I’ve written two versions of this reply regarding the letter from Linda Boyle last week. A long version which contains more details that some members of the public may not be aware of and which has been sent in a separate email and this shorter version if you are short of space. This is as follows:

Re “Issued a parking fine for waiting next to car park. Have Your Say, Sutton Guardian February 7th”. Well done Linda Boyle for taking on Sutton Council’s dictatorial car parking services.  This sort of practice goes on everywhere. I was a delivery driver for six years, driving all over the country and had to endure continual harassment from wardens issuing inappropriate tickets almost every week, which I then had to contest and get cancelled. This involved copying all my driver’s sheets, writing a letter quoting chapter and verse from the loading regulations and The Highway Code, at my own expense, for parking tickets that should never have been issued in the first place. I still have the file on all this correspondence!

I wrote to the then Home Secretary Alistair Darling, my local MP Paul Burstow and Transport for London about this problem. All to no avail, all I received from Mr Darling’s office was a letter on how to contest the tickets. I’ve spoken to wardens who either ignored, or were ignorant of the regulations, preferring to rack up as many tickets as possible, regardless of legitimacy, to curry favour with their employers, who would be only too pleased to rake in the money from uninformed drivers.

If you get a parking ticket which you know is inappropriate, always contest it. It will usually state that if you pay within a certain time the amount will be reduced. This is done to intimidate you into not contesting the ticket in case the council has to cancel it. Always make sure you’re in the right before you go ahead with your representation and don’t try to get out of it if you know you’re in the wrong. Always send it “Recorded Delivery”, they won’t accept “Proof of Posting” otherwise you run the risk of it being “not received”.

You then have to pay a hefty fine for failing to pay. This is another ploy used which I have experienced more than once. If the cancellation is refused, despite your insistence that the ticket is inappropriate, take a leaf out of Linda Boyle’s book and take it to the adjudicator. Make them pay! And when you’ve won, write to the Sutton Guardian so that everyone in the area can see what nasty little con artists these people are.

If any member of the public or a trader was to try to extract money from people in this way, they would be arrested and charged with extortion, or fraud, or obtaining money with menaces, or obtaining money by false pretences, or such like. But because they are part of the government, they think they can get away with it. Well, show them they can’t!

Alan Turner
By email