12-fold surge in parking ticket appeals (POPLA) in just two years

Browntoa

More than 600 drivers a week contesting fines and 10,000 penalties quashed

• Parking on Private Land Appeals service deals with contested tickets from car parks in supermarkets, service stations and sports centres
• The service assessed 23,500 appeals in the year ending March 2014, and decided to reject more than 10,000 tickets
• People tended to complain after receiving an invalid ticket, or buying the right ticket but being accused of not displaying it on their windscreens

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2686815/12-fold-surge-parking-ticket-appeals-just-two-years-More-600-drivers-week-contesting-fines-10-000-penalties-quashed.html

trisontana

Once again the Fail gets it wrong. That's a picture of a council CEO and not of a PPC ticket jockey.

The_Slithy_Tove

The usual carp from the Daily Wail, who, as ever, can't even get their overblown, exaggerated facts right. That paper is an utter disgrace, just like the PPCs themselves.


The headline: "12-fold surge in parking ticket appeals in just two years." Interesting, since POPLA hasn't been running that long, so what are they basing their 2-year old statistic on?


Then we get, "POPLA spokesman Henry Michael Greenslade said: Since my last report the number of cases being decided has grown substantially. The workload has increased some 12-fold." Ah, so it's the workload, which is not necessarily (though probably) directly related to the number of appeals. But the timescale is "since his last report, whenever that was (not stated, and certainly not 2 years ago). And the 12-fold increase only indicates their complete underestimation of how many appeals there would be at the time they first estimated/recruited, which is not the same thing as the report tries to say.

bazster

How can there be a 12-fold surge in 2 years when PoPLA didn't exist 2 years ago? I have a degree in mathematics so I'm fairly confident in stating that 12 x nowt = nowt.

This bit is a hoot: The British Parking Association welcomed the POPLA findings, but warned that motorists are still at the mercy of firms who are able to exploit legal loopholes to charge inflated prices for parking.

That'll be every member of the BPA then.

The_Deep

Most of the comments were very sensible, although a few seem to think that ignoring tickets is still the best policy.

bargepole

The good news about this story is that the number of POPLA appeals is steadily rising, although clearly not "twelvefold".


They are now running at 600+ appeals weekly, so that's at least 30,000 per year, a figure which can only go up, thanks to the efforts of people on forums such as this.


The fact that successful appeals are at 45%, when we know how to word an appeal with an almost 100% guaranteed success rate, suggests that there are an awful lot of people out there sending in appeals based on mitigating circumstances.


Spread the word.

Hot_Bring

While The Daily Fail have struggled to report correctly let's just take a moment for a high five as 23,000 appeals will have cost the PPCs around £750k and the BPA a cool £2.3m :rotfl:

That's £3m taken out of the PPC world

nobbysn*ts

It's a drop in the ocean compared to the millions of tickets issued, and paid though. But 'every little helps'

bazster

Meanwhile the number of fake fines issued per year heads towards 3 million. Supposing 40% of them are paid, that's something like £70,000,000 stolen from motorists.

PoPLA isn't going to bring this fraud down, not in 100 years.

Hot_Bring

nobbysn*ts wrote: »

It's a drop in the ocean compared to the millions of tickets issued, and paid though. But 'every little helps'

Oh agreed but it's a start. I'm sure the £750k can easily be afforded by the PPCs but how long can the BPA afford to take multi-million pound costs each year ? ***snigger***

I guess they'll be going back to Parking Eye for another loan :rotfl:

nobbysn*ts

Hot_Bring wrote: »

Oh agreed but it's a start. I'm sure the £750k can easily be afforded by the PPCs but how long can the BPA afford to take multi-million pound costs each year ? ***snigger***

I guess they'll be going back to Parking Eye for another loan :rotfl:

How do you get your figures?