Free Traffic Legal Advice

A disabled wheelchair user and a visitor to a cctv hospital car park, parking in a disabled bay not meeting disability regulation in design or access.

On leaving the car park you have to register your disabled badge for free parking via a machine. The payment machine keyboard is designed at the top height of the machine, at a height too great to reach from a seated position, and so the registration input was inaccessible in practice. It is discriminatory and people struggle to reach , make typing errors or no letter is selected when keyboard attempt is pressed, its speed is to fast, changing pages on the screen. After long struggle and pain it was believed blue badge went through ok. The machine provides no receipt, leaving people uncertain the vehicle was recorded or not. To double check again someone may re flash the blue badge for the second time it states the disabled badge is in use, so you just pray it has accepted it. only this time it was met with a ticket in the post for non payment. It was noticed from PCN pictures sent that the plates were both white as in the pictures were both of the front of the vehicle only. No yellow plate for the rear which seemed odd. It is addressed to a name, not notify the driver ? not sure if this makes any difference. There is no trust in this machine. It is discriminatory to disabled and small people as you have to type information in at the top height of the machine window when disabled people would find this difficult or impossible to reach the height with their hand. advice welcome attached pictures and car spaces not meeting car parking standards.

 PARKING BAYS ARE NOT ACCESSIBLE or the required measurement ie there is no dropped kerb. There are no access hatchings either side of the parking bay as per law, meaning you could not access the footpath from the vehicle you have to go on road. The bays has no access for a wheelchair transfer both sides of the parking space due to kerb directly next to parking space. Hardly any space to reverse out of space, due to shed storage blocking the road as pictured at the rear.       
Glad of some help from regulars please. Cant seem to add any more pictures. Thankyou in advance

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Let me get this into a more coherent context. The disabled visitor in this case parked in a designated disabled bay at Brixham Community Hospital. They were using a wheelchair and held a valid Blue Badge. The car park uses automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), and Blue Badge holders are required to register their badge details at a machine before leaving, in order to avoid a parking charge.

The machine used to register the Blue Badge was not designed in a way that a wheelchair user could access easily. The keyboard and touchscreen were positioned at the top of the machine, well out of reach from a seated position. This created a significant barrier for the disabled visitor, who struggled for a long time in pain trying to use the machine. The screen was too quick to respond, changing pages unexpectedly, and the keyboard was unreliable. Some key presses did not register, while others selected the wrong letter. Despite these problems, it appeared at the time that the badge registration had gone through. The machine gave no receipt or confirmation, and when the person tried to scan the badge again to check, the screen said it was already in use. This led them to believe that the registration had worked, and that no charge would be issued.

Then, a few days later, a Parking Charge Notice (PCN) was received by post. It claims that the driver failed to pay for the duration of their stay. The PCN includes time-stamped ANPR images of the vehicle entering and exiting, and it is correctly addressed to the registered keeper, citing the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA). However, the visitor was unaware that their Blue Badge registration had not gone through, and there is no trust in the machine due to its inaccessible and unreliable design.

On top of this, the physical layout of the disabled parking bays at the hospital is not compliant with required design standards. The bays do not have the required side access hatchings that allow a wheelchair user to open their door fully and transfer in or out safely. There is no dropped kerb next to the bays, which means a wheelchair user cannot get from the vehicle to the pavement without going onto the road. At the rear of the space, a shed or storage unit makes it extremely difficult to reverse out, especially for larger vehicles. The lack of proper space, kerb cuts and side access creates a serious risk and makes these bays unfit for purpose.

The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers, including NHS Trusts and parking contractors, to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that disabled people are not placed at a disadvantage compared to non-disabled people. This applies to both the physical infrastructure, such as bay design and kerb access, and to procedures such as the method of badge registration. In this case, both the machine and the bays were inaccessible, and the system caused distress, confusion and ultimately led to a parking charge that would not have been issued if the system were accessible and compliant.

This situation is clearly discriminatory. The parking process disadvantages wheelchair users and fails to make reasonable adjustments. The hospital and the parking contractor both have a legal duty to avoid this kind of harm. The PCN should be cancelled immediately, and the system needs to be reviewed to ensure it no longer puts disabled people in this position.

The first step should be to try Plan A: contact the hospital’s Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) to explain the situation and ask them to intervene and have the PCN cancelled. They have the ability to escalate the matter internally and liaise with the parking company. At the same time, a formal complaint should be made to the NHS Trust that operates the hospital, as well as to UK Car Park Management (UK-CPM), setting out all the points above.

If needed, a more formal challenge under the Equality Act or escalation to a regulator or Member of Parliament may follow. But the aim for now is to give the hospital the opportunity to put this right.

An afterthought... do the blue badge bays conform to this mandatory requirement according to the BPA/IPC Private Parking Single Code of Service (PPSCoP) section 4.1?