Our Parking suspension, which was in my Wife's name:
The informal rep (summary)Unfortunately (and I appreciate this doesn't help), I can't find the original informal appeal, and it is not available via Lambeth Council via their process which is unfortunate. We must have appealed directly in their portal rather than saving a copy. It seems there's no way of seeing this and from experience I doubt a request to Lambeth Council will be fruitful. In fact, they don't even send you an email notification following an informal rep.
Summary of what we said in our appeal (my wife did the appeal).
- We were moving out and had booked the suspension for the removal lorry
- We literally bought the car the evening before and so didn’t have time to add the number plate to the suspension, given that Lambeth Council’s response is five working days for parking-related inquiries and there is no way to add a vehicle to the suspension without directly contacting the council (you can’t do it through the portal, as I found when I booked a suspension in mid-March.)
- We knew the lorry was half an hour away and so wouldn’t need the space for a while. We parked our car in the end bay of our own suspension to a) load some bits from the house that weren’t going in the removal lorry, and b) to make sure another car didn’t park there, as earlier in the morning a car *had* parked in our suspension. I’d called the council three times to get this car removed and have evidence of this. Once the car finally moved we needed to ensure another car didn’t take up the space.
- My husband [that's me] spoke to a parking enforcement officer about the car being in the suspension for a short while and explained the situation. The parking enforcement officer reassured us it was fine to leave the car there for a bit.
-Ten minutes later a different parking enforcement officer came along and affixed a PCN while we were moving stuff into the car.
They acknowledged that the situation was unfair but said they couldn’t remove the PCN.
-Our own car (registered under my husband’s name) was parked in our own suspension, and did not inhibit the removal lorry (as we had also booked the lorry). No issues resulted from our car being parked in the suspension. We have already paid you £305.17 for said suspension.
In my view, the response to this informal challenge does not satisfactorily answer any of these points and
indeed it seems to misunderstand the nature of the challenge, as it says that ‘the works were completed’ when they were not yet started.
On that note, you can even see in the photos that our removal lorry is arriving.
Full rejection of informal reps:
