How to stop DVLA from giving out my details requested by Car Parking Companies

TamA

I got one of these tickets from a private car park a few months ago.

If you look at the wording on the actual ticket they use phrases like "parking offence" and other nonsense with to make it seem legitimate.

You are not obligated to pay any money to them.

The stages I went through were:

Ticket
Letter for debt collector
Letter from solicitor
Letter from solicitor citing "intended legal action"


The solicitor turned out not to be a real firm. This was over the course of about a month. I've heard nothing since.

Crabman

TamA wrote: »

The solicitor turned out not to be a real firm. This was over the course of about a month. I've heard nothing since.

If true, this should be reported to the "Solicitors Regulation Authority" (SRA):

http://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/fraud-dishonesty/bogus-fake-solicitors.page

Lum

moonrunners wrote: »

Crown Immunity? Tpypical!

They also like to exempt themselves from the freedom of information act by blatant lying. A while back I asked them how many cars they had records for of a particular make and model. This is a very simple query to do on a database. They claimed it would cost over £600 to do this search and that it would severely impact the performance of their computer systems and thus was exempt from FOI.

Gavin83

How the hell did it take you 4 hours to get your shopping in tesco?

TrickyWicky

It was either a hell of a long stint in the cafe or they were misusing the car park (eg visiting friends).

Either way, Tesco know that their car parks never fill right up so its a bit of a con even trying to claim that they need any enforcement. Only time they do fill up is xmas (I should know, they've used me in the past to keep it all flowing).

For years supermarkets allowed this little perk of a bit of free parking (ok town centre super markets tried to stamp it out) and it was give and take. They knew people used their car parks while not shopping and it gave them a nicer reputation to go with it. Now they just treat customers like a commodity. ASDA are just as bad now too.

Lum

I quite like the system they have in some town centre branches of Sainsburys. You pay £1 for parking, but in addition to a pay and display ticket you also get a voucher, valid for that day, that gives you £1 off your shopping.

Annoying if, like me, you don't really carry cash often, however.

forgotmyname

The local CO-OP did the same, Fitted pay as you display meters.

£2 minimum, Yes you get a voucher but when i only wanted a carton of milk or a loaf of bread it was useless.

Simple solution, I stopped shopping there.

TrickyWicky

forgotmyname wrote: »

Simple solution, I stopped shopping there.

I often wonder what would happen if people who stop shopping at these stores would go back there once a month with the receipts from their shopping 'elsewhere'.

Perhaps if the store managers were shown a months worth of custom that has been given to other stores, they would rethink their parking enforcement.

Lum

Why would you drive to a town centre supermarket for a single item like a pint of milk?

It'll cost you more in fuel than you'd save by not buying that milk from your local corner shop!

Cash-Strapped.T32

TrickyWicky wrote: »

Perhaps if the store managers were shown a months worth of custom that has been given to other stores, they would rethink their parking enforcement.

Probably not much worth unless it was an organised effort, but I bet it would be fairly simple to organise on a forum such as MSE.. /hint-hint :dance:

Imo you'd need accumulated receipts from several customers to show that this isn't just one random "disgruntled customer", again, easy to do;
Pick a particular supermarket that is bad for this practice, and then collect a number of members from that area.

Each member keeps their receipts for a month, and then these could be copied; 1 copy goes to the branch, and the other goes to head office, explaining that this is the revenue that has been lost due to the practice of their branch.


The reason I'm so hot on it being from multiple lost customers, and copied to H/office is because it's easy for someone in a business to fob-off colleagues saying that it's just one "mr angry" type, but when you get a trend, that's when actual decision makers get involved.

Emptying an envelope full of scratted-up receipts on a manager's floor isn't going to do anything other that wind up the cleaners, but a businesslike campaign, whereby XYZ's head office starts receiving a breakdown of lost custom each month would work wonders imo - I know our company would go bananas if something like this happened to us, and Big-Things(tm) would happen, and sharpish once H/O got involved.
(different type of business, but the result would be the same)