A “five minutes to pay” parking rule has left a woman facing a £1,906 bill.
Rosey Hudson is being taken to court by the operator of a car park in Derby for not paying her tickets within five minutes of arrival.
She said poor signal on her mobile phone meant she had to use Wi-Fi at her place of work to purchase tickets on an app, paying £3.30 each day starting in February 2023.
But she has since been sent 10 penalty charge notices (PCNs) worth £100 each for not paying for parking within five minutes.
Excel Parking, which runs the Copeland Street car park, is demanding Miss Hudson pay £1,905.76 to clear nine outstanding PCNs, which includes a £70 “debt recovery” charge for each one, eight per cent annual interest and £195 in court costs.
Now, so far as we’re told at least, the lady paid for her parking. Every day. She claims – claims – that WiFi at the parking lot was bad. So, she got to work then used the WiFi there to do so.
They’re now charging her all the penalties for not having paid within the 5 minutes.
There’s some cretinous jobsworth behind this:
In a statement, the spokesman said: “The signage at the car park made it clear that it was ‘Pay on Entry’ and that there was a maximum period of five minutes to purchase the parking tariff.
“This is one of the specific terms and conditions for use of the car park. It is the driver’s responsibility to read and understand the terms.
“It seems that Miss Hudson is the author of her own misfortune.”
Murder’s too good for that sort of person, no?
It seems the car park is designed for all the diversity contributors we are forced to pay for who are all, like our Prime Minister, astute lawyers who can read, learn and inwardly digest a legal text at 100 paces in 3.2 minutes…
It’s far, far worse in the (in this parish) much-derided civil law jurisdictions, where debts come due at the end of service provision rather than five minutes after service provision starts, and one-sided non-negotiable contractual penalties are subject to a conscionability test.
Also worth asking, if the car parking company claims a debt comes due five minutes after entry why it is unable to accept settlement of this in cash. In England, legal tender must be accepted for settlement of any debt. Not having the right signal for the right app on the right phone.
A spokesman for the company said she was “the author of her own misfortune” because she had taken “between 14 and 190 minutes” to purchase tickets
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A spokesman for the company said she was “the author of her own misfortune” because she had taken “between 14 and 190 minutes” to purchase tickets.
…
Excel Parking maintains that the five-minute payment rule was clearly advertised and that Miss Hudson could have paid in cash, which she says was not possible because the payment machine was out of order.
The organisation may well be awash with jobsworth mindsets but I’m going with “our gaff, our rules” on this one. Park elsewhere
Will
In two minds about this one. It does look like the rules are created in the hope of being able to apply penalties. Similar to how some buses make it inconvenient to use contactless cards when the max fare is £2.00. They’re hoping you’ll forget to tap it when you get off so they can fine you.
I have come across several car parks where the only option is to pay by phone yet there is no phone signal within a 10 minute walk of the car park. I accept that having machine cash would be a problem in remote locations. They probably don’t put a credit card reader on the ticket machine due to the lack of phone signal…………
One of the things the court will consider is reasonableness. The man on the Clapham omnibus test. Is the plaintiff behaving reasonably? She paid and will have evidence, presumably. The five minute rule is, to a reasonable man, overly restrictive and being applied in a pedantic manner. I don’t think it would survive a court case. With whom would the man on the Clapham omnibus side here?
Don’t forget that a last resort is the “Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Act”, although the fact that she didn’t use the parking appeals tribunal route (irrespective of the outcome), may count against her.
I’ve nothing to say about the situation, but the woman is a babe
This is typical of the version of capitalism we have nowadays. Things run by grasping arseholes who are just out to rook the public because they can (utility companies, banks, lawyers and estate agents I’m looking at you). Its why capitalism is getting a bad name. A lot of it is down the the fact that the lawyers have taken over now, so the idea of justice is out of the window and we get rule by lawyers instead.
We ought to have a version of the law whereby ordinary people could take on companies like this and take them to the cleaners. A bank of ordinary people sitting on a constant basis in every town who you can book a case in front of and the company (if it is such you are suing) have to send the CEO (or largest shareholder maybe) along to defend themselves. No lawyers, just actual people putting their case to an independent group of their peers. No using contract law to hide behind, just the simple idea ‘is it fair?’
@Jim – Oh, I don’t know. Ovo have been completely useless shitbags as far as customer complaints are concerned, but I make a killing out of them by using their ineptness against them.
