THE only way to pay for parking at Pyramid car park is via a service called Phone and Pay – this is provided as either an app or a telephone number payment line.

We are currently trying to appeal a £100 fine for 17 minutes of parking at Pyramid Arts Centre – we tried repeatedly to pay via the phone line and app provided, but it is absolutely condemned by technical issues and not fit for purpose.

After multiple attempts to pay using both methods, we left the car park (we didn’t even leave our vehicle).

When we were contacted by the parking management company, we appealed but were rejected.

We raised the appeal to POPLA, but the operator is claiming the app and phone line work fine.

We are not sure we will win as we cannot provide any tangible evidence – it is simply our word against theirs – we have proof we downloaded the app and proof we called, but it isn’t definitive.

The car park operator claims the fact other people successfully paid that day is proof we are lying, but they are completely ignoring the multiple technical issues that could mean someone using one device on one operating system on one network may be successful, whereas others might not.

They also seem to be conveniently ignoring the thousands of reviews on various outlets that corroborate our claim that their app and phone service does not work: a 1.1 out of five-star review rating from 909 reviews on Apple App Store and 1.1-star total rating on Google Play Store from more than 2,000 total reviews.

Considering I now have to forfeit my food shop for the next two weeks to pay this private profiteering fine, I’d be very grateful if you could bring some focus upon this company.

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