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the fines are outrageous and should be illegal
Right on a page or so ago the fine of 50-85 is in the same ball park as a local council for parking issues.
Goes and parks car elsewhere with better T and C
What like Time Limit 3 hrs? Hard to argue that is ambiguous.
No mike what they charge you for not doing
As much of the semantics of Not parking properly or not leaving on time vs parking out of spaces and overstaying they are the same thing. If you were done appeal. If you couldn't manage to work out that you could only park for 3hrs accept that you were wrong and are due the penalty. If you then choose to ignore the letters twice then why should you not be asked to pay?
Are you saying that people should just ignore all of the private parking companies and just file an appeal?
and Cougar in that case why can a local council charge 50-100 for an infringement without having to prove a loss? Lets all play fair.
Right on a page or so ago the fine of 50-85 is in the same ball park as a local council for parking issues.
Private companies still can't issue fines. The law hasn't changed in the last ten minutes.
Mike.. It's not the parking properly and leaving on time that anyone has an issue with. It's the £85 for not doing that. The Charge is too high. It doesn't represent losses and it's disguised as a 'penalty' in order to encourage payment.
If the invoice stated that your overstay has resulted in an increase of your invoice from nil to £3 then I'm pretty sure no one would really be arguing the toss. The problem is that reasonable amounts like that that are far more representative of the costs involved and losses incurred do not add up to a viable business for the parking companies, and so they look at the numbers of overstaying parkers they are likely to come across and work backwards from that to arrive at an arbitrary figure that amounts to a viable business. Which sort of sounds fair enough, apart from it's not legal.
The fact they have to apply the invoices in a style that looks like a parking fine and word it in a way that also make it look like a parking fine further demonstrates that these parking company's business models are morally bent.
The issue is the business model of overstay charging doesn't stack up to something that is viable if you do anything other than try and kid the 'customer' they are being fined, when they are actually being asked for vastly inflated damages.
Plan a) Have barriers - Pay to park by using a meter and then let the supermarket refund that at the til if you buy stuff - it's possible. I've seen it. It's also fair.
Or b) have a free car park that encourages visitors to your business and put up with the fact some people will park there and not visit your business. If it gets out of hand then choose plan a)
the fines are outrageous and should be illegal
They are, and should be.
Problem then is, do a significant number of car parks then become financially unviable?
FWIW, I've had two tickets. 1 council, 1 private.
With the council I went through the appeals process and had the ticket called off. (failure to properly display residents permit)
Private ticket (failure to properly display residents permit), appeal denied. Didn't pay that in the end.
well fair enough now I have the 2 big boys after me I'm off to bed 😉 but my real point is why can a council charge for overstay but a private company can't. The law isn't really the point but more the principle. If you feel you can park how you want on private land but accept that on public land it's hypocritical. If all I had to pay was an extra £6/day in some areas to park in my local supermarket car park for work I would but that would screw up that car park for their customers as it would be full from 8am to 5pm. People would just pay for convenience. Feeling like doing a godwin but there was a Clarkson column where he joked that in central London or Oxford it was cheaper to be towed & get a taxi home than pay parking so is that the model you want?
I do not have a problem with people appealing unfair or wrong fee's. But not paying attention or reading the rules is just taking the piss. TBH it's like using Ad software in here Mark.
How about we start issuing a 'charge' to users of the site we detect to have ad blocking software installed? After all everyone here has agreed to the terms and conditions of our site, one of which is that you don't act to disable the ads.
I reckon £85 should about cover it. Maybe with a discount if you pay within 2 weeks.
Or is that actually taking the piss?
By the sounds of some previous posts not really, but then it's not like other sites are doing the same (see council fines) forget the who can do what should the dvla be able to charge ad blockers up you can't? Why is a penalty for not following clear instructions wrong?
At the risk of injecting some levelheadedness into a jolly good frothing debate, the answer to why councils can levy fines is because they've been delegated statutory powers to do so by Parliament.
Private land owners have not.
Whether that's right or not is a different argument.
Now, I'm a premier user, but I also run adblock on chrome. Strictly speaking, I've violated the t&cs, so I should also be 'fined'. Them's the rules I guess.
Do councils put free-for-3-hour car parks outside supermarkets?
Or do they mostly allow permit parking on roads, where it is not possible to put up barriers?
Maybe that's why they can issue fines.
Why is a penalty for not following clear instructions wrong?
I'm an individual. I may represent a company but either way i have no right to penalise anyone. I have no rights to fine anyone.. This is an exceptionally good thing. The world would be a much worse place if unelected individuals could levy fines and penalties.
Our local councils have been give the rights they have by parliament. If we don't like that arrangement we can lobby our local mp to go and raise it as an issue in parliament. We vote for our lawmakers. No one voted me in charge of revenue raising here at Singletrack - I invented the job myself. Do you really want me to have the power to impose fines on you for choosing to ignore our site t&cs? I have the power to disable your account and do what I can to stop you from accessing our content if the ads are disabled, but what I absolutely won't do is start sending out bills that look like fines because that would be a really shit thing to do and would be morally bankrupt. And yet, some on here seem happy that some parking companies do this.
Why is a penalty for not following clear instructions wrong?
you need to argue that the penalty for the breach of parking rules is right
That is a broader, and different, question
FWIW Mark showed why its wrong* with his ad blocker example.
* the punishment in no way matches the crime and its OTT
Premier user no ad blocker installed
we've done this, parking fines are a penalty and a threat, to prevent you from doing it again/at all. Private companies are not allowed to fine you, they legally are only allowed to sue you for losses*, of which they have incurred bugger all in most cases, so £85 for a 5minute overstay is not in anyway related to losses and is not really acceptable.Right on a page or so ago the fine of 50-85 is in the same ball park as a local council for parking issues.
As for getting an agent to protect your car park, PE actually pay to manage some car parks, [url= http://parking-prankster.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/parkingeye-pay-1000-week-to-be-allowed.html ]£1000 per week here[/url]. An agent paying £1000 per week doesn't sound like someone managing your parking, that sounds like someone who knows loads of people overstay, for whatever reason, and want to be able to send some "parking invoices".
*and all the everyday stuff of running a business, installing systems and employing staff etc aren't included
Why is a penalty for not following clear instructions wrong?
Legally, because as a private individual/company you're only entitled to be compensated for your actual loss. Anything above that is likely to be considered a penalty and a court won't award damages on that basis.
If someone knocks down my wall and I sue them for the costs of repairing it, the court will want to know, unsurprisingly, how much the wall actually cost to repair. If the wall cost £500 to repair and my claim is for £1,000, the court will want to know what the other £500 is related to. If it's related to the TV inside my living room that was also damaged as the wall fell in...OK. If it's a figure I've added on to cover the "buggeration factor" of having to get my wall fixed...not OK.
The civil courts are there to right any wrongs, to make people "whole" again (usually!).
As a ever-so-slightly interesting aside I live in a place where the mahoosive ASDA was rebuilt to an abso-effing-lutely mahoosive ASDA. At that point they put a parking levy in. There were machines where you put in a pound to get a ticket and the money would be refunded as you bought something in the shop.
AFter about three months they were removed. Most probably due to people not having the change and going to the massive Tesco across the road, along with the cost of checking cars in a very busy huge car park.
Then they tried barriers where you had to show a receipt for more than £4 spent in ASDA to a man in a box. That lasted about two months. I think they've gone to the Europarks type thing now.
People want free supermarket car-parks. If there was a charge of a few quid (up to a fiver, say) for overstaying (unless egregious such as a weekend or something) then most people wouldn't complain.
My main issue is the price.
There is only one other carpark nearby, a council run park which charge £1:30 per half day.
The Morrisons carpark is huge, almost always half empty carpark in a deprived are. (Porth, Rhondda Cynon Taff)
There is very little in the area in the way of employment or entertainment.
If it was in a city I would expect to pay around £10 to park.
so If she overstayed In either of these I'd understand them charging at least what they had lost.
It's the amount, £85 but also a private company with the power to overcharge I dislike.
"Sorry but the number of people who can't read the rules and then expect to get off takes the pee"
The organisations that don't read or play by the rules are the parking companies. The rules are clearly set out in legislation and case law if they can't stick to them then they need to anticipate parkers will ignore their threats and defend their rare court actions and judges may will dismiss their spurious claims.
They have created a business model that depends on people not knowing their rights and giving in to their high pressure tactics.
AdamW a few quid just wouldn't work.
People would simply use it as a cheap all day carpark whilst going off into town or work.
It has to be a deterrent. Even if the charge was £20 you'd still get a lot of forgetful types forgetting and they'd end up making/churning through money (as they'd subcontract the carpark management out) on a carpark scheme with falling/bad sales in the actual place where they opened to make money in the first place.
It was to be high enough to focus peoples minds.
I know it varies around the country but it's ~£5 per day for parking near home, I'd have thought £20 is enough to focus the mind while also happily coinciding with a [i]genuine[/i] estimated loss for parking companies.It was to be high enough to focus peoples minds.
[quote=Mark ]what I absolutely won't do is start sending out bills that look like fines because that would be a really shit thing to do and would be morally bankrupt.
Oh go on. Would make some threads much more amusing.
wonga did it, wrote letters to customers from an alleged law firm but was really them.. got told off but nothing further 😯
Private parking companies don't play by the "rules" so why should we?
Their business model relies on essentially deceiving people. Its widely acknowledged they have no power to impose fines yet they continue to do so.
The Forestry Commission / Parking Eye is an interesting one. I've forgotten to pay at Glentress before. I got a reminder note on my windscreen from the FC telling me why I should pay for parking. I made sure I bought a ticket before I left.
If I received a parking "charge" from Parking Eye for the same error I would appeal and pay nothing as there charges aren't enforceable but if they gave me the opportunity to pay the parking charge I had forgotten to pay i would do so gladly.