I write a complaint by email and letter both, sending the letter to their head office. They ignore it, I wait 8 weeks and then send a request asking for a “Letter of Deadlock” over the complaint and they offer my £60 to settle the matter.
It’s like printing money.
“Murder’s too good for that sort of person, no?”
It is indeed. Murdering this type of jobsworth would be wrong.
We need the jobsworth to be struck down by some apparently extraneous factor which allows us to believe in divine or karmic retribution.
@JG: I’m not surprised you mentioned OVO, my mother has unfortunately got them as an energy supplier and a bigger bunch of malevolent and moronic twats you’d be hard to find.
Jim @ 11.05 agree 100%. Wanted to update my will. Saw ad on YouTube = £19.99 for a simple will or £39.99 if there are beneficiaries. Pay the £39.99.
At the end of a 50 minute phone call I was given the option of £996 in one lump sum or pay installments over 4 or 12 months.
Not thinking too clearly and swayed by ‘protect your loved ones’ and ‘peace of mind’ I paid £100 deposit.
Had a think about it during the cooling off period and told them I wanted to look at other providers as the cost was way more than I anticipated. OK, it now included lasting power of attorney and a discretionary trust but the individual costs of these were not mentioned .
A bloke from the cancellations department called – £996 got knocked down to £650. Then £400 if I just wanted the trust set up. I asked ‘why didn’t you offer these terms when I first enquired – it just seems an attempt to screw money out of the unwary’. The reply I got was waffle. I told them I won’t be giving any of my money too a company that does business that way and got a full refund. Fuck ’em.
I’d be prepared to take it to court if I was her. That lawyer who kept getting people off speeding tickets would be a good bet.
I would be interested to know how they can draft a will with no beneficiaries. Not only misleading shysters but clearly incompetent too.
Go to a proper lawyer and spend 30 – 50% of the amount they wanted to get the job done properly.
Maybe she hadn’t heard of it. I hadn’t until I read that comment.
@BiW
Sad but true that ignorance of applicable law is not a defence.
“ Every day. She claims – claims – that WiFi at the parking lot was bad. So, she got to work then used the WiFi there to do so.”
Claims… indeed.
Where there is no WiFi signal, mobile phones default to cellular mode. However – at least on iPhones – permission has to be given in Settings for an app to use Mobile Data. And if you try to use an app with Mobile data switched off, there is a message to that effect and a prompt to go to Settings to switch it on. it seems likely this will be so on androids too.
Parking apps can be used for on-street parking at meters where there is no WiFi, so mobile data must be used there.
So her story is a bit iffy. I suppose there is a saving on the time her car was parked and when she paid, which may have put it in a cheaper time band.
Nah. Too small and not a criminal matter for legal representation.
Small claim court is the way to go. I’ve done this for parking schysters before, they provide a load of legalese waffle to you, but then when you serve the “writ” (N1 Claim Form or at least it was last time), then they never file a defence and you get the default judgement against them.
Alternately, they file a defence which is nonsense and don’t turn up in court, so again you get a default judgement against them.
Since they can’t claim solicitors fees in court (leastways not enough to cover the actual costs), they end up either giving way or giving in. Just not worth the costs of defence for most cases.
If you’re an indigenous Brit it doesn’t, if you’re a rubber boat invading Mohammedan, they seem to get away with it all the time.
“Sad but true that ignorance of applicable law is not a defence.”
Unless you are suitably diverse, then its a very good defence that the law 100% accepts:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268395/Adil-Rashid-Paedophile-claimed-Muslim-upbringing-meant-didnt-know-illegal-sex-girl-13.html
I do wonder how you can reasonably have a £100 late fee (I guess it can’t be called a fine since it isn’t from government) with a £70 “recovery charge” tacked on.
Does that parking company run a local monopoly? More generally, what, if anything, should be done about local monopolies?
Because there is nothing in law to prevent you filing whatever “service charges” you can make up. Enforcing it though, is a whole other matter.
I’m surprised they don’t have a “Just because we can fee fee”.
I seem to recall that that bastion of business Ryanair used to charge you about £6 per person per flight for credit and debit cards with the only exception being their own Ryanair credit card.
