Dart charge prepay accounts

oblivion62

I have a prepay account for the Dart Charge. I don't use the crossing often -- three or four times a year -- but the prepay account means you get a discount (£1.67 instead of £2.50) so what's not to like, really?

I used the crossing on Saturday, and I know I'll be using it once again before Christmas. I checked my account and I had a little over £3 in it so I topped it up to a total of £11.

After I'd done it, I had a vague recollection of someone telling me that the minimum topup of a prepay account is £10, so I went for a wander round the site to look for any information about this.

Buried in their T&Cs I found a statement to the effect that they may refuse to credit topups of less than £10.

Now, I didn't have a problem as such -- the topup was applied immediately and my balance showed as £11 as I'd intended. But even though the statement in the T&Cs hadn't been applied to my £7-and-change topup, the suggestion was certainly there that I might have lost the money and had no right to complain, so I emailed their customer service address to ask for clarification.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn't get clarification. I got this:

In regards to your email, we set a low balance threshold of £10.00 on the accounts. You are required to ensure you have sufficient credit on your account to cover any crossings which you will be making.

And, because I'd already used the crossing before I saw their response, I also got an automated reminder that includes this statement:

On 20/ 11/ 2016 your Dart Charge account balance is £9.33, which is below the minimum account balance threshold.

So my account has slipped under their minimum threshold by 67p and, on the face of it and under their T&Cs, I have to make another topup of at least £10 immediately. (I returned after 10pm so my return trip was free, which I wasn't intending but for the mathematicians among us, I should probably explain...!)

If I do that, my (probable) three crossings I'll make this year will cost me a little over £17 and I'll never get the minimum tenner back unless I convert to a PAYG account -- which doesn't attract a discount.

So I asked for clarification, again, and despite being very, very clear about the fact that I'm querying the apparent license to steal small payments in their T&Cs and the apparent demand to topup a tenner immediately the balance has dropped below £10, they've got back to me and told me nothing I didn't know -- that I'm required to maintain sufficient funds in my account to cover any crossing I make.

This feels like a set of rules that might have been designed solely for heavy users with some unwritten laxity for occasional users -- but I'm uncomfortable with this. Have I missed something obvious somewhere -- or have THEY simply given themselves the right to misbehave towards ordinary punters and hoped nobody notices?

If nothing else, I'm tempted to suggest that someone with a better eye for detail than me goes through their T&Cs and notifies someone a bit higher up the food chain than their customer service chaps if this really is as dodgy as it feels. Or, I guess, if they've allowed me to open an account that I have no right to expect to be allowed to use (even though I seem to recall being encouraged to do so when it first went live.)

glider3560

Everytime I've had to speak to someone, they give me a different answer about this issue.

I now top up £1.67 a time, before setting out on my journey. This works provided the account always stays in credit.

Experience now tells me that if you cross with a £0 balance, you must top up £10 minimum within 24hrs for the journey to be deducted. If you top up less than £10, you get a PCN and the journey is not deducted from the account.

Nodding_Donkey

So set your minimum balance as something else then.

Simples

rdr

Nodding_Donkey wrote: »

So set your minimum balance as something else then.

Simples

£10 is the minimum minimum balance.

I cross less than 10 times a year and have disabled auto top up, I maintain a small positive balance just over a multiple of 2*£1.67, it seems to work.

oblivion62

I got a response back from the Dart Charge people. It says:

These initial payment levels have been set to help ensure that pre-pay accounts remain in credit and the road user charge can be paid in full each time a crossing is made. If minimum levels were not set there would be a greater chance of account holders having insufficient funds in their account and facing penalty charges and/ or account closure.

We warn account holders when their credit is low. We also offer an automatic top-up service so they don’t have to remember to top-up manually.

As per the Terms & Conditions : a Minimum Top Up (whether by Auto-Top-Up or any other method) is £10 and you acknowledge that payments of less than £10 will not be credited to your Account;

If you are not happy to have more than £10 credit on your account, you can change your top up method to manual , where the topping up your account will be under your control and you could top up your account as and when it is required.

Which is reasonably clear except that I don't use auto-topup -- obviously! -- and they did credit £7.70 to my account, despite the T&Cs saying they wouldn't. (If this was adhered to, they'd probably be in receipt of a zillion complaints that the topup form doesn't insist on a minimum payment!)

rdr and glider3560 -- you're using the system pretty much as I want to. The thing that bothers me is the fact that they're completely clear that that sort of usage is in breach of their T&Cs, along with their claimed right to keep payments of under the minimum without any recompense to the user. (Whether this policy would survive being tested in court is perhaps moot, but I don't want it to be me who has to find out!)

So I think I'm going to stick to some of the terms of this. I'm not going to top my account up until there's insufficient funds to cover a pair of crossings, despite the low funds warning email; but I'm not going to take the chance that they'll allow me to pay in £9.50 and neither credit nor refund it.

I think, if I'm honest, that this is utterly appalling. In a world where micropayments are becoming more common and more accepted, their apparent insistence that I maintain an account balance of between £10 and £20 in exchange for a discounted crossing tariff (when I suspect there's no easy way to empty the account back into my own bank account) is nothing more nor less than mandated theft. (Cue chorus of "come the revolution, brothers..." )

They do say:

[FONT=&quot]If you are still unhappy with our response, we advise you to please contact Highways England as they are our charging authorities. You can contact their Customer Contact Centre (CCC) on 0300 123 5000. Alternatively you can email them at [/FONT][FONT=&quot][EMAIL="info@highwaysengland.co.uk"]info@highwaysengland.co.uk[/EMAIL].[/FONT]

I am inclined to ask Highways England how they justify allowing this. If I get a sensible response, I'll bring it back here.

waamo

I use the auto top up option and haven't experienced any problems at all.

John_Pierpoint

We local residents get a super cheap crossing of £0.20 and my old banger does not manage to use up £10 a year (I mainly come back after 22:00 and often go out before 06:00 as driving on the M25 is usually a form of torture during the day time (not to mention that the air is not fit to breathe).
At the end of the year the remains of the £10 is stolen; so obviously I don't want to automatically top up and put a "1" infront of the missing money.

I cannot seem to manually top up this year, can anyone post a link.

John_Pierpoint

Ah I've found it directly under the total of £0.00 (though above that it does say "20 Crossings left" presumably I have made a donation of £4)
(you cannot get the staff)
And in fairness the payment screen does say minimum payment annually is £10