You all deserve your parking tickets

There was some editorial in the Express in the early part of this year about a disgruntled pensioner overstaying the time limit and receiving a charge, and since then there have been a number of letters complaining on the same issue.

What is the problem with these people? This is a private car park for shoppers of the stores on the site and it has a clearly stated limit of two hours. Other stores have their own car parks for shoppers, Tesco has a limit of three hours, Sainsbury the same, Homebase is two hours, and several others. They are designed for customers, adequate time is given to do shopping, have a snack, etc with still time to nip into town.

I take advantage of these stores’ generosity on many occasions but make sure I am back within the allowed timescale. But if people are stupid enough not to follow that simple common sense approach, they deserve to have to pay the £60. There is no point calling TKMaxx or the companies employed to manage the car parks. So no sympathy for Michele Binks who had been ‘done’ twice in a week for using the car park for having a night out at bingo. It’s not a Gala Bingo car park! Same goes for the others she mentioned. If you abuse the system you pay, but please do not advertise your stupidity publicly by putting it in the local press.

If you do overstay, you do not get a fine, you get an invoice for payment. There are a number if internet sites telling you what to do if you get one of these, if you don’t pay the parking company has to take you to court. In 99% of cases they follow it up with a couple more letters but you would rarely get to court.

As the writer stated, reply to their invoice with a nice letter enclosing a modest payment of £10 and the chances are you would get away with that - look at the sites on Google. So, if you want to be stupid, continue to ignore the signs, people with a bit of common sense wont have an issue.

David Bellamy