Ryanair defiant over credit card surcharges crackdown
@John B
You have probably misread it
“She said poor signal on her mobile phone meant she had to use Wi-Fi at her place of work to purchase tickets on an app”
Given her age and the “Instagram” type picture on the article I have no doubt that she will always have Mobile Data turned on.
The reasonableness test for me would be is she “remembering” to pay every day she is at work and how much free parking has she been getting by paying late every day. If it’s a daily parking charge and she can show she pays every day when she is at work fine. If however she is paying by the full hour or she sometimes forgets her actions are not so reasonable.
I find her version of events rather suspect. If she couldn’t get a mobile signal then none of the other users of the car park can. If the ticket machine takes cash is permanently out of order, how is the car park making a living?
If she can enter & leave the car, it obviously doesn’t have barriers. So it’s just drive in & park. And with that situation, there’s a lot of people will park not pay & if they get caught, try use an excuse why they haven’t. People do it at supermarkets all the time. Regard them as all day free car parks & then wonder why they get clamped. “I just bought these three items but it took four hours to choose them”. There was an office I was involved with in London, had its own parking area on the front. People would use it because “I’m just going to the bank for a few minutes.” Except their few minutes would be 3 hours of blocking other cars in. Why the majority who do this are women is explicable.
andyf: worse than the no signal is the rapidly expanding hordes of car parks that refuse to take a debit card and demand you stand in the rain and install yet anuvver parking app on a smart phone to park just the once in this god-forsaken town you’ll never visit again. That happened to me a few weeks ago, I just turned around, got back in the van and drove off. It took me ten minutes to find a proper insert-coin-of-the-realm car park, and only 20 minutes eaten into my buffer time to get to my site visit.
That 5 minute payment rule does make it look like the firm are looking to catch people out.
I’d have more sympathy with her if she’d challenged the first fixed charge and paid every time within, say, 30 minutes.
Good Glod, a grand for a will? I went to my solicitor who did my conveyancing, their “wills” chap quoted £100 quid for a standard “all to named beneficiary” will; I need to specify research papers and stuff beneficiaries, so it was £200.
At the end of a 50 minute phone call I was given the option of £996 in one lump sum or pay installments over 4 or 12 months.
Blimey, Adolff, they look like a right bunch of shysters.
We’ve just updated our wills and set-up 2 x financial and 2 x health powers of attorney with a big local firm and it was a lot less than that, including the registration fees for the powers of attorney.
I did the lasting power of attorney myself – the government have an easy to use website. £82 each (one for property / financial, the other for health and care).
I don’t object to anyone making a profit, but to me it seemed like they were taking the piss.
In England, legal tender must be accepted for settlement of any debt. Not having the right signal for the right app on the right phone.
Nice try, no coconut. For any outstanding debt, maybe. But not for any transaction. Any transaction will be subject to the terms entered into at the time of the transaction. It’ll likely be in the T&C’s displayed in the car park. It probably says pay via app or you can pay cash via the machine & you accept the transaction by parking for more than 5 minutes or paying. If the machine isn’t functioning, it means that facility is not available. Not that you can park without paying. Either use the app or don’t park. If you can’t use the app don’t park.
I just read the whole Torygraph story.
Her photo had the fuck edited out of it, so the chances she doesn’t have data on her phone approach zero.
“I was trying to get reception and wasn’t able to, so I got my Wi-Fi within the store and paid online through their app,”
So her place of work seems to be a store. By the look of her, on the cosmetics counter.
My guess would be she’s habitually late for work, so leaves paying until she gets a chance to use her phone. And that’s not always immediately. It wouldn’t the least surprise me if the car parking company has been letting her get away with it, because a delayed payment would show up as time she paid differing from the entry window. So someone’s been manually cancelling the fine liability for her. Maybe they left or just got pissed off having to do it every day she’s late.
Here’s another little example of how the UK has become a shysters paradise, all protected by the lawyer class:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c978jqvjzvlo
If there was any justice the owners of the management company would come home one day and find their houses burnt to the ground.
@ Jim
The management company, Firstport, is owned (indirectly through a sequence of holding companies) by a partnership in Switzerland. Firstport and its sister companies own a poerfolio of estate management companies around the UK – this should, in theory, enable them to manage the lot more efficiently but in practice their accounting department is incompetent.
“The management company, Firstport, is owned (indirectly through a sequence of holding companies) by a partnership in Switzerland. Firstport and its sister companies own a portfolio of estate management companies around the UK”
And people laugh at me when I say limited companies are a shysters dream……..
