Parking charge from Horizon cancelled - thank you everyone!

Xevious_2

I just wanted to post to say thank you to everyone on this board who donates their time and effort into making sure that the unscrupulous parking companies are prevented in their efforts to extract unfair money.  Like most I will pay for parking whenever needed, and in the past have paid a finecharge when it was fairly incurred (forgetting to buy a parking ticket!), but that's not what we're talking about here.

My latest issue was that I went to our local Tesco one evening, ahead of a party for my son, and bought £300 of stuff - the weekly food shop, plus party supplies.  It took about an hour to do.  I wasn't aware that the car park had recently changed from being free and unregulated - it's attached to the shop, nowhere near a station, nothing else nearby - to having a 3 hour limit during the day, but then 1 hour after 10pm.  I arrived at about 10:10, and left at 11:25.  I didn't notice any signs - I wasn't looking for them - and so the first I knew about it was a month later when I got a "Notice to Hirer" from Horizon telling me I owed them £70.

I went back to Tesco and the signs are very poorly placed, not well lit, and there's no information as you go into the shop.  It really feels as if they are trying their best to catch out anyone who might go shopping late in the evening.  Bear in mind this Tesco is open until midnight, so there is obviously demand there ...

Anyway, the letter from Horizon was rubbish.  Very little information about the process, no chance to actually speak to anyone, no chance to submit a receipt showing I'd been shopping.  I went to Tesco and was told they had no power to do anything about it, because I should have known to go and register with consumer services if I'd known I was going to be more than an hour (so they could have prevented the ticket being issued).  No signs about that, of course.

A complaint to Tesco is ongoing, and I'm shopping at Sainsbury's in the meantime.

I read through the information on this board, including the really helpful newbies posts and templates, and it was clear that the Horizon letter got some really fundamental stuff wrong.

• The process to transfer liability required you to respond within 28 days of the letter.  No two-day delivery period, no day after provision.  They were cutting the period short by three days.  Given that we didn't even get the letter until a week after it was dated (not sure whether to blame them for delays in posting, or Royal Mail for delays in delivering!), this was pretty substantial.
• This was a Notice to Hirer, since this is a lease car.  However they didn't actually tell us that they had approached the lease company already, and the wording was all consistent with a Notice to Keeper (getting details from DVLA, and so on).  They certainly didn't include any of the required documents showing that we had liability.
• There was no picture of the sign, nor information on grace periods or the contract with the land owner.

All this stuff is really clearly set out in PoFA, no ambiguity at all.  It's not one of these pieces of legislation which could be understood in multiple ways.  I can't see that the government could have made it any simpler for the parking companies to be compliant.  And yet they're not.

So, I took parts of the templates from this site, regarding the transfer of liability, regarding the documents needed for lease vehicles, regarding the need for evidence.  I put a very clear conclusion that they had no ability to transfer liability to the keeper since they had fundamentally failed to follow the very simple guidelines in PoFA.  I put it all together in a letter and sent it off using their standard contact form, since they don't have an email address.

It took me a couple of evenings to pull all this together and send it off.  From the timings of the response and their office opening hours, it looks as if it took them 17 minutes to cancel the ticket.

Thank you all for a very helpful forum and all your efforts.  I have a dream where this isn't necessary, and parking companies are fair and reasonable, following the rules and having empathy where needed.  If everyone can fight unfair tickets due to this forum, we may, one day, get there.  Until then, thank you!

Coupon-mad

Yay - easy when you know how! Hope your lease firm didn't charge you an admin fee?

Xevious_2

No, it's a company car (through quite a small friendly lease company) and there was no fee at all.  I let them know that the charges were cancelled anyway and they seemed pretty pleased with the outcome!