£1 coin changeover descends into chaos
THE withdrawal of the old-style pound coin was mired in chaos yesterday after it emerged that thousands of parking ticket machines and shops have yet to convert to the new coin.
Car parks serving as many as a million motorists a day have defied the Royal Mint’s deadline for updating machines to accept the new pound coin.
It means drivers who have already spent all of their old-style coins, as instructed by the Royal Mint, are at risk of having the wrong change. Meanwhile major retailers and food chains including Tesco, Holland & Barrett and Mcdonald’s were still handing old coins back to customers in change yesterday despite them having ceased to be legal tender at one minute to midnight on Sunday.
The stores claimed the incidents were “isolated” and put them down to human error. The Treasury declined to comment on how it would respond to shops flouting the rules by handing out old £1 coins after the deadline.
The Daily Telegraph has learned that as many as 5,000 car parking machines across the UK, which serve between 30 and 200 parking spaces each, are still not ready to take the new pound coins. Some councils are not planning to
update their machines until February 2018, the date when it will become compulsory for them to undergo annual maintenance, the British Parking Association (BPA) said.
Such a delay could result in nearly 200,000 extra parking fines being issued over the period, or around 1,200 a day. Some 9million parking fines are is- sued every year, BPA data shows.
A BPA spokesman said last night: “We would advise people to carry a variety of different change to avoid getting caught out.”
Councils are reserving the right to issue parking fines to drivers who say they have been unable to pay for tickets because of out-of-date machines.
But Neil Sargent, a motor law specialist at Duncan Lewis solicitors, said drivers caught out in this way have good grounds to appeal the fines if they have not paid for a ticket.
He said: “Machines not working properly is a defence which can be used successfully in an appeal, however it may not always work.
“It is a legal grey area as the old coins have gone out of circulation, meaning the machines should be ready to take the new ones.
“However as time goes by local councils may decide that people should be aware that parking machines may not accept new pounds and should make sure they have other change to hand.”
A spokesman at coin handling firm Maggi Electronics, which updates machines for parking, vending and entertainment companies, revealed that the number of calls it was taking from firms had quadrupled yesterday as “panicked” businesses suddenly realised they had fallen behind schedule.
The spokesman added that the parking industry had been “especially slow” to adapt to the changeover to the new coins.
Meanwhile, the raft of stores defying the Royal Mint’s deadline and changing their policies at the last minute to accept the old £1 coin, is growing by the day.
John Lewis and Waitrose became the latest retailers to soften their approach and both firms say they will now accept the old coins until Saturday.
A spokesman for John Lewis said: “All our systems and trolleys are ready for the new coin.
“However, we want to be helpful to our customers and, if they have no alternative ways of paying, we will continue to take old-style coins until the close of trade on Oct 22.”