Ticketed in my own space!

From: Gian
Subject: Advice about a parking ticket

Hi there,

I’ve got two separate ticketing issues i’d like your advice on.

1 – I received a ticket in my underground carpark on a friends car which was both correctly displaying a permit and in the correct bay. My appeals were rejected by the parking company and eventually I was out of time to appeal to POPLA (i did anyway and they confirmed I was out of time).
The parking company very quickly escalated the cost of the ticket and involved debt collection companies. I eventually settled the ticket at a cost of £119.20. The original ticket was £60.
Given the ticket was unjustified in the first place, is there a way to retrospectively challenge the parking company?

2 – At the end of March, parking permits for my car park expired. No notices were put up in the building to advise of the change of permits by the building manager but new permits were issued to the concierge for collection by residents. Between April 1st & April 8th when I happened to go down into the garage, I received 6 tickets between my two cars – one of which was under a car-cover with the tickets hidden underneath and packed inside the first ticket issued.
I took this up with the building manager initially and got nowhere, I eventually appealed each ticket by pointing out that there was no photographic evidence of the lapsed permits for 4 of the 6 tickets (their photos were blurred). Again I got nowhere, the tickets were escalated again to debt collectors and I was facing £149 per ticket. At this point the building manager claimed to have negociated on my behalf with the ticket company and they agreed to settle each ticket for the original £60 fine per ticket. I paid £360 to settle all 6 tickets.
I still have each letter and photographic evidence to challenge each ticket. Is there a way to take this company to court to get my money back?
Thanks,
Gian

Hi Gian,

I suspect you should not have had to pay any of these tickets. It depends on what it says in your leasehold/freehold on the parking space. Usually they mention nothing about displaying a permit, or charges payable if you do not. If they do not, then they have no right to charge you whatsoever. Often management companies set up these arrangements with parking companies but without the permission of the leaseholders/freeholders.

I would suggest you review your deeds immediately to see what they say. If they do not mention anything about permits or parking charges, then you can then write to both the management company and parking company to explicitly remove your permission for them to operate on your land. If they then continue to issue tickets you can then sue them in the county court for trespass (as this motorist did).

With regards to recovering charges you’ve already paid, I’ve not heard of anyone successfully recover money from a parking company before. You may perhaps be able to do so (on the basis of the above), but you would probably need to take them to county court to do it. I would suggest a good first port of call is the Pepipoo forum to seek advice.

If you ever get any other tickets, remember to look up my site before paying – you could have saved yourself a lot of money!

Best of luck, PC