I installed the PayByPhone app to pay for a full day’s parking during a family outing in Ealing, and was surprised to find a parking ticket when I returned hours before the expiry time.
I wrote to Ealing council with proof of payment and was even more surprised when it insisted I pay the fine, or go to court. It claimed there was a mistake in my purchase but gave no details.
I checked the app and discovered that, when I had entered my car registration, I had confused an O with a 0.
This feels like such unfair treatment for a small error. I don’t know whether to go to court for a fairer outcome, or just pay the fine to avoid the inconvenience.
RD, London
It’s been years since I’ve seen this vexed issue. I thought councils and parking companies had learned.
Your mistake is easy to make because Os and 0s are indistinguishable on number plates. The only way of telling them apart is to mug up on how current registrations are formulated, so you know which order letters and numbers appear.
You might wonder why the DVLA doesn’t amend number plates to avoid confusion. Because, it once told me, the font has been used since 1935 and hasn’t caused problems. The fact that ticket machine keypads and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras were not around for most of the last century seems to have passed it by.
Like you, I assumed Ealing council would back off when I questioned its decision, since you had evidently paid in good faith. It did not. “The driver’s ‘mitigating’ circumstances appears to be driver error,” it says. “Cancelling a PCN for driver error is inappropriate as fair consideration must be given to motorists who comply with all the parking regulations.”
Ealing’s £37.7m funding gap may have more to do with its intransigence. Private parking companies, which are not noted for their charity, no longer ticket drivers for minor typing errors – their trade associations, the British Parking Association and the International Parking Community, banned it a few years back and their code of practice specifically cites mismatched Os and 0s as a mitigating factor.
Private parking has to comply with contract law, which takes a hard line on unfair terms. Council parking enforcement, on the other hand, is governed by the Traffic Management Act. The Department for Transport (DfT)’s guidance on what this means in practice states briefly that authorities must act “fairly and proportionately” and exercise discretion “sensibly and reasonably”.
The DfT tells me that a council has the power to cancel a parking ticket at any point. “It can do this even when an undoubted contravention has occurred, if the authority deems it to be appropriate in the circumstances of the case,” it says.
The trouble for drivers is that the council acts as judge and jury when it comes to fairness and discretion. They can appeal to a tribunal but tribunals can only decide whether or not there has been an infringement (which, in your case, technically there was), not whether “sensible and reasonable” discretion has been applied.
No “sensible and reasonable” person would consider Ealing’s stance sensible and reasonable, but you did not want the hassle of challenging it in court so paid up.
“Ealing council seemed to have decided it wanted a Christmas present from me whether by fair means or foul,” you concluded, and I can’t disagree.
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