Help needed please - posted appeal to Parking Eye now have 2 questions

Nenen

Hi and many thanks to all the people who take lots of time helping others who have been unfairly fined and special thanks to Coupon-mad. I have just used the brilliant advice and templates to send an appeal to Parking Eye and obviously I'm hoping that will be successful.

However, despite searching the Newbie thread and FAQs for hours, there are a couple of related questions which I haven't been able to find an answer to (apologies if it's just me being thick):

1) My parking charge is for £85 reduced to £50 if I pay within 14 days. The automated response I got when I submitted my appeal to them online said it can take up to 14 days for them to respond. My 14 days 'grace' finishes on 1st May. If the appeals process takes longer than this and I lose, will I have to pay the full £85? If the answer to this is 'yes' then I am tempted to pay now rather than risk losing another £35 plus all the worry, especially as I stayed for more than 4 hours over the 3 permitted so am not holding out much hope of winning.

2) I overstayed in a car park at a retail park (Beehive Centre, Cambridge). Stupidly, I didn't look at the notices saying it was a 3 hour maximum stay because it didn't even occur to me that a retail park with 12+ big stores and several cafes etc (including TK Maxx, Asda, M&S, Next Home, Dreams, Toys R Us, Pets at Home, Maplins, Hobbycraft, Homesense, Multiyork, Carpet Right, Subway, Cafe Revive, Costa Coffee) would have such a limited amount of parking time. If I wanted to visit even half the stores in the park and have lunch or a coffee then I could spend no longer than 20 minutes per store without getting fined.

It seems ridiculous to me that the stores think this will encourage customers to browse and/or help their business, especially as there is no facility to pay beyond three hours and a restriction on returning in less than an hour.

After I received my parking charge I went back into the two stores I kept receipts for (M&S and Asda) and asked if they could get the charge taken off. Both the customer service assistant in Asda and the Deputy Manager I spoke to in M&S said it was "Nothing to do with us" and that they had "No jurisdiction or ability to get parking charges rescinded". They also agreed that such a short length of time was not helping their business but again both said it was "Out of my hands" and that their stores did not own the land and had complained to no avail.

The Deputy Manager at M&S then told me to go to the Parking Eye office on the site to show them my receipts because they could cancel my charge. However, having trudged all the way over there and waited 15 minutes for him to appear, the security guard on duty told me he couldn't do anything either as they do not employ car parking attendants on the site only security.

I find it very difficult to believe that these multinational stores have no jurisdiction over the car park serving them, particularly when I've read other posts about people who have had their parking charges overturned by store managers.

I'd be really grateful to know if there is a way to find out if they are actually telling the truth.

I am also going to try writing to all the shops in the Beehive Centre and would be really grateful for some help in drafting an effective letter, both to get my parking charge overturned and to get them to consider forcing Parking Eye to extend the parking time if possible.

One thing that might help is that (having been sent to the Parking Eye security office on a wild goose chase by the M&S Deputy Manager) the security guard told me that, other than the cameras timing entrance and exit to the car park, there are no other effective monitors or car park attendants so able-bodied people are always parking in disabled bays and hedges (potential hazard especially for emergency vehicles) yet nothing is done about this.

I'd be really grateful if Coupon-Mad or anyone with any expertise/knowledge about this could help me draft an effective letter.

ColliesCarer

Nenen wrote: »

1) My parking charge is for £85 reduced to £50 if I pay within 14 days. The automated response I got when I submitted my appeal to them online said it can take up to 14 days for them to respond. My 14 days 'grace' finishes on 1st May. If the appeals process takes longer than this and I lose, will I have to pay the full £85? If the answer to this is 'yes' then I am tempted to pay now rather than risk losing another £35 plus all the worry, especially as I stayed for more than 4 hours over the 3 permitted so am not holding out much hope of winning.

2) ..........
I'd be really grateful if Coupon-Mad or anyone with any expertise/knowledge about this could help me draft an effective letter.

Hi Nenen,

The bad news is that your 1st appeal will most likely be rejected.

The good news is that is the expected result because the aim of the 1st appeal is to get a POPLA code so that you can submit a POPLA appeal which this forum has a 100% record of winning.

