An article I read the other day said a well known supermarket (with blue and white bags) was going to start dishing out "fines" to anyone without children who park in the parent and child bays.
After asking "why the heck should people with children get priority parking when a lot of both the children and parents need the exercise" there is also the questions what right have they got to impose the "fine" and what right has the DVLA to sell our details to anyone calling themselves a parking firm?
Thankfully the DVLA question is now (Feb 2014) being raised in parliament but the others I am interested in here.
When you park on private land with notices saying - so long free, parent only, shoppers only, and if you overstay or forget to bring the 2yo out with you or park too close to an imaginary line only a parking attendant can see, you agree to pay £100 etc etc, what you are doing is entering into a contract with the owner of the land. So if you park for 121minutes or only had the dog with you not little Madaline you have breached a contract, not broken any laws.
The notice that is placed upon your car in a private car park or sent to you through the post by one of the CCTV controled supermarket carparks is not a fine notice, it will do everything it can to look like one, which can in some circumstances be an offence in itself, but it is an invoice. BIG DIFFERENCE.
Unless it is issued by the police or a local authority its an invoice so feel free to chuck it in the bin and ignore it, all you actually do is break your contract over parking. You don't commit a crime.
There are masses of contract laws that apply in the UK but all I need to say is this, if you break a contract the person who you had the contract with can seek to claim back their losses.
Not a massive unreasonable sum like £100 just their losses.
For example if you overstayed in a shop car park and there were 100 other spaces free at the time they would be hard pressed to say they had lost anything.
If you got the ticket because you parked accross 2 bays and you did it for say 2 hours and parking is £1 an hour their losses are £2 not £100. So offer them £4 and say thats all they are getting.
If you parked in a parents bay without the kids their losses are probably diddly squat.
There have been some brilliant cases recently where the company patroling the private car park was not even being employed by the land owner, those invoices can go straight in the bin. Oh hang on they all can.
The Government mistakenly passed a law in 2012 requiring the owner of a car to tell the scumbag parking people who was the driver but after you have complied with that bit you are done.
The reason why the private land parking industry is taking £50,000,000 a year off of drivers is because people have let them.
They can't put a marker on your credit rating, they can't send in the bailiff unless a court has heard the case and ruled against you and they cant clamp your car. If the person writing the ticket sees you and asks you anything you dont have to say a word.
Although if I am ever ticketed for parking in a parent and child bay I shall be informing the person issuing it that I do indeed have children with me, they are in the boot, and no I am not opening it because they might escape.
Fixing your number plates with velcro and removing them in private car parks is another way to defeat these scumbags, I mean companies, come to think of it with no police on the roads maybe just ditch the plates completely?!
If everyone told these companies 'see you in court' they would rapidly go out of business and the sooner that happens the better!
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