£120 Parking Fine from Lambeth Parking Services!!!

There goes £120 down the drain! We were issued a parking fine in London when we had a valid ticket last month. We thought they hadn’t seen our pay and display ticket, but apparently we were in a residents parking permit bay – this was not clear due the to the sign on the same side of the road (the one we saw), next to machine a few meters away saying you could pay to park. There weren’t even any road marking to define the different areas. This was an oversight on our part, and we initially appealed thinking the parking attendant hadn’t seen our ticket in the windscreen. The only response and acknowledgement we had to our appeal was the Notice of Contravention this morning, telling us to pay £120 or face £180 and court.

I phoned them and they said a rejection letter to the appeal had been sent to me, but I never got it! I was then informed that it was a permit holder only bay we had parked in, which I wasn’t aware of up until that point. The first girl on the phone at Lambeth Parking services was very understanding and even looked at Google Street View to confirm what I was saying about the signs and road markings and told me it was very strange that different signs were so close and very odd that they were on the same side of the street. She told me to appeal, but as I didn’t get a response to my first appeal I didn’t want to face going to court due to potentially no fault of my own. If the parking fine notice hadn’t been so vague as to the reasons for the fine we would have probably paid the £60 fine in the first place. I’m not impressed!

I’m not going to bother appealing again against the fine or trying for a £60 fine instead. Apart from the stress and time it takes to do everything in writing and supply evidence (ie going to London to take photos), I’m not a gambling man, and I don’t want to face court if I don’t get a response to my appeal again. The cards are stacked against me in this case.

To get my money’s worth and make me feel better about the whole situation I will be writing an open letter to Mr Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) later today. I don’t expect him to actually read it, but it will allow me to get this and probably a few other things off my chest!

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