Timmy has commented on this one. I left a message in his comments, but it’s worth expanding a bit here in a slightly different direction.
A “five minutes to pay” parking rule has left a woman facing a £1,906 bill.
Rosey Hudson is being taken to court by the operator of a car park in Derby for not paying her tickets within five minutes of arrival.
She said poor signal on her mobile phone meant she had to use Wi-Fi at her place of work to purchase tickets on an app, paying £3.30 each day starting in February 2023.
But she has since been sent 10 penalty charge notices (PCNs) worth £100 each for not paying for parking within five minutes.
Excel Parking, which runs the Copeland Street car park, is demanding Miss Hudson pay £1,905.76 to clear nine outstanding PCNs, which includes a £70 “debt recovery” charge for each one, eight per cent annual interest and £195 in court costs.
As Mr Worstall observes, these people are cretinous jobsworths. They will use as their argument that the defendant breached their five minute rule. But is the rule reasonable? A rule can be written down as part of terms and conditions, but those T&Cs have to be reasonable to be enforceable. In the days of ticket machines, you could, on a busy day, spend more than five minutes just finding a space, parking then queuing at the machine. In theory, using an app should shave time off that. However…
Assuming that you have the relevant app on your phone, as they seem to use different ones, the issue here was poor signal. I have been there and experienced that. I’ve also had apps that just don’t work. The ones used by First Great Western seem to be spectacularly buggy and I gave up the last time I tried. So it comes back to that clause being reasonable.
In common/civil law, the court uses the man on the Clapham omnibus as a test. This person being the man in the street, a reasonable person. Would a resorbable person regard the cluse as being fair and reasonable and would they regard the parking company as behaving in a reasonable manner?
I think not. I suspect that a court would find accordingly. If it was me being chased, I would screw the bastards for every penny in costs and inconvenience that I could – pour encourager les autres.
I’m going to be watching this one with interest.
Force majeur in contracts seema to be applicable. With acknowledgement to Harper James website:
A typical force majeure clause reads something along the lines of:
Neither party shall be in breach of this agreement or otherwise liable for any failure to fulfill its obligations if such failure results from events, circumstances or causes beyond its reasonable control.
Ms Hudson has no possible responsibility for the weakness of the mobile phone signal in Excel’s Car Park. Unless Excel can show that they have taken steps to ensure that there is a good mobile phone signal throughout their car park, Ms Hudson has, I think, a good defence.
Not forgetting there are currently FOUR different mobile networks in the UK. Unless Excel specify which one should be used (and have established that it provides good coverage in that car park), I don’t see how they can justify their stance.
Are there actually 4 networks? I mean there are, in that there’s 4 companies who have their own bespoke telecoms network to route calls through. But those 4 companies now tend to place their equipment on the same masts, sharing the physical infrastructure. So chances are if a location has bad reception from network A it will also have bad reception from networks B, C and D. It used to be they had their own masts and there were genuinely 4 networks, and if networks A and B were bad, C and D were Ok. Then they worked out it would be far cheaper to share masts so the number of individual mast locations were reduced massively. Meaning the coverage/signal quality tends to be universally good or bad across all networks, depending on the area.
Even if a degree of physical equipment sharing goes on, there are still 5 different frequency bands being used:
https://www.4g-lte.net/about/lte-frequency-bands/4g-frequencies-uk-networks/
The lower bands generally work better over longer distances and through obstructions, so this will have some bearing on which network works best in a particular location.
More here than meets the eye. It mentions (true or not) that on one occasion it took her up to three hours to buy the ticket; why?
Is that acting reasonably?
As I understand it, this was a delay in the app/banking system. Not entirely unusual.
Whilst I have some sympathy that trustworthy, hardworking people are being fucked over by evil capitalists, it’s worth considering why these T&C’s exist in the first place.
Put simply, it’s because many people are scheming dishonest twats who would take the piss with respect to any leeway provided.
So the blame (as is so often the case) is with your fellow citizens. There is a reason it’s known as “The Tragedy of the Commons”.
While that’s a fair point – five minutes is still way too unreasonable. I think she has a decent defence and in her position, I’d go for as much costs and damages as possible to teach them a lesson.
What would a reasonable time be?
If it’s 10 minutes or more then lots of people will just drop into a shop to buy something and clog up the car park because it costs them nothing to do so.
Ten to fifteen would be about right – many car parks have a twenty minute free period anyway. Ultimately, was the parking paid for? Yes. Then there shouldn’t be an issue about when, exactly, the ticket was paid for. The parking was paid for. I really don’t see them winning this one.
Equally, the parking industry has always attracted more than it’s fair share of bandits and knuckle daggers who aren’t capable of earning a decent living doing anything that requires integrity or a moral compass.
Think back to the wild West days of clampers who roamed the country waiting to pounce on people who hadn’t seen the (often hidden or misleading) parking signs then marching (often frightened and elderly) people off to cash dispensers before agreeing to remove the clamp.
That type of sociopath didn’t retire when the law was changed to protect the public, they just found other ways to legally mug motorists. Operating an automated parking system that is unreliable leading to disproportionate numbers of fines being issued is just the sort of scam that would appeal to them. Requiring payment through an app in an area known to have poor mobile reception would certainly fit the bill.
We had a car park with similar rules, ended up on a TV show as one of Britain’s worst car parks. The journey from the eye to the actual car park coukd take more than 5 minutes as a single narrow road with no passing places. Then you had to park, then you had to pay, a queue if the height of the season. It was only a few days later did people get the fines. As far as they were concerned they’d parked up and paid, no shops to pop into, most holiday makers and dog walkers. Luckily it’s run by other people and they allow more time.
So long as the parking charge is paid within a sensible timeframe i don’t see the issue here and hopefully neither will a judge..
Dartford crossing for example you have until midnight the day after to pay the charge.
5 minutes is taking the piss, but knowing the ne’er do wells who operated the clamping wheeze in a nearby town its hardly surprising.