Car park user left furious after being wrongly ordered to pay hefty fine for trip to doctors
An Essex mother was left furious after she was wrongly ordered to pay a hefty fine for taking her daughter to the doctor.
Bridget Gooding, 57, insisted that the machine at the free-to-use car park was not working when she took her ill teenager to the GP, later receiving a penalty charge notice for parking.
Maldon’s Longfield Medical Centre has a car park, which is free to use for patients who must enter their registration number at the reception area, which Gooding did.
The system is controlled by the car parking management company Creative Parking, rather than the GP surgery itself.
Consequently, the mother was furious when she received the fine in the post.
She said: “I’m not the only person that has been wrongly issued a PCN, and it’s just wrong.
“There is a telephone number on the PCN. You call the number, and you can’t speak to a human being; it’s a recorded message. It gives you an email address where you can appeal, and the email address is incorrect.
“They could take me to court if they wish because I’m not paying for any of this; I’ve done nothing wrong.”
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Longfield Medical Centre has said: “Unfortunately, the car park was being abused due to our close proximity to the high street, local schools and another GP surgery, and so it was decided by the partners of the practice in April 2019 that a third-party company, Creative Parking, would be used to manage the car park.”
The centre explained that they cannot appeal fines on a patient’s behalf, requesting that individuals abide by the appeal process that is detailed on the parking fine.
Creative Parking said: “We have checked our records and can see that the exemption tablet was working correctly on the date in question with no faults reported to us by the Medical Centre.
“Over 250 exemptions were recorded on that date by patients inputting their details, which is the normal daily number for this site.”
Other individuals who use the car park in the same way have said that the surgery is aware of the machine’s faulty nature.
In response, the medical centre said that Creative Parking did not issue any fines during the time at which the machine was broken.
They advised their patients, if they had received a fine during the dates which the machine is confirmed to have been down between October 14 and October 17, to contact the car parking company to seek a solution.
Gooding said: “I’m very, very frustrated. There’s no other parking facilities that are close, as there are yellow lines everywhere. I’ll use the car park again, but I will take a picture of the machine every time I use it.”