbing thriving gets.  She can appeal via POPLA. 

First & most important rule: NEVER say who was driving the vehicle unless you're actually asked in court or it needs to be disclosed for a court of law. The car park companies have to "go to" the registered keeper and there are precise rules & timings about how they must do this, etc.

Get onto the relevant bit of the MoneySavingExpert website, or there's another site (whose name I can't remember) that advises about these things. They are both very good at advising how to deal with car park INVOICES (which is what this is unless it is a Council penalty notice - unlikely) that have been improperly/unfairly issued.

The ten minutes is a grace period - not sure whether this is a legal requirement (it is for a Council's Penalty notice) or a code of practice thing but I'll bet it's been upheld in court judgements.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/parking-tickets-fines-parki...

Pepipoo ?  (dot com)

I think Money Saving Expert is probably the better of the two though in this case.  (Based on a quick scan of both, and having had some very good advice via MSE a few years ago.)  This is one area where UKC really isn't the fount of all knowledge.

I have just this very second paid those Parkingeye scum.

Three years ago I was able to refuse to pay, but Parkingeye have it sewn up legally.

You could try the Pepipoo website if you want to try your luck but the law has changed in the favour of parking companies who do this.

http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?

Good luck 😪

Another one to beware of is the new drop-off fee for London Heathrow (and I think most British airports). I dropped off my daughter in the New Year at Terminal 5 and was surprised to get a parking fine a couple of days ago through the mail. It's now 5 pounds just to drop someone off. (I was in the drop-off zone for just a few minutes.) The fine is 80 pounds, or 40 pounds if one pays within two weeks. There are instructions to pay on line. All seems to work until I pressed the "pay now" button. Then the system crashed with an error message. I tried again today and this button was now working, but rejected my my normal debit card, which is working everywhere else; finally, I managed to pay with another card. My guess is they have built in a clever algorithm to make it difficult to pay, to maximise the chances that you will miss the two-week deadline and end up paying the 80 quid instead of the 40.

Contact the venue,  explain this (and show payment) and ask them to contact the parking firm to say you had permission/ reasonable cause.  

We will do this, as well as other advice.

Thanks all.

Thanks for the heads up  

I once went over the Dart toll bridge thingy. Paid afterwards, with the time zone. Then got a fine. When I paid, I’d actually paid for a future journey (rather than the one I’d made). They let me off. 
 

That's certainly the case with Manchester (it's been a while now).  The was a guy who lost it early on, ended up in court and the judge stopped just short of saying running over the parking attendant was fair game:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-45599295

I made exactly the same mistake with the Dartford crossing a few years ago, they let me off too.

I thought the law had been changed to make private parking fines legally enforceable.

The ULEZ and Dartford bridge both allow you one strike - quite a nice letter essentially saying next time...

I fought the f*ckers and lost,  though the judge was gracious in delivering the verdict. I suggest you pay up and save your self many hours of heartache and late night forum trawling.

PoPLA is legitimate.  However it works to its own set of rules, which are arcane and not at all user friendly.  It occasionally comes up with a completely ridiculous result, because it's not really a court at all but a collection of assessors who sometimes go off script, but generally if you understand the rules it's reliable enough.

I would suggest you have a more than fair chance of winning at PoPLA, given what you've said in your first post - you've got poor illumination and a malfunctioning app.  But do not in any circumstances try to write your appeal by yourself: you WILL get it wrong.

You need specialist advice which you will not get on a climbing forum.  Go to PePiPoo or MSE.

Kinda sorta.  It's no longer safe to just ignore the tickets, but they're only enforceable if the companies who issue them have properly followed the rules which they hardly ever do.  (Because it's still more profitable to dish out loads of dodgy tickets and bully people into paying up with a series of threatening letters than it is to issue fewer properly legitimate ones.)

They need to go through the companies appeal system, the company will dismiss it with a cut and paste letter, that doesn't really deal with the facts of the appeal. However, they will issue a POPLA reference. Submit what you have written here to POPLA with evidence such as a photo of the dark signage and evidence of payment. I got notification within 2 days that the parking company did not wish to challenge my account and the charge was dismissed.

In my case it was a free car park with a 90 limit, unless you were a customer in one of a number of restaurants that the car park served in addition to other uses. If you were a customer at one of the restaurants you got three hours, which we were. However, to do this you were asked to use a "console" which wasn't installed until three weeks after our visit.

I think it depends on both the parking company and the venue.

Place I go started charging last year but gives 4 hours free for people using the centre if you enter the reg at the reception desk. I have managed to forget on a couple of occasions (generally go 1-2 times a week) and in both cases appealed on the grounds of being a numpty providing the booking email reference (possibly helps that I generally bulk book so they get to see a months worth of slots) and got a ticket cancellation both times without any hassle beyond the crap webform.

Definitely do this. I had an issue where I parked in a marina car park, with a complex payment system. Two older couples in front of us were really struggling with entering details and payment, so we helped them get sorted, then sorted ourselves. This all took about 15 minutes, but we paid and had out day out. A few days later we had a penalty charge for basically not paying quick enough, so I contacted the marina manager, explained the situation, and he got the charge cancelled. The land owners can be reasonable and understanding about these situations. The parking firms are not! 

Often it is within the power and inclination of the landowner to cancel a PCN.  Sometimes they do not have that right (some PPC contracts don't allow for it) and sometimes they just don't want to.

It's always worth approaching the landowner, but the PoPLA appeal is strictly time limited so do this in parallel.

I think as your wife brought a ticket and had legitimate cause for the delay, I cant imagine if it ever went to court a judge wouldnt find in your favour?

I suspect parking company wouldnt pursue you in court anyway, unless they think they have a very good chance of winning.

I've had one in the past which I thought was on slightly dodgy grounds (5 mins late on 4 hour ticket, cause had issue with one of my children which delayed us, and received a PCN). When contacted by parking company I explained the situation, and said I'd see them in court, never heard anything more from them. 

I would hope that you'd win this one if it came to county court.  But better to knock it on the head with a landowner cancellation or a PoPLA win first.

How long ago?  Do bear in mind that a known tactic they use is to wait five-and-a-bit years and then issue a claim (the deadline for a county court claim is six years).  They're hoping you have moved in the interim, so you never receive the claim forms, and thus they win by default.  What lovely people they are.

Wasnt aware of that! Cheeky bastards.

Honestly cant remember, must have been more than 6 years ago though, kids were pretty young at the time.

Indeed.  Civil Enforcement Ltd, for example, used to have the contract for Co-Op car parks, and systematically waited for five and a half years for all their outstanding PCNs before batch issuing small claims.  This tactic is why MoneySavingExpert and PePiPoo have a regular stream of threads where people have just discovered they have an outstanding CCJ issued to an old address, and only discover it when they get rejected for a mortgage or credit card.  At that point the easiest and fastest way to get rid of it is to pay up - which is what the PPC is hoping for.

These are not reasonable or fair people - they are the ex cowboy clampers, now forced to operate (just about) within the law.

If all the documents and wotnot went to a previous address and you genuinely had no idea it was happening the easiest and fastest (and cheapest!) way to get rid of it is to get the judgement set aside isn't it?  It puts the claimant back to square one, so they can pursue their claim again from the beginning if they want to, using the correct address.

(Also if everything works as it should that's a better result for the credit rating, as it doesn't just satisfy the CCJ, it makes it like it never happened in the first place.)

I think the point of delaying the claim so long for the parking sharks is simply that people won't remember where they parked years previously, won't have kept receipts etc., the shop may have different staff or have disappeared altogether, it's too late to go and take photos of inadequate signage, all that kind of stuff.

You could well be right.  I've not looked into that end of the process in any detail at all; I've made a bit of a hobby of helping friends and family beat them at the first appeal or at PoPLA, before things progress to a county court.

Have fought a few over the years since it became harder to win, I’d suggest if you had to go outside with a torch to find out how to pay that the signage was insufficient and popla would probably come to a similar conclusion, however you need to follow the correct process and it can take a while so it also depends how much you value your time..