My daughter also fined for Polegate parking

My daughter had just turned 18 years old and only been driving for 3 months. She was going to a concert in Brighton with friends and initially were intending to take the train from Eastbourne but due to engineering work between Eastbourne and Polegate decided to take the train from there. Like a victim mentioned in the article, she took a picture of the notice right by her car and paid online on the train. In her case, the payment went through and she thought all was fine.

Unfortunately, she received a ticket some weeks later because she’d paid Indigo parking rather than this one. She is an A levels student, about to go to Uni to study Medicine and is only working a few hours over the week-end for pocket money, so £60 is a huge amount of money for her, especially when she thought she’d done what she was supposed to.

She appealed the decision, explaining the situation and asking for a gesture of goodwill but this was turned down with a response received last week. She kept telling me that the notices were very misleading and she and her 3 friends travelling with her didn’t think for a second that this was not the notice that applied to where she was parking.

I now see that it wasn’t her being distracted but that the notice is indeed very misleading. She had never been to Polegate before.

As it seems a number of people have complained to the Council, I was wondering if you knew if anyone had challenged this and managed not to pay the fine. I have told my daughter that I will help her pay for it, but £60 seems totally disproportional to the fine when paid, just not to the right company because of their poor signage. Not impressed at all with Polegate station!

Lauren Brosson

Polegate