How a £35 car parking fine in Leeds became a £423 bill – Yorkshire Post Letters

MY son, a 20-year-old undergraduate reading economics at university in Edinburgh, had the misfortune of receiving his first parking ticket during a visit to Leeds last January.

He had been visiting a friend who is a student in the city and was parked outside his student accommodation overnight.

As I am the registered keeper of the car, I received a letter from the city council when the £35 fine wasn’t paid on time which I passed on to my son and asked him to pay.

Then Covid landed, with the national lockdown, university campuses being closed and somewhere in all the ensuing chaos the car parking fine was lost and not paid.

While tens of thousands died and hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, the fastidious car parking fines department at Leeds City Council carried on regardless and in August I received a letter from an enforcement agency demanding a payment of £188.

My son somehow confused this with an earlier letter demanding £105 and paid this amount, and assured me all was sorted.

Fast forward to November 13 during the second national lockdown. Imagine my 
surprise to find a bailiff at my door, 100 miles north of Leeds, not even wearing a face mask
and demanding more than 
£300 or the immediate clamping of the car outside my home. 
No call to say the earlier 
payment was wrong, no forewarning.

So my son, who has no income other than his student loan, paid. He had therefore paid £423 in respect of a £35 fine for parking in a residential street.

We had to accept the increased fine due to late payment by my son. My complaint was about the bailiff visit and £235 fee charge for this which was rejected by the city council, which apparently thinks the escalation from £35 to £423 is reasonable.

Fortunately, faced with evidence that Government guidance for bailiffs operating as an “essential service” during lockdown had not been adhered to, the enforcement agency working on behalf of the city council have backed down and have refunded the £235 for the home visit. So the parking misdemeanour has ‘only’ cost £188.

But the whole episode has been a salutory lesson for my son; don’t bury your head in the sand if you get a parking fine – it won’t go away. I don’t think he will be in a hurry to visit Leeds again though.

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