I owe £8,400 in PCNs after my name was spelt wrongly on Transport for London records: CRANE ON THE CASE

I recently received a Penalty Charge Notice for congestion charge and ULEZ violations I had made when driving my van into London. The letter only mentioned one PCN and said I owed £354, including late payment charges.

I contacted the enforcement agents and was taken aback when they demanded a total of £1,651, stating that it related to four PCNs.

I bought the van second-hand in 2021 and tried to set up an account to automatically make ULEZ payments online, but the van was registered to another user.

TfL said it could not disclose any details about this person due to GDPR restrictions, but suggested I track them down and request that they remove the vehicle from their account. Despite my efforts, I reached a dead end.

Man with van: Our reader received 39 Penalty Charge Notices for driving in London – and many are subject to hefty late payment charges as an address blip meant he wasn’t aware of them

I mistakenly believed that the ULEZ payments were still being processed. As my address details were associated with the van’s registration plate with the DVLA, I thought I would be notified via post if there were any issues.

In the past year, my family and I moved to a new address and set up a mail redirection service. I later discovered that TfL had my name registered with a spelling mistake, and as a result, Royal Mail did not forward any PCN notices to me.

I contacted TfL and it said there were in fact 39 PCNs associated with my van. I am required to pay for the four PCNs at £1,651, as well as a further 25 at £270 each, totalling £8,400. 

I don’t know the cost of the remaining 10 PCNs because they are now with the Traffic Enforcement Centre, which won’t give me information due to the misspelled name.

Can you help me resolve this complex and challenging situation? A.W, Essex

Helen Crane, of This is Money, replies: This issue with your van must have been a heavy load on your mind. 

I can only imagine your shock when you phoned TfL and discovered that you had £1,600 in unpaid motoring charges – let alone when it turned out the true figure was more than £8,000. 

You have started to repay some of the PCNs, but each one must be paid individually over the phone which is taking you some time – especially as you say the phone line frequently disconnects, and that the transactions are often flagged by your credit card company as potential fraud. 

So how did this happen? 

The ULEZ – or Ultra-Low Emission Zone – means that drivers of vehicles that don’t meet certain emissions standards must pay a charge when driving in London. 

The area it covers was recently expanded and it now covers all the capital’s boroughs. 

The daily charge is £12.50 for cars, motorcycles, vans and specialist vehicles, and it must be paid by midnight on the third day following the journey. 

Some of your PCNs also relate to the congestion charge – a £15 daily levy for those that drive within a designated area of central London at certain times. 

Drivers can also pay for both of these advance of their journey, or set up an ‘auto pay’ account with TfL which means they are billed once a month for any congestion charges or ULEZ fees they owe. 

When you bought your van, this is what you quite sensibly decided to do – but TfL could scarcely have made it any more difficult. 

The roadblock, it said, was that the van needed to be removed from the old owner’s auto pay account before it could be added to yours. You didn’t know this person, as the van came from a second-hand motor dealership. 

Because of data protection rules, TfL said, it couldn’t tell you their identity – so you were forced to embark on a wild goose chase trying to find the van’s previous owner. You went to some lengths to try and do this, but – not that surprisingly – you didn’t succeed. 

Undelivered: A house move – coupled with the incorrect name on the reader’s DVLA and TfL registrations – meant he missed warnings about the charges he had incurred

I find this situation ridiculous. People buy second-hand cars all the time – so surely TfL should have been able to contact the previous owner and ask that that they take the van off their account. 

At some point, you had to give up trying. When you hit a dead end, you assumed that any charges would eventually get to you by post, as the van was registered to your address with the DVLA. 

Later, you moved home – but you didn’t update your address with the DVLA straight away. That shouldn’t have been a problem as you had a redirect set up for post that went to your old address.

However, it turned out that the origin of your name being mis-spelled on TfL’s records was that it was also incorrectly spelled on the vehicle’s V5 registration document with the DVLA – which is where TfL gets its information. 

A tiny error, but with huge consequences. It is not clear who is responsible for this, but I find it extremely unlikely that you would misspell your own name. 

This was something you didn’t realise until recently, and meant Royal Mail’s redirect wouldn’t pick it up and you never received these fines. 

Some may argue that you should have noticed that no money was being taken from your account by TfL – but I can see how it could have gone unnoticed, especially as you don’t drive into London every day. 

You could have done more to keep your details up to date, however – including updating your address manually with the DVLA and checking that your name was correct on your log book.  

In the zone: Drivers who enter the ULEZ area in non-compliant vehicles have to pay £12.50

It’s astounding that one silly mistake in your name could lead to all this trouble. 

It’s an unfortunate situation, but one that wasn’t helped at all by TfL’s obstructive attitude to getting your auto pay account set up. 

I contacted it to ask if anything could be done to help you navigate this process, and accelerate it to a swift conclusion. 

TfL has now agreed that you only need to pay the daily charge for each PCN – so £12.50 or £15 depending on whether it relates to ULEZ or the congestion charge. 

Multiplied by the 39 PCNs that means you should pay, at most, £585 instead of the £8,400-plus you were originally being asked for. A huge reduction. 

A TfL spokesman said: ‘After reviewing this case it is clear that certain steps in the process could have been made smoother for [this driver]. 

‘However, it is a legal requirement for vehicle owners to keep their details up-to-date with the DVLA, including a change of address, and in this case this hasn’t been done in a timely fashion. 

‘In view of the circumstances we have decided to show our discretion and are now asking [them] to pay the value of the daily charges for each PCN as settlement of the penalty charges incurred and we have ordered further enforcement action to cease.’

‘I got a parking charge while my car got fixed’

One in five drivers received a parking charge in the last year, according to the latest figures – with town centre and work car parks the most likely places to be caught out. 

Many are issued fairly when people break the rules, but This is Money has heard from plenty of readers who feel they have been unjustly treated. 

So we have one eye on the rear view mirror, keeping watch over the private parking companies who issue them. 

They have a habit of issuing parking charges in the most improbable situations, and this week we have another one to report. 

Repair: James had dropped his car off at a branch of Halfords to get a new tyre – but Parking Eye recorded him as being parked in the car park so he incurred a £100 charge

After a reader reported receiving a charge when he waited for a coffee in the McDonalds drive-thru, we have now heard from someone who got one while his car was being repaired in a local branch of Halfords. 

Reader James said: ‘The parking charge was given to me by Parking Eye while my car was at a branch of Halfords in Ipswich having a tyre changed. 

‘The car park is on a trading estate with only one way in, and out therefore you have to go past their cameras even if you are not using the car park, but instead getting your car fixed. Please can you try and help me out.’

The letter from Parking Eye said James was ‘parked’ for 4 hours and 50 minutes, and he was issued a £100 charge falling to £60 if paid within 14 days. 

I contacted Parking Eye to ask if it would reconsider – and I am glad to say it has now seen sense and accepted his appeal. 

A Parking Eye spokesman said the car park in question had ‘Nineteen prominent and highly-visible signs’ with clear guidance about how to use the car park. 

They also said there was also a QR code that Halfords customers could scan to register their vehicle, or Halfords could offer them a permit.

They added: ‘Parkingeye operates a BPA (British Parking Association) audited appeals process, which motorists can use to appeal their parking charge. 

‘If anyone has mitigating circumstances then we would encourage them to appeal.’

So would we.

Do you have an equally ridiculous tale of private parking pandemonium? Get in touch: [email protected]

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk