Two-year battle and court threat over £2.50 car parking mistake
TICKET PAID FOR BUT ERROR LED TO ESCALATION IN FINE
A DERBY man was threatened with court action after a simple mistake triggered a huge fine.
Baljit Samra says he was issued with the fine by NCP after his car was parked in the company’s Siddals Road car park in Derby city centre on December 24, 2018.
He says since then he has been receiving letters demanding he pays a £268 fine – more than 100 times the £2.50 actually spent on the parking ticket.
The 52-year-old said the company had threatened to take him to court despite the fact he has a bank statement proving the ticket was paid for and money was deposited into the company’s coffers on the day of the alleged violation.
NCP says that if Mr Samra had communicated with them earlier then the initial mistake could have been rectified. Instead the situation escalated until Mr Samra was facing court action.
Mr Samra, from Littleover, says when he and his wife initially began to receive letters a month after parking at the car park, they thought it was a scam.
“My wife was in the car, she went to town on December 24, 2018, and parked opposite Intu Derby in the NCP car park,” he said.
“She paid by contactless and she wasn’t given a ticket, but it was on her bank statement as being paid.
“A couple of months later we got a message saying we hadn’t paid, but we had.
“We thought it might be a scam so we ignored it, but then we started getting other letters from a company called BW Legal saying it we did not pay they were going to take us to court.
“I phoned them up to find out what was going on. I said we’ve paid it, look on our bank statement.
“We sent them the details, they came back saying there was no record of us paying.”
The father-of-two said there was no way he was going to back down when he knew they had done nothing wrong.
“I got in contact with BW Legal again, I said I’m going to dispute this all the way, as our statement says we’ve paid,” he said.
“The last letter I received from them they said the car wasn’t registered and they couldn’t find it and that we might have put the wrong registration in.
“I think the next step is court. They’re threatening a county court judgement and I don’t want that on my record.”
A spokesperson for NCP told the Derby Telegraph that the parking charge notice had originally been issued in January 2019.
“We had no contact from the customer until February 2021, by this point the PCN had escalated through our debt recovery process back in 2019,” she said.
“We have looked back through the logs for 2018 when the customer parked, since the customer has now sent us his bank statement and can see that the customer put in an incorrect registration plate into the machine when making payment and therefore no payment was recorded against his vehicle in the car park.
“So the PCN was correctly issued. “When this happens we ask our customers to let us know if they feel the notice is incorrectly issued, we can then look into the case to understand why there is no payment registered. “Despite the issuing of the PCN and all the information regarding how to appeal, we had no contact from this customer to any of our letters until 2021.”
“We have now withdrawn this notice and recorded it as a customer error on inputting the registration plate,” she said.
“If the customer had communicated with us, appealed and shown us the bank statement after the initial notice was issued, then we would have been able to understand why there was no payment recorded against their parked vehicle and could have cancelled this PCN a couple of years ago.”