So stop worrying about losing out on the early payment discount and as for thinking of paying the charge - I'm lost for words !!!!!!!
Have you not seen that Parking Eye aren't even submitting any challenge against forum supported POPLA appeals.

If not you need to take a look at post #3 of the NEWBIES thread (which you should be doing anyway to gen up on How to win at POPLA) and follow the link to POPLA decisions - go to the last page for the most recent wins and start working backwards.
How many can you find that P E won?

Follow the process through and you will have to pay a big fat £0

If you're not holding out much hope of winning then you haven't understood that it's not about what you did or didn't do - it's the legal arguments that win these appeals.

What does it matter how long you stayed if the charge is unenforceable in the first place. You could stay for 1 minute or 1 year and that would still be the case - so read up on some winning POPLAs.

Regarding complaint letters take a look at crabman's Parking Tickets Board sticky thread (the one below the NEWBIES thread) link below and click on successful complaints link to see lots of examples.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4896178

Also it may well be the case that the contract with P Eye at the Beehive is through a Landowner not any of the retailers and you need to try to find out who that is - so ask the retailers the question and use the search the forum function for other OP's dealing with this location as they may know.

EDIT - the Beehive centre was bought in Oct 2012 by Orchard Street Investment take a look at the link below
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CHQQFjAK&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cambridge-news.co.uk%2FBusiness%2FBusiness-News%2FBeehive-Centre-in-Cambridge-sold-for-109-million-01102012.htm&ei=LtJfU_b-J8LXOaDZgLAP&usg=AFQjCNH7HyaVHT8EMp-mLC1WVWMwyqbf3w&bvm=bv.65397613,d.ZWU

Coupon-mad

My 14 days 'grace' finishes on 1st May. If the appeals process takes longer than this and I lose, will I have to pay the full £85?

Don't be daft! Course not, everyone here wins at POPLA when you follow our advice. Why do you think the question about paying the fake 'fine' isn't in the NEWBIES thread - because it's not what happens and the discount is a bribe, utterly pointless even looking at the 14 days thing! And you have soooo many Store Managers and CEOs to complain to as well as the Beehive Centre Management. Complain to ALL of them including those where you only browsed (you remember, you window shopped in ALL of them).

Send the appeal online to PE this week, so it costs nowt, then plan your complaints - either in person to Store Managers (loads of them, brandishing the fake PCN) and/or by email to the CEO of each national chain, and to the Centre Managers (easily found by Googling the place). You are likely to find someone who will cancel this at the outset - it's just finding that person and spreading the net wider.

Nenen

Thank you both very much for your replies; I really appreciate your support. You both appear shocked that I am considering paying this charge so I'd like to explain why I have decided to do this.

I don't think I am functioning very well at the moment (probably due to dh being diagnosed with heart failure fairly recently). I am also suffering from a chronic condition and was already under a great deal of stress prior to getting this parking charge (probably the reason why I was oblivious to the huge black and yellow signs proclaiming the charge in the first place).

I have found trying to follow all the links above, along with those suggested on the newbies thread, really confusing and extremely time consuming - most links lead to other links for other threads, that lead to yet more links (both on MSE and other suggested websites), until I feel I am lost in a tangle of threads and websites, drowning in trying to decide which are pertinent to me etc.

It took me over 4 hours to read round the subject in order to compose my appeal to Parking Eye, based on looking at several different templates suggested via the links. Then, when I went to submit online, I found out that (despite following a suggested template on the newbie thread) the character count was too high so I had to spend at least another hour trying to find out which bits I should cut and edit my original accordingly.

I also did as was suggested on the Newbie thread (at least I think that's where I read it but after reading so much I might be wrong about that) and went to see the managers of stores I had shopped in (to no avail as I wrote in my previous post). As the car park is 7 miles away across the other side of the city, it took me 2 hours (plus petrol) to go and speak to them and then be sent on a wild goose chase to Parking Eye security.

As I said in my original post, I have already submitted an appeal to Parking Eye but am unlikely to find out if it has been accepted in time for the lower charge to be applied if this fails. I do understand the points you've made about the 100% success rate to date gained by people who then go through to a POPLA appeal but I really cannot afford the time and energy. let alone the additional worry and stress that going through this would take.

