Fighting car the park pirates
Our investigation into the bullying tactics used by private parking firms in Scotland generated a huge mailbag. Here, Mail readers share their horror stories – and they’ll make your blood boil
IT was a letter from the debt collection agency that finally broke Margaret McAdie’s resolve – something about its insidious tone, the spectre of the long, unwinnable battle it conjured in her mind. What next? Would debt collectors arrive at her door? Was she prepared to risk her life being disrupted by sinister forces whose power she did not fully understand for the sake of £160?
At one stage the widow from East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, had been prepared to hold out against Smart Parking all the way up to £1,000. Why shouldn’t she? At 76, the retired teacher had been driving since she was 19 and never had a parking ticket. Now this outfit was chasing her because its own machine was out of order. They could whistle for it.
But she did not like the look of the letter from Debt Recovery Plus. With a heavy heart, she paid the firm £160 – £100 more than the original penalty – and tried to forget about it. ‘I regretted it almost immediately,’ she said.
Two days later Mrs McAdie read the Scottish Daily Mail’s investigation into the bully-boy tactics of private parking firms and realised she had been browbeaten into paying a penalty that was almost certainly unenforceable.
She learned, along with countless other tormented customers of this and other private parking firms that their bark is far worse than their bite – because their bite is practically non-existent.
Since the Mail’s investigation was published last month we have been inundated with messages from readers aggressively pursued by parking firms demanding fines in often bizarre circumstances.
Almost all express gratitude to the paper for taking up the fight against parking pirates on behalf of law-abiding people hounded, bullied and cajoled into lining these firms’ pockets. One reader, retired Royal Navy officer William Brogan, is being threatened with court action over a parking penalty from Inverness despite the fact he was not even in the country at the time.
Another, Angie Robertson from Glasgow, was bemused to learn her taxi spent a night at a retail park operated by Smart Parking when her own household CCTV footage shows it parked in her own driveway.
Many others, such as Gillean Joels from Stirling who made two visits to the Kinnoull Street car park in Perth in the space of a few days and received fines relating to them both, said they felt ‘powerless’ and filled with dread. ‘I don’t want to be hounded by debt collectors or to have a black mark on my credit rating,’ she said.
Another, Linda Milne, who finally paid £164.50 after weeks of intimidating letters for a supposed infraction at the same car park, said: ‘A price cannot be put on the stress and upset this has caused. It makes me ill thinking about it.
‘I would dearly love to fight this company as I am sure it’s not legal but I have not the energy or the funds to do this.’
She even suggested staging a protest outside Smart Parking’s Kinnoull Street multi-storey.
It may seem extraordinary that such strong feeling is aroused by as mundane an activity as parking a car but, as our investigation showed, there is nothing simple about using many of these firms’ car parks. They use automatic number plate recognition systems which mean cameras capture all cars entering and leaving.
At many premises, customers must key in their registration number at the pay machine which leads to mistakes – and the fact motorists can pay both on arrival and departure creates further confusion. Worst of all, no indication is given if the customer has made an error or underpaid. The first they know about it is when the parking penalty letter arrives.
This kind of punitive operating system has allowed Smart Parking to put these penalties at the centre of its business model. They account for a staggering 75 per cent of the company’s revenue.
Adding to the controversial picture is the parking firms’ dubious arrangement with the DVLA, a taxpayer-funded Government agency which sells the firms vehicle registration details they need to issue their penalties for £2.50 a time. As we revealed, this is in breach of the DVLA’s own guidelines in Scotland, for firms such as ParkingEye and Smart Parking are not subject to an independent appeals process here.
‘It’s awful that the DVLA can just sell all your details to firms like this,’ said Mrs McAdie. ‘I can’t think why it’s allowed when the only people you can appeal to are the firms themselves.’
It was on a routine visit to Clarkston Toll near Glasgow for a hair appointment in January that she fell foul of the inflexible, remotely operated system. Arriving at the car park, she found several motorists gathered around the pay station, which was broken. Because she was due at the salon she decided she would have to pay on departure by which time, hopefully, the machine would be fixed.
She said: ‘On returning to my car I saw a Smart Parking employee – identified by his uniform – approaching the pay station. He said he was there to repair it and he would have it functioning normally shortly. I told him I couldn’t wait as I had to pick up my grandsons from school. He said, “just go on then” and I thanked him and drove off.’
But Smart Parking refused to accept her explanation, claiming there were machines accepting payments and printing tickets at the time she was there.
