A man has been hit with a fine for £270 despite paying for parking at a notorious Welsh car park. The car park at the seafront in the tiny village of Llangrannog in Ceredigion has made headlines over the past few years due to the number of people receiving fines in the post after leaving their vehicles there.
The car park has a camera placed high above its entrance, which was put in place in 2019 to automatically clock every vehicle as it arrives. The camera is operated by One Parking Solution Ltd, a company based in west Sussex which manages the car park and has come in for fierce criticism over the past three years from angry residents and visitors alike.
At the end of summer, 2019, controversy surrounding the car park made national news as it threatened to tear apart a close-knit village. The problem initially stemmed from the ticket machine only accepting coins, payment over the phone, or via an app which needed to be downloaded onto a user’s handset.
Read more: The tiny, isolated Welsh village that went from having it all to having nothing
However, anyone who has ever visited Llangrannog will know it is a beautiful seaside haven but not one renowned for its phone signal or particularly the robustness of its internet connectivity. This has led to people being unable to pay and being hit by fines - you can read the full story of that here - a problem that was seemingly rectified in 2020 by the introduction of a facility to pay for parking by card. Despite this, issues remained at the car park and people continued to be fined for various reasons, including one family who had entered one wrong digit when typing their full number plate into the machine.
One Parking Solution Ltd makes it clear that visitors have a 10-minute grace period upon entering the car park, during which time they must pay for parking, leave the site or automatically be hit with a fine thanks to the number plate recognition system in place. However, as one man has found out, along with scores before him, things at Llangrannog car park are not as straightforward as they should be. Get stories like this straight to your inbox with our newsletters.
“I went down there for a weekend with my partner,” said the man, who does not want to be named as he is currently in a dispute over the parking ticket he received. "We drove into the car park and I got out and went straight to pay for parking, but there were a few people in a queue in front of me including an elderly couple and some were having difficulty using the machine. So there was a bit of a wait and I moved to the front to help people use the machine and to pay for parking.”
The man then paid for parking himself, more than covering his and his partner’s stay in the village, which was, he said, no more than an hour long. To his disbelief, he received a fine in the post a short time later for £60. He was not too alarmed to begin with because he assumed it would was an honest mistake by the company in charge of the car park, but they had not made a mistake in their eyes, they were in fact penalising him because it took him 17 minutes to pay to park - seven minutes longer than they allow.
“I sent the fine back to them with proof that I had paid for my parking by card, but they sent it back saying I had to pay the fine,” he explained. “I then appealed to POPLA (an independent appeals service for parking charge notices). They got back to me and said I should have made other arrangements and made sure I paid within the 10 minutes. I was helping people in front of me, and I paid. There’s nothing I could have done to pay sooner apart from jumping the queue.”
The initial fine was £60, which would have been reduced to £30 with an early payment. However, due to the appeal, that window quickly lapsed and further refusal to pay saw the fine jump to £180 and then again to £270. The man is adamant, however, that he should not have to pay it, and insists he will not.
“There’s no way I’m going to pay this,” he added. “It was seven minutes and there was nothing else I could do. It’s a shame because Llangrannog is such a nice place and all the little businesses down there are great, but this issue will put people off going there. I would not be happy to go back there knowing what’s happened to me.”
One Parking Solution Ltd has been asked to comment.
Find out about the latest local issues where you live:
