Free Traffic Legal Advice

I will not confirm if the registered keeper is the driver (unless you tell me there is no advantage in not doing so).



The car in question has a staff parking permit to park at a certain university in England.
With this permit, you must still pay every time you park.
The registered keeper has an account with the Evology parking system, which is a trading name of Parkingeye.
Users must top up their Evology account online, and then the system automatically deducts payment from the prepaid balance every time you park.


The driver parked on 26-May.
On Friday 29-May, Evology sent an email that they were unable to collect payment for the 26-May parking, and would try 3 more times.
On Sunday 31-Jun the registered keeper topped up the balance again. By now, Evology had already tried to collect payment 3 times. The keeper can see this from the statement, logging into their Evology online account.


The keeper has contacted the landowner (the university). However, based on similar experiences to other people, it is reasonable to assume the landowner will do nothing.


I can think of two main points:

   1) The registered keeper topped up their Evology account promptly (email received on Friday, topped up on Sunday). Evology sent an email notification on 29_may at 13.06, then tried to take a payment for the last time on 30 May at 13.06. The email notification did not clarify that the user had 24 hours. These time stamps are confirmed from the Evology statements. The willingness to pay seems clear to me. Notifying the user late, giving them only 24 hours, but not even telling them so, is neither fair nor reasonable.
   2) The university car park is vast, with multiple entrances. Neither the notice received nor the evology statement show which of the many entrances was used, where the car was parked, nor where the signs are. I am not sure to what extent any of this can be used in an appeal.

Thanks!

Parking Eye won’t have got the £2 anyway, their usual modus operandi is that all the money paid for parking goes to the land owner, in return for which Parking Eye get the right to pursue anyone breaking the rules and gets to keep the money. So they won’t care about £2 now.

It’ll be down to terms and conditions, signage and Evology, but I can see from

27. Where you have not selected Auto-Top up as your Payment Preference and the process in clause 24 would not result in a Balance sufficient to cover the Automated Billing Parking Tariff, We shall not seek to take payment via your Payment Preference, and We will notify You, by either email or SMS, to advise that a payment request has been received and Your Balance is insufficient to settle the Automated Billing Parking Tariff. We will provide a period of up to 24 hours for You to make a successful Manual Top-Up to Your Balance to cover the cost of the Automated Billing Parking Tariffs; or to revise or review Your Payment Preference including the Payment Card details.

If this is applicable here, you didn’t need to be told you only had 24 hours because you’d signed up and agreed to the terms and conditions.

Supreme Court: ruled that the charges were appropriate, not excessive.
Challenge needs to be on a technicality - poor signage, failure to comply with PoFA 2012, failure to comply with the industry code of practice.
Parking Eye will take you to court. If they do it themselves, the usually mean it, but if they engage DCB Legal then the case will usually be discontinued before the court fee has to be paid, but there are a lot of steps until then, including constructing and submitting a defence. Search the forum if you want to know more.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I know about Parkingeye vs Beavis.
I should have asked: is there any precedent on challenging in court whether it is fair and reasonable to give users only 24 hours to top up, and to charge them even if they have topped up after 48 hours?

I don't think Parkingeye vs Beavis addressed that, right?

Correct.
As above, I think their argument will be that you read and explicitly agreed to their terms and conditions when you signed up. I don’t think a court will say this isn’t fair or reasonable.

Is there a reason the account wasn't topped up at the time the driver parked?

It is not reasonable for a driver to log into the account to check the balance every time they park.
It is not clear to me why the auto top up didn't work.
Sometimes legitimate transactions may be misclassified as fraud by the bank and blocked, but I do not remember a notification from the bank about this,
The auto top up has since been linked to a different card.