YOUR correspondent Jonathan Hayward may be interested to know that Smart Parking is issuing penalty charge notices even when a ticket has been displayed. My registration number contains two zeros. My husband, who is in his 80s and unfamiliar with any technology, entered those two zeros as “O”s. Colloquially one often uses the letter O in a sequence of numbers, as when giving your telephone code, but so far as Smart Parking is concerned, this is not acceptable.
I am appealing to POPLA. I hope I will be successful as, looking at the various tickets I have kept, this method of entering the VRM may have been used on several subsequent occasions before the first PCN was received (I have already had a second), raising the prospect of several hundred pounds of fines. As you wrote in your opinion of October 6, “that is how boycotts begin”. So much for free car parking.
Clare C Smith
Church Street
Steeple Ashton