Please stop calling it a “fine”. It is not a fine. It is not a penalty. It is a speculative invoice dressed up to look official. I will give you £1,000 for every occurrence of the word “fine” you can point to in that Notice to Keeper. You will not find it, because ParkingEye know perfectly well they are not issuing fines and have no lawful power to do so.
Now, the £60 point: The parking charge is £100. Always has been. Always is. The £60 figure is nothing more than a "mugs discount" for early capitulation. It is a time-limited bribe designed to make the recipient feel clever for “saving” £40, when in reality they are simply paying an invoice that should never have been issued in the first place.
Calling it a £60 charge is playing ParkingEye’s game for them. This is how the trap works:
– Inflate the headline charge to £100
– Dangle a short deadline
– Offer a “discount”
– Sit back and wait for guilt, fear, and ignorance to do the rest
And it works astonishingly well, especially on people who immediately start saying things like “it was my fault” and “maybe I should just chalk it up to experience”.
That is precisely why you are being targeted. Not because you did something egregious, but because you look like low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree who can be intimidated into paying out of ignorance and fear: a compliant, apologetic consumer who can be nudged into paying quickly if the letter looks official enough.
If this were genuinely about loss or fairness, there would be no arbitrary £40 discount for paying early. Loss does not magically reduce if you open your wallet within 14 days. The discount exists solely as a psychological lever. They are demanding £100 and offering a bribe to see if you panic.
Next, stop blaming yourself. This is exactly the mindset these operators rely on. You are doing the classic “low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree” routine by immediately assuming fault and moral obligation. Unregulated private parking firms design these systems to catch ordinary users out, then rely on fear, self-blame, and unfamiliarity with the process to extract money.
You did not “forget” to do something that was obvious and clear. You attended a leisure centre, used the facilities, parked in what appeared to be a customer car park, in the dark, with no prominent warning that free parking was conditional on hunting down a tablet inside the building and manually entering a VRM. That is not reasonable consumer conduct on their part, it is entrapment by design.
This is not about whether you were a genuine customer. ParkingEye do not care. This is not about fairness. This is about automated enforcement and volume revenue. The £100 demand plus the mugs’ discount are engineered psychological levers, not a reflection of loss or wrongdoing.
You have already done the one sensible thing: you contacted the leisure centre. They are the principal. ParkingEye are merely an agent. If the centre instructs cancellation, the charge disappears. That is how these cases are routinely resolved.
Do not rush to pay because of an artificial deadline. Do not panic about weekends or dates. And above all, stop internalising blame as if you have committed some civic offence. You have not.
Wait for the centre’s response. If they cancel it, the matter ends. If they do not, then you deal with ParkingEye properly and on your terms, not theirs. But paying now out of fear simply rewards the business model.
This is not “harsh but fair”. It is a commercial trap that relies on people being too quick to say “my fault” and reach for their wallet.
If you follow the advice you receive here, you will never have to pay a penny to Parkingeye.