I've tried to use your links to find templates for complaints to store managers/site owners in the hope that one of them would get the charge overturned but, yet again, each link just leads to another link and I am struggling to unravel everything in order to be able to cobble my own letter together.

I estimate that this has taken about 2 hours already. It will almost certainly take me another couple of hours to complete this and then find out the names and addresses of all the people I should complain to, then adjust my letters of complaint accordingly. I will then need to add the cost of printing and posting these letters.

My dh and I are both self employed (different fields). His illness means that he had to halve the amount of work he was previously able to do, thus half previous income. It also means that I am trying not to let him see that I am worried as this only makes him feel guilty and then he gets depressed. I am struggling to maintain my own business whilst trying to support dh.

So far I have spent around 8 hours trying to avoid paying this parking charge. If I had spent those 8 hours working that would have more than paid the charge and saved me a lot of anxiety. I really don't want to appear ungrateful for the time and effort you have both spent answering my original post but I just feel that, even though I think this charge is legally and morally wrong, it would be worth paying £50 now just to prevent wasting further time and having additional worry.

HO87

You have a PM

Redx

I agree its time consuming so lets assume you spend 8 hours at minimum wage rates dealing with this , that equates to about £50 and if you are tax exempt (low wages of say 10k or less per annum) then your time is paid for when you win at popla

also, PE have a good reputation of cancelling if you provide evidence of shopping "on site" so dont assume your appeal will fail , especially if you have store receipts

the same applies if you appeal to the landowner too , either or both courses of action can give a cancellation even before popla

strictly speaking , your time has been employed understanding what is going on, this will help you when you park in future as you will be aware of the "goings on"

as for appealing this charge , I would say that it takes maybe 2 hours of anyone`s time to copy and paste a template letter to PE and to copy and paste a popla appeal into notepad, alter it slightly and send it to popla

possibly one hour to send appeal letters to retailers and landowners

so if you save £50 or £85 its tax paid money and so saving say £85 for a few hours work is well worth it, especially with the help you get here to tailor your popla appeal (the PE appeal is already a copy and paste letter from the NEWBIES thread so takes at most 10 minutes if adding details on store receipts)

2 of my relatives did a similar thing on a retail park near me, jointly stayed 5 hours on a 4 hour restriction, quick email to PE with scans of store receipts produced a cancellation in less than a week for the RK , no popla , no hassle and no money changed hands (I did post about this last autumn on here)

so less worry and a pro-active attitude (which you have started by approaching retailers etc) is all that is needed here , especially due to the number of stores and any patronage of those stores

Coupon-mad

Nenen wrote: »

So far I have spent around 8 hours trying to avoid paying this parking charge. If I had spent those 8 hours working that would have more than paid the charge and saved me a lot of anxiety. I really don't want to appear ungrateful for the time and effort you have both spent answering my original post but I just feel that, even though I think this charge is legally and morally wrong, it would be worth paying £50 now just to prevent wasting further time and having additional worry.

Please - don't pay a scam. The template was there on the NEWBIES thread, no link, it's there as you found and you just needed to remove the bottom part of it. How to win at POPLA is also simple, we can help.

ColliesCarer

Hi Nenen,

I just wanted to show you the link below so you can see how easy it will be to put together a winning POPLA appeal against P Eye from the templates available on the forum.

Yesterday the OP in the link got his rejection letter from P E. Today the OP has posted their draft POPLA appeal which they've produced by a small amount of editing of a template appeal.

This same appeal, with a bit of editing re: the specifics of your charge and your location and some fine tuning, would work for you too.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/65394808#Comment_65394808

Umkomaas

Here's another alternative OP - the Parking Tickets Appeals service.

£16 and your 'ticket' is taken care of. A guaranteed win, or they pay the ticket. Two experienced and trusted forum contributors have set this up; have a look at their website:

http://www.parkingticketappeals.org.uk

Nenen

Thank you all SO much. With your help and encouragement I put in an appeal to Parking Eye and heard today that my charge has been cancelled. I wouldn't have done this without the support I have received on here so thank you all again. :beer::beer::beer::beer::beer::beer: