Dear Warwickshire County Council,
In the first instance I rely on my informal representations, as I sought to explain there I made a concerted and repeated effort to pay the appropriate parking charge and it is the inadequacy of the council's systems that prevented me from doing so.
To expand on that, I had an appointment at 8am with the police to give a statement about a crime; I parked in front of the police station at about 7:55 and attempted to pay for parking; payment for parking is required only 8am-6pm. I normally pay by app (RingGo), I hoped I could pay for 1 hour and that it would start rolling at 8am, so I would be covered until 9am. However, when I attempted it, the app said "parking is currently free" and it didn't let me.
Before entering the police station to give my statement, I tried again to pay (around 8:05am) and the officer said to do it outside because they don't get good signal inside, the app still didn't let me pay ("parking is currently free"). Midway through my appointment the officer reminded me about the parking and suggested I went outside to try and pay again; it still didn't let me ("parking is currently free"), for peace of mind I took a screen recording on my phone which has been placed at
(link)I didn't know at the time (around 8:34), but the penalty charge had already been issued. I only found out at around 9am that there was a PCN on the windscreen (issued at 8:20).
Most authorities across the country provide both pay & display and telephone payment facilities that allow payment prior to the controlled hours, because for instance if one parks at 6 am it would be absurd to require someone to hang around at the parking place until 8 am in order to effect payment at that time. Indeed, there are many areas with daytime charge and pay & display machines where one can buy a pay and display ticket the night before with a start time of 8 am (or whenever the charges begin), so in this instance the root cause of the issue is the inadequacy of the council's parking systems.
All that being said, I draw your attention to The Warwickshire County Council (District of Warwick) (Civil Enforcement Area) (Waiting Restrictions, On Street Parking Places and Residents Parking) (Consolidation) Order 2017 which provides at article 13(4) that:
Any person who wilfully avoids or seeks to avoid or assists in avoiding the payment of the specified charge for parking shall be guilty of contravening this Order.
Quite plainly the council has no hope of showing that I avoided or sought to avoid making payment, on the contrary I made repeated efforts to effect payment and it is the council's use of a payment system that is not fit for purpose that thwarted those attempts. While it is true that usually such contraventions do not include an element of mens rea, you have chosen to draft the traffic order in such a manner that an element of intent is required for a contravention to occur. Applying the principle of contra proferentem, the council cannot avoid the consequences of the wording it chose when drafting the traffic order.
As I did not wilfully avoid or seek to avoid payment, I am not guilty of contravening your traffic order, so the penalty charge notice must be cancelled.
Yours faithfully
. The reason is that if the view count is zero by the time you get a notice of rejection, we then have proof that they've failed to consider all of the supporting evidence submitted, which is a procedural impropriety. If the notice of rejection says they've carefully considered the representations, we've also got them for lying.
Lastly don't use the text box on the council website for the representation, rather put the representation in the PDF and in the text box where they want you to write the representation, just say something like "
".