@ Jim
They don’t have to be, but anything can be misused. [My son’s standard illustration is that di-hydrogen monoxide in excessive doses was found to cause cancer in laboratory rats …]
I prefer to shop local and to hire local tradesmen as far as possible as they never know whether or not I might be friend of someone in their “local”
Did the cancer form before or after the rats drowned?
Jim is right, I had a Google and these guys are cowboys whose business model is “take the piss”. May or may not be legal, but people like this are the reason the Greeks invented the ostrakismos. The parking equivalent of doorsteeping shysters who con old ladies into signing bad bargains.
Anne Robinson used to put fear into people who ran businesses like this on Watchdog. Bring back the 90’s.
PS – The last known ostracism was that of a politician named Hyperbolus in circa 417 BC
Can we bring back this excellent custom and use it to get rid of Twattamanthius and Cuntro?
ISTM, that if payment was made within a couple of hours, and before any notification of default, that there is no intent to avoid payment demonstrated. Any penalty should be quashed, and any “penalty” applied should be applied instead against the thieving bastards who are seeking to extract money by devious and unfair means.
OT – Midsomer Norton mentioned in Auto Shenanigans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YZVD-XUfTA
Fwickid sweet awesome
@JG They didn’t introduce the oxydane through the lungs.. 😛
But yeah.. water causes cancer in the right amounts.
Not surprising when you dilute your cellular plasma that much. It’s meant to function within certain parameters of salinity. Go beyond those boundaries either way, and you get Interesting Times.
With our bodies being able to cope with too high salinity much better than with too low.
And there is a “sweet spot” where too much water causes some classes of DNA locks to be able to be knocked loose. Quite a few of them disabling “growth” and “development” sequences that are locked down for very good reasons once they’ve had their use.
Take it further, and you actually kill yourself directly. And it’s not a nice death either…
Of course, the Health Freaks who are on the “Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate” until their piss is crystal clear train are roughly in that Sweet Spot…
Which will be fun in a decade ot two as their bodies start….mushrooming…
That starting point, Beechen Cliff, is a couple of hundreds yeards uphill from the parentals place where I’m sitting right now. And Combe Hay and the locks – was wandering around out there only a few weeks back.
the thieving bastards who are seeking to extract money by devious and unfair means.
Yeah well, everybody resents not being being able to park just where they want to, when they want to. And a lot of them just do that anyway & then moan bitterly when they get penalised for doing so. Often without any consideration for the inconvenience they cause others.
Car parks are businesses. The price is set by the market. If it’s high it’s due to lack of competition. Do you expect a business not to exploit its asset to the maximum? The prices will be set at the clearing prices. So, effectively, they’re set by the people park their cars.
As for this particular case, the car park has conditions of use which the lass has breached. They seem pretty reasonable. It’s roughly the same time as you have when you feed your ticket into the machine to post pay, to get your car out of the parking. Paying by app seems to be a popular demand nowadays. No doubt the same people would be bitchin if they couldn’t. It’s certainly rough on people like me don’t want to use apps. What’s wrong with cash? I don’t want to leave paw prints of my movements & actions everywhere I go. I don’t even like paying by card. My privacy is important to me.
The level of the “fines”? Have you noticed the level of the fines the local authorities impose when you breach the T&C’s for parking in the street? And LS’s definitely regard them as a source of revenue. I wonder what proportion of car park users breach the T&C’s in a manner entitles the car park to fine? I would guess very few. Like I said in a comment above, I don’t buy her story. The pay cash facility might have been out of order once. But the CP’s not going to cut itself off from its revenue. It’ll allow for not every user being able or wanting to pay via app. I just think it was the usual case of perceived entitlement. Managing cases of people breaching the T&C’s no doubt costs the CP money. Having the system enforces the T&C’s no doubt does. Cameras & number plate readers don’t come cheap. If people were honest, they wouldn’t need to do all that, would they? So maybe they’re just loading part of the cost on the very few people try to bilk them.
Jim
Agreed – and also know someone being ripped off by the scum at Firstport.
Whether or not it makes any difference, someone forwarded me this:
https://chng.it/6JTXTzbqcP
1. Yes, murder is too good.
2. Except – everyone else seems to have been able to pay within 5 minutes.