Hi All,
I've gone through the FAQ, but to be honest I'm more than a little confused, so perhaps someone can guide me a little.
On the 22/5/07 I received a notice on my car to say that I had parked after the expiry time on my ticket in a council owned multi-story car park. I wrote to them enclosing my parking tickets (there were two, one on each side of the vehicle expiring at different times as I had renewed it earlier) and told them that I expected them to get rid of the notice & fine. To which I heard nothing back for a few weeks so expected it to be fine.
About 8 weeks later I receive a Notice to Owner (although dated the 27/6/07 - approx 35 days after the alleged infraction). I can only expect that the post held it up. The Notice stated that they would increase the fine by 50% if I didn't stump up the cash. I wrote to them again, including the previous letter, stating my case and requesting that the ticket be canceled again. Unfortunately I did not photocopy the original tickets.
A few weeks later I received ANOTHER letter, this time a Charge Certificate stating that I now owed £120.00!!! I was furious, and wrote in again enclosing a copy of both my other letters. About 10 days ago I receive a letter stating that they had recieved my last letter but that "there is no representation of appeal at the Charge Certificate stage". I await the letter that they say is following which I received y/day morning which is from the special debt recovery team asking if I want to make a Statutory Declaration or just pay the money.
I've managed to get a copy of Hillingdon's photo's of the offence, and in them you cannot see any parking tickets at all, let alone just one or another (I assumed that the inspector was just being a bit blind), but they have taken photo's from both sides of the car (inc drivers & passengers window) and the front.
I'm really not sure what to do now. I know that I was very stupid not to have made photocopies of the tickets or sent them signed for delivery, but I've disputed tickets before with my local authority in the same way and never come off the worse for it. All in all I don't want this to become a very expensive lesson, especially as I really believe that they must have screwed up somewhere (I'm assuming that they received at least one of them but 'lost it').
Please help!
Regards,
TGN