Free Traffic Legal Advice

I have received a Parking Charge Notice from Euro Car Parks Ltd, the operators of the car park at Morrisons in Wells, Somerset.



The vehicle referenced was parked at this location on 16th November 2024, for over 4 hours.

The car park has an initial 2-hour free parking period.

After two hours, while in town, I opened the YourParkingSpace app to purchase more parking time.

The app refused to let me buy parking time, displaying a message “Unfortunately, all of our allocated bays have been booked at this time. To guarantee space in future, please pre-book in advance.”



This makes no sense to me, when the vehicle had been parked in a marked bay throughout.

There is no mention of a need to pre-book parking spaces on the signs in the car park. It’s presented as optional on the sign.

I include photographs of the signs from Euro Car Parks and YourParkingSpace: (click to enlarge)



There are no machines in the car park to buy tickets instead of using the app.

The PCN’s date of issue is Friday November 22nd.
The PCN did not arrive in the post until Friday November 29th.
This leaves only a week until the deadline for the reduced parking charge of Friday 6th December. It sounds like this could be a standard “tactic” of private parking companies.

I do not understand why it was not possible to buy parking. I did as instructed on the signs.

Sensing trouble ahead, I captured the screenshot of the app above, and even purchased parking for the following day instead, even though this vehicle has not returned to that car park since.

The green YourParkingSpace sign says that payment must be made on arrival, but I would say there's a good argument to be made that the term was not prominently displayed.

Before we advise on any appeals, speaking to the management of Morrisons would be sensible. Anecdotally Morrisons can be quite good at intervening in parking chsrges issued at their car parks

Unless you can get Morrisons to get the PCN cancelled, this will never be accepted on appeal, at least by ECP. There is a remote possibility that a secondary appeal to POPLA will succeed but don't bank on that.

However, no one who is here receiving advice and following it, pays a penny to ECP. Even if Plan A, a request with Morrisons to cancel the PCN or Plan B, an appeal to ECP or Plan C, an appeal to POPLA don't succeed, I can say with greater that 99% confidence that Plan D will bering the matter to a close after a county court claim is issued and simply defended, they will eventually discontinue some time next year.

Please stop worrying about the "mugs discount". It is there to persuade low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to pay up without making ECP have to do anything. It's a scam. Sadly, one that probably works for the majority of the 41,000 private parking tickets that are issued every single day! Yes, every day.

Follow the advice and, whilst it can be protracted, you will not pay a penny of your well earned cash to these ex-clampers and you'll learn a lot of useful civil law and rights in the process.

After two hours, while in town, I opened the YourParkingSpace app to purchase more parking time.

The app refused to let me buy parking time, displaying a message “Unfortunately, all of our allocated bays have been booked at this time. To guarantee space in future, please pre-book in advance.”



This makes no sense to me, when the vehicle had been parked in a marked bay throughout.

YourParkingSpace only allow a certain percentage of spaces to be booked, based on historic ANPR data. Once that limit has been reached, they don't allow further bookings even if you're already on site.

The signage could definitely be improved to make that clear.