She wrote back: ‘No person, including your maintenance operator, present in that car park said there were other meters available and certainly there was none in view. However, it is not for motorists to go searching for alternative pay stations, it is the responsibility of your company to maintain your installations ready for use.’ That did not impress the company’s appeals department
‘I don’t want to be hounded by debt collectors’ ‘You can only appeal to the firms themselves’
‘I’ll go to court, I think I have a very strong case’ ‘Debt recovery scared me, that’s why I paid them’
either. ‘You have now reached the end of our internal appeals procedure,’ a letter advised her. In Scotland, of course, there is no external appeals procedure.
The next letter, from Debt Recovery Plus, finally did the trick. It demanded £160 and said if the money was not paid within 14 days the firm would recommend court action.
Cynically, the letter also cited the case of Dundee woman Carly Mackie, who was ordered by a sheriff to pay £24,500 to a parking firm, which frightened her into settling the debt.
Miss Mackie was ordered to pay the huge sum after she ignored more than 200 penalties for parking at her parents’ address without a permit.
Now, evidently, the parking industry was using her case to convince people to pay penalties imposed in completely different circumstances.
Tory MSP Murdo Fraser commented: ‘Sadly, bully-boy tactics of this nature are all too typical of Smart Parking and their debt collectors. They intimidate people into paying penalties which would almost certainly be unrecoverable in court.’
Mrs McAdie is not easily intimidated. ‘I’m inclined to be a fighter,’ she said. ‘I’ll fight to the last barricade, but when it comes to debt collectors and things like that, well, people aren’t sure of their ground.’
But following the Mail’s investigation many are far more confident of their position and quite prepared to see their tormentors in court if it comes to that.
One of them is Lieutenant Commander William Brogan, 70, who dropped his car off for repairs at an Inverness garage last year before leaving for the US on business. While he was away a mechanic took it for a test run and spent a few minutes looking for a space in a car park without success.
Mr Brogan said: ‘The first I knew about it was when I received a letter with a picture of my car coming in and going out and a charge for £60, which was about to become £100 and has now been upgraded to £160.’ In Scotland only the person who was driving at the time can be held liable for a penalty issued by private parking firm. So Mr Brogan was in no doubt the matter would be resolved when he explained the circumstances.
Despite providing proof that he was in the US at the time, he is still being pursued. The latest letter, from a firm called Zenith Collections, said that if he did not pay it would recommend Smart Parking took him to court. It also warned that a court judgment or decree against him could seriously affect his ability to obtain credit in the future.
Mr Brogan said the mechanic who took his car for a test drive failed to find a space in the Strothers Lane car park and left after about five minutes. But despite informing the firm of the facts, Mr Brogan has ‘not received the courtesy of a reply’ and is still getting demands from debt collection agencies.
He does not intend to pay and if the company plans to take him to court he will see them there.
That is Angie Robertson’s position, too. She was astonished to receive a letter from Smart Parking demanding £45 for parking her taxi in Glasgow’s Forge Retail Park all night last November. Footage from the CCTV camera outside her house showed the black cab was there between 1.50am and 7.50am.
But despite contacting the firm with her proof, Debt Recovery Plus is demanding £160.
‘I sent them a letter including photos, thinking common sense would prevail but no,’ she said. ‘So I’ll go to court. I think I have a very strong case.’
Smart Parking did, however, manage to extract a £45 penalty from Tom Wilson, who is 87, for forgetting to display his disabled parking badge at Strathkelvin Retail Park in Bishopbriggs near Glasgow.
The pensioner, who has a pacemaker and a chronic lung condition, said: ‘At my age you forget things. When I got the ticket I appealed, attaching my badge, and they just said no.’
Trading Standards officers helped him write a letter of appeal but it was rejected and the fine eventually went up to £160 when he refused to pay.
Finally, after speaking to a lawyer acting for the firm, Mr Wilson, of Bearsden, Dunbartonshire, agreed to pay £45. He said: ‘Smart Parking’s lawyer threatened me with the sheriff court. The debt recovery scared me and that’s why I paid. This constant harassment caused me sleep loss. It was very stressful, I take things badly. I can’t just shrug them off.’ The Mail approached Smart Parking about all the cases but it did not respond.
Following our investigation a crackdown on the firms is being proposed in a Private Member’s Bill by MSP Mr Fraser. It would ban companies from issuing fines above a certain level, likely to be £60, and introduce a new independent appeals system, removing the obvious conflict of interests in firm’s adjudicating on their own customers’ appeals.
For thousands of motorists nostalgic for the days when using car parks presented no challenge and carried little fear, the curb on the pirates cannot come soon enough.