A driver is prepared to pay thousands in legal fees to fight a £100 parking fine he was given for staying in a retail park for 'just half-an-hour'. Lawrence Carnie has been on a nine-month crusade after he received a charge for parking for 23 hours when he claims he was only there for around 30 minutes.
Mr Carnie said he visited the retail park two days in a row for 30-minute stints, but was punished thanks to problems with the CCTV. The car park is free for three hours but he claims he was never logged leaving the first time so was hit with a fine for overstaying.
He appealed to both the parking enforcers, Group Nexus, and the independent adjudicator, Parking On Private Land Appeals (POPLA), but was rejected both times. But now Mr Carnie is carrying on his battle and has sought legal help to fight the fine by was handed at Tower Retail Park car park on last June 10
He said: "If I bumped into you in the street and said 'give me £100' you wouldn't do it. That's what's happened here, they're asking for £100 for not being there. It's just so wrong what this company is doing."
The motorist is being advised by CCJ Removals Services, who help people remove court judgments from their credit reports. Paralegal Luke Memory specialises in challenging parking fines and is overseeing the case. He said: "Cases like this do not usually make it to court as the legal costs are much higher than the fine but Mr Carnie is an exception to the rule.
"Once a claim is made against Mr Carnie we would instruct a barrister to draft a defence statement which costs £500 and this would lead to a court hearing at which Mr Carnie would instruct a barrister and this would cost approximately £1000. It's off-putting for the common man but Mr Carnie is happy to fight it in court."
He added: "They are very clever these companies as the costs to defend a case is much higher than the fine so people would usually just pay. My thoughts are he has a good case. What they are alleging is he stayed too long in the car park but their own evidence does not prove this and is littered with omissions and errors and clearly demonstrates that their records are inaccurate and unreliable."
Mr Carnie added: "I am doing this purely because the data they provided was so bad. They would have to show it to be impeccable but as I have found it doesn't show that."
Mr Carnie plans to request all his costs be paid for by Group Nexus if he wins his case. After appealing the penalty through the independent adjudicators, POPLA, Group Nexus released a 356-page document showing all activity across that 24-hour period at the car park.
Mr Carnie used his knowledge of analytics and placed all the logs into a spreadsheet. From there he deduced that Group Nexus' data appeared to be missing a number of entries. According to the document, Mr Carnie was spotted entering the shopping estate car park at 3.20pm on June 10.
He was then seen leaving at 1.30pm the next day with no other data entries for his car. After looking through all 9,920 entries, he claims there are even more anomalies. Mr Carnie noticed that 135 cars arrived or left the car park twice, and while 67 entered two times, 68 left twice.
There was also a single entry where one car exited the car park three times without even entering. Along with this, Mr Carnie discovered that 96 cars were recorded going in on June 10 but were not spotted leaving that day.
On June 11, 100 different cars, that hadn't arrived that day, were seen leaving. This means that a maximum of 196 people would also have been fined. Mr Carnie said: "That one night they had 196 cars left unchecked meaning at 3am that car park should've been half full."
"How can they be issuing fines off of this? Their data is so bad. What I really want is for Group Nexus to cancel all their parking fines from this car park."
Mr Carnie added: "I know they have lost two of my photos which I know I can't prove in isolation but there are so many entries that can't be explained or have not been explained.
"They are using this poor data to give out fines. There are people out there who can't afford the fine let alone the legal process for it and so to be giving out fines on this data is wrong. There are some entries which begin as 13.22 which is essentially the area code for Dartford.
"I think the ANPR system could be capturing phone numbers off the back of vans. The data provided by Group Nexus demonstrates that cars are arriving and departing unnoticed by their ANPR cameras, this can and does result in tickets being issued in error.”
Mr Carnie made the British Parking Association aware of these data issues but they denied any problems. Despite this, their website acknowledges this problem on their website. The website states: “Repeat users of a car park inside a 24-hour period sometimes find that their first entry is paired with their last exit, resulting in an ‘overstay’.”
Mr Carnie urges everyone who appeals a fine to properly analyse the evidence provided. He said: “When a person appeals their Parking Charge to POPLA Nexus may provide evidence in the form of a PDF document showing all arrivals and departures. This is particularly true for these long 'overstays'.
“People should get the data properly analysed as it's likely to be very poor.”
Group Nexus previously said of the case: "The PCN was upheld on the grounds that the motorist overstayed the free time allocation. Issues with the cameras are extremely rare. When there is one, we virtually always find evidence of it on the system.
"In this case we investigated the claim and could find no evidence that this vehicle had visited the site twice."
Subscribe here for the latest news where you live
The British Parking Association said an investigation was carried but that the ticket was issued correctly. A spokesman said: "The motorist appealed the charge issued to their vehicle to POPLA which was rejected as they deemed the charge to have been issued correctly.
"The BPA carried out a thorough investigation of the motorist’s complaint about the management of the car park by one of its members and found there to be no breach of its code of practice."
Group Nexus also reiterated their claim there is nothing wrong with their cameras. A spokesman said: "The original challenge was rejected and the PCN upheld on the grounds that the motorist overstayed the free time allocation.
"Issues with the cameras are extremely rare. In this case we investigated the claim and could find no evidence that this vehicle had visited the site twice. The motorist then referred his challenge to POPLA, the independent adjudicator run by Ombudsmen Services who also rejected the appeal."
