Free Traffic Legal Advice

My wife received this as the keeper of the car for an alleged contravention on 20/02/2026 (MC04774743). The last digit of the reg was entered as a 0 instead of an O. She had previously received a PCN for the same issue on 10/12/2025 (MC04614190) and it was cancelled after an informal appeal with the council's response stating,



"On this occasion, I am satisfied that you had paid for your parking time and your (PCN) has now been cancelled. Please be aware should you receive another ticket for the same reason we may not be able to cancel it."



The informal appeal (on two attempts) on the second PCN was rejected with them saying,



"We wrote to you to advise you that future PCNs may not be cancelled, as such this PCN will not be cancelled. I have carefully considered your case and I am satisfied that your PCN was issued correctly, and as such, I have taken the decision not to cancel it."



We both think it's outrageous to get a fine when there's been no attempt to avoid paying for parking and it's only been triggered due to honest manual error. We decided not to pay the discounted rate and wait for the NTO to arrive so we can challenge it formally. This arrived a couple of weeks ago. I've seen that there has been at least one other case where the appeal was rejected by an adjudicator for a similar issue so I'm just coming here (admittedly quite late on in the process as I didn't know about the forum before yesterday), for some advice on how best to proceed.



Here are the docs thus far:


The latest PCN (MC04774743):








The first informal appeal rejection letter:







The second informal appeal rejection letter (which was also sent to us in the post):







NTO:













For background, the acceptance of the first informal appeal letter:





Apologies for not coming here first before challenging the ticket informally and also not coming here until I have a reduced number of days to submit my formal appeal (I believe I have 28 days from the issuing of the NTO to do so, so by 11th May 2026).

Any guidance you can provide here would be appreciated about the best action to take.

The reg was entered in a machine at the site, so is prone to error since not in an app, but even so it's a simple mistake to make (in my mind). I'd even go as far as suggesting the machine should be smart enough to validate whether the right character format (i.e. number or letter) has been entered, but this is just in my pre-problem-solving head.