Appealing your £100 fine? You should be so lucky...
Probes a world of scams and scandals
P. E. writes: I parked my wife’s car at the NCP car park at North Greenwich station in south-east London. The car park has automatic number plate recognition, so I went to the machine and paid the £25 fee with my American Express card. We then went to the O2 to see Kylie Minogue before driving home. The following week my wife received a penalty notice from NCP, alleging we had not paid. I appealed unsuccessfully to both NCP and the supposedly independent appeal body Popla. NCP is demanding £100 or it will call in debt collectors. YOUR appeal to NCP and to the Parking On Private Land Appeals body was supported by your Amex statement, which shows that you paid £25 to NCP at North Greenwich station. As a regular NCP customer, you have two number plates registered with the company – for your car and your wife’s. As it uses number plate recognition at North Greenwich, NCP says: ‘There’s no need to display a ticket as your parking session is registered against your car registration number.’
So, what went wrong? One possibility is you entered the wrong index number at the machine, or mistakenly paid for your own car instead of your wife’s. Another is that you entered no number at all, in which case it is not clear why the machine would have accepted payment.
This is why NCP rejected your appeal. Popla also turned you down because, it ruled, you ‘failed to make a valid payment’. Nobody seems to have asked the obvious question: what did you get for your £25?
I put this to Popla, but it feels its job is just to consider the evidence before it – not to ask questions. NCP has reconsidered though. It told me: ‘As a gesture of goodwill, we will cancel the penalty charge notice, but it is important to note that we issue notices for non-payment. In this case there was no payment for the vehicle in our car park.’
It seems you were fined for failing to jump through the correct NCP hoops, rather than failing to pay, as NCP had not lost a penny. Since it uses CCTV to monitor every car, I would have thought it could have put two and two together and made £25 with a lot less hassle than this.