Nurse who pays for contract parking "fined" for using the wrong space

HamptonWick

First, apologies if this post is covered elsewhere in the forum - I've tried searching for a similar case relating to contract parking with no success.

My wife works at our local hospital and pays something like £26 a month, taken straight out of her wages, for the privilege of parking there. Parking is always a lottery as the contractor has issued many more permits than there are spaces (and it will shortly get much worse). There are two types of staff parking, standard and "premium".

On the day in question, my wife arrived 30 minutes before her shift to find no standard staff spaces available, despite spending 15-20 minutes looking round the various car parks on site, so had to park in a premium bay to avoid being late for work. As you will have guessed, she came out at 10pm to find the little yellow square stuck to her windscreen.

So, what should/shouldn't we do as she has no intention of paying the robbing £$$(*&$(%?
Would the fact that the company charges for the right to park but doesn't guarantee a space will be available, fall under unfair contract terms?

Fruitcake

What is the name of the PPC please.
Has your wife read the sticky thread for NEWBIES yet?


Your wife should be complaining to the head of the hospital trust asap, and get her union rep involved as well if she has one.

Have a look at this as well. Boris and co has recently updated this. I'm sure someone will be along soon with the newest version.

NHS patient, visitor and staff car parking principles - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Umkomaas

Complain to her Trust Facilities team (or whoever organises the parking arrangements) and ask them to sort this out. 

Which parking firm?

Which hospital (we will possibly have seen cases there before)?

Half_way

Also take a look at the NHS parking principles before you complain

HamptonWick

Thanks all for the information so far. I did look in the Newbie threads but couldn't see anything about contract parking arrangements - probably just my poor searching. I'll have a read of the GOV.UK doc.

The hospital is the Royal Stoke Hospital, which is part of the University Hospitals of North Midlands (UHNM) trust. I believe it's APCOA who are the contractor.

As an aside, she recently got some debt demands for old infractions from ZZyouknowwho, along with dozens of her colleagues, but the hospital had those cancelled as a clerical error (translated to: we don't like the bad publicity).

For further info. - the situation is about to get worse. The trust has just sold the site of a former hospital about 1/2 a mile away that until now was used for overflow parking and had several hundred spaces.

Umkomaas

Your wife shouldn't concern herself about APCOA, they are totally benign. I suspect they have issued a Notice to Keeper (NtK) that doesn't comply with the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (Schedule 4), so as long as the driver doesn't 'out' themselves, there's nowt APCOA can do. 

So, course of action ... let's see a redacted copy of the NtK (both sides, but leave any dates on it still showing), then we can help you adjust the standard template initial appeal to push APCOA towards an early cancellation. 

D_P_Dance

Have you read this?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nhs-patient-visitor-and-staff-car-parking-principles/nhs-patient-visitor-and-staff-car-parking-principles

Have you complained to your MP?

HamptonWick

Umkomaas said:

Your wife shouldn't concern herself about APCOA, they are totally benign. I suspect they have issued a Notice to Keeper (NtK) that doesn't comply with the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (Schedule 4), so as long as the driver doesn't 'out' themselves, there's nowt APCOA can do. 

So, course of action ... let's see a redacted copy of the NtK (both sides, but leave any dates on it still showing), then we can help you adjust the standard template initial appeal to push APCOA towards an early cancellation. 

Thanks. Will post it once received. So far, she's just had the screen notice, which got torn into very, very small pieces and binned, accompanied by much swearing.

Redx

No Biggie , the postal NTK PCN is likely to fail a POFA test , meaning no keeper liability , especially if that is you , the non driver !!

Slowly slowly catchee monkee , keep tempers under control

Apcoa are easy to beat as long as nobody blabs about who was driving

The trust complaint can be made when the NTK PCN arrived in several weeks time , after day 29 following the event , without outing the driver (even if it's obvious)

Fruitcake

HamptonWick said:

Umkomaas said:

Your wife shouldn't concern herself about APCOA, they are totally benign. I suspect they have issued a Notice to Keeper (NtK) that doesn't comply with the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (Schedule 4), so as long as the driver doesn't 'out' themselves, there's nowt APCOA can do. 

So, course of action ... let's see a redacted copy of the NtK (both sides, but leave any dates on it still showing), then we can help you adjust the standard template initial appeal to push APCOA towards an early cancellation. 

Thanks. Will post it once received. So far, she's just had the screen notice, which got torn into very, very small pieces and binned, accompanied by much swearing.

That's a shame because the advice is normally to appeal a NTD around day 26. If you haven't got the PCN number you can't appeal it, and it is going to make it difficult to complain to the hospital about that specific scamvoice. However, your wife, her colleagues, and all the on site unions should be thumping the table and demanding the scamvoices are cancelled. You also need to be asking now what they are going to do about the lack of parking if the overflow site is not going to be available.

When one of the Bristol hospitals closed and a new one was built on the Southmead site, the hospital trust had a temporary two storey car park built, and rented land at a nearby welfare club for staff to park whilst buildings were demolished to make way for a multi-storey car park.
They don't have unregulated scammers on site. Everything is done in house. More jobs and the income from parking goes to the hospital, not the scammers.

As well as complaining to your MP I suggest you also complain to the Secretary of State for Health, and to Boris, who has repeatedly said he is going to stop this sort of thing.
Local and National Press might also be interested in the way out NHS heroes are being scammed by unregulated parking companies referred to as rogues, scammers, and bloodsuckers by MPs across all parties.

Half_way

there's something seriously off if a site is selling significantly  more permits than it has spaces available for.
they might get away with a slight oversell, but if this oversell is significant and they know about it then something seems off