#oneaday Day 404: Case Closed

I'm delighted to announced to anyone who cares that I have successfully fought a "Parking Charge Notice" issued by a private parking company and got myself out of having to pay £100. I thought this was going to be much more of a pain in the arse than it actually ended up being, and I'm thankful for that. I really didn't want to have to waste my time assembling evidence packs and taking photographs and potentially even going to court.

Here's the full story, for anyone interested.

Back in… October, I think it was, I went to our local post office delivery office to pick up a parcel I hadn't been home to receive. Said delivery office shares a site with a local gym, and apparently — I didn't know this at the time — a specific part of the car park is managed by a private parking company known as Premier Park. This part of the car park, despite being closest to the customer door of the delivery office, is supposedly for gym members only, and is enforced by automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) cameras tracking people coming and going.

Not being aware of any of this at the time — I had mistakenly assumed the whole car park was for both the post office and the gym, like a sane, rational person would — I had parked in the "forbidden" zone and, as luck would have it, a long queue at the delivery office and a customer whingeing and complaining at the front of it meant I was stuck there for 15 minutes — five minutes longer than the statutory "grace period" parking companies are supposed to provide you with when it comes to issuing these parking charge notices.

Eventually, I picked up my package and went about my business. Over a month later, I received the parking charge notice through the post, informing me that I would have been liable for a £60 charge if I'd paid it within 14 days of the infraction, but was now liable for £100. Notice that I said the notice arrived over a month after the supposed infraction, meaning that the (still outlandishly expensive) £60 charge was never actually an option for me.

Incensed, I attempted to phone up the parking company to shout at someone, only to discover that they're one of those companies that seemingly doesn't actually have any human employees, and thus it's impossible to speak to anyone. So, unwilling to part with £100 for the convenience of picking up a package, I decided to do some research online.

As often happens with incidents of this nature, I ended up on the Money Saving Expert forums — specifically, this thread, which explains exactly what you should do in exactly the situation in which I found myself.

The process is essentially thus:

• Do not admit you were driving, deny keeper liability and take any opportunity you can to discredit the parking charge notice — in my case, this was easy, since it arrived well outside of the statutory 14 days required for ANPR-enforced cases.

• If they deny your initial appeal, get a "POPLA" code and appeal directly to POPLA with as much detail as possible. At this point you generally win on technicalities such as signs not adequately indicating the parking terms and conditions in a way that is visible from a vehicle entering the car park. If my appeal hadn't been upheld at the first stage as it was, I would have definitely won here on these grounds.

• If they send debt collectors after you, write a sternly-worded refusal to pay and accuse them of harassment.

• If you end up having to go to court, you'll probably win, because most of the legal system and government in this country thinks that private parking companies are the worst kind of money-grabbing scum, and thus will do anything to give them a swift punch in the balls.

Thankfully, I only had to do the first step here, and I received acknowledgement that they had upheld my appeal. They evidently knew that they had fucked up this time, and thus I don't have to pay £100.

This feels pretty good. But I would also encourage you all to be wary of this sort of thing in the future! The appeal process doesn't always run this smoothly, from what I can gather — so take great care to avoid these "managed" car parks wherever possible!