Council admits issuing 'invalid' parking tickets at Bradford Mela (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Council admits issuing 'invalid' parking tickets at Bradford Mela

2:42pm Tuesday 13th July 2010 in

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Bradford Council has admitted issuing ‘invalid’ parking tickets at the Mela.

But despite getting it wrong, officials at the Council’s parking services department will not be offering to cancel all the penalty notice charges.

Instead they have agreed to look at each individual case.

The error came to light after a member of the public, who contacted the Telegraph & Argus, contested the £70 penalty charge notice slapped on his windscreen on the Saturday of the event in Peel Park last month.

The driver of the car, who parked in the lower end of Lister Lane, insisted he had not seen any parking restriction signs at the time.

However, when he checked further afield – and returned the next day with a measuring tape – he found two restriction signs at 112 metres apart saying ‘permit holders only’.

The parking laws say these signs for such permanent restrictions should be 30 metres apart on a street.

The Shipley driver, who did not want to be named, said at first the Council refused to cancel his ticket but after he challenged the authority again about the spaces between the signs and the fact there were no painted white lines marking out parking bays for permit holders, he received a second letter.

In it the Council’s parking services supervisor Stephen Hook said information had since been gathered from its highways department which led him to believe his first response had been “the wrong one”.

It then read: “The traffic officer responsible for the temporary parking at the Mela did not get Department of Transport approval for a length of Lister Lane, making the penalty charge notice you were issued invalid.”

The driver said he had been told by a Highways Department worker that 30 tickets including his had been issued on that day in Lister Lane.

“What I want to know is will all those other people have their tickets cancelled too or refunded if they’ve already paid up? Surely the Council can’t hang on to that money if it didn’t have permission in the first place to put those restrictions in place?”

Paul Ratcliffe, Bradford Council parking services manager, said: “We cannot cancel all parking tickets given out on Lister Lane during the weekend of the Bradford Mela as there was only a small section of road that was not covered by the traffic regulation order.

“If anyone feels they were parked on this section of the road they can contact us and we will look at each individual case.”

Parking Services is on the 3rd floor of West Riding House, Bradford, BD1 4HR.

Officers can be contacted on 01274 434300 or on e-mail at parkingservices@bradford.gov.uk