I do find myself asking the question here.
Gareth Hughes, who lives in south London, is a BP customer who fell foul of this policy. He was recently sent a letter threatening the debt recovery agents after he failed to pay a £100 parking charge demand by MET Parking Services – a private company contracted by BP. His crime? He exceeded the 30 minute maximum permitted stay at the busy BP garage on Mitcham Road in Croydon, south London.
“After I filled the car, I went in to pay. I decided while paying to also use the car wash, and having paid for that returned to the car. There were perhaps six cars in front of me waiting to use the wash. I certainly didn’t see any signs warning of the 30 minute limit,” he says
Personally, I find this tendency for petrol stations becoming retail outlets irritating. I want to fill up, pay and then leave in short order. I don’t particularly want to hang about while someone does their grocery shopping.
However, if that is what the station is encouraging, then they should expect people to be there for a while. Indeed, the quoted example isn’t out of the way given what he did. He was spending money at the outlet and got a penalty notice for his pains. Well, frankly, I would do precisely as I have done at petrol stations that insist upon me removing my helmet – I would never darken their forecourt again.
It later emerged that his wife, the car’s registered keeper, had been sent a previous unopened letter from MET, which had demanded the charge, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days. He had been on the site for 47 minutes, it said. He says he paid the £100 fearing debt collectors might turn up at their house.
I don’t consider 47 minutes excessive for what he was doing. Also, as noted these parking sharks do tend to put their notices where they aren’t readily seen, so there might be grounds for fighting the penalty. Note, also, it isn’t a fine – it’s extortion with menaces by a private company that has conned people into entering into a contract by default.
“When I arrived there was a bit of a queue for the petrol pump. There is a Marks & Spencer’s Simply Food shop on the premises, so I stopped to buy a few bits. There was quite a wait for the till. After I had vacuumed the car and waited to use the car wash I’d been on the site 42 minutes and was sent the same £100 demand.”
After a long battle in which he contacted BP to point out it was penalising its customers for using its services, he was eventually refunded, but he says BP wasn’t interested in his plight.
Perhaps if enough people stopped using their services, they might, but otherwise, no, I’m not surprised. But again, don’t just cave. Fight the bastards.
It is not the first time MET Parking Services has appeared in Money pages. A year ago it emerged it had divided up a car park it managed near Stansted airport and was issuing tickets to diners who ate in the wrong restaurant. Victims of the policy said it caught out the unwary.
This, again, is sharp practice. These people are racketeers and the only response is to refuse to pay them and avoid doing business with outlets that use them.
I saw this title and thought (guess how?) Oh, you must mean TalkTalk…
Ha! Well, there’s plenty it could apply to.
The thing is that, in a free market economy, This kind of thing will harm BP’s business. They will either have to stop doing this kind of thing or suffer the consequences.
I actually like the fact that my local garage has a convenience store, it is very useful. If they ever pulled this kind of thing though, they would lose my business forever.
My nearest garage is a Tesco/Esso establishment. Been using them for years. Then one evening last summer they demanded that I remove my helmet. I use a flip-front style lid, so seeing my face isn’t an issue. I flatly refuse to enable this behaviour, so got back on the bike and left. Not been back since and nor will I. That is the best way of dealing with these kinds of issues. Walk away. Take your business elsewhere and tell as many people about it as possible. So, yes, damage their business.
It isn’t just garages, high st shops, large (particularly) but small too have been driving customers straight into the arms of Amazon and the like for years, from surly assistants seemingly annoyed that a customer should interrupt their chat, to large shops also having no toilet facilities for customers who might well be spending £hundreds, oh well your loss, any idea why your high street is dying?
Local councils don’t help, making travelling and parking an utter misery with stupid traffic schemes.
Not a problem for the customer, click click, beverage to hand, nice loo next door, items delivered next day.
Supermarket fuel for me, BP unless you’re on odd roads like the A47 between Thorney and Wisbech are stupidly expensive.
I don’t use the conveniently placed Morrisons fuel near here because of the time shoppers spend, holding eveything up. The clincher was when I sat waiting to fill behind some intellectual who filled up, left their car on the pump and then went shopping . . .
I had a similar situation with “private car parking contractors” a few years back. I followed through their appeals process and was told (politely) to get stuffed, so I took them to the small claims court.
Since they were barely literate and had no understanding of the law, the case was decided in my favour without even a hearing. Problem was that winning a case is one thing, enforcing it is another.
Fortunately, when I dug up the details of the registered company, his girlfriend was listed as company secretary, so she started getting the letters rather than the thug actually running the tow truck. Cheque turned up a week later.
These parking companies can be very selective about what they ‘see’. My sister dropped off some French students at a local Aldi, where their tour bus was parked, in the morning and picked them up in the evening.
The parking company ‘saw’ her enter the car park at 8 am and leave at 5 pm. Somehow they missed her departure at 8.02 am and arrival at 4.58 pm!