Leicester parking tribunal upholds £50 penalty despite receipt showing payment

A parking adjudication tribunal hearing in Leicester denied Helen Pritchard’s request to cancel a £50 penalty issued by the Local Parking Review Service. Although she proved that she had paid for a parking session, the tribunal found insufficient evidence that the payment was registered to her car.

The dispute turned on a single letter: her receipt showed LP21 XKR, while her car’s registration was LP21 XKP. Pritchard said she corrected the entry in the app, but the available records did not establish whether that correction reached the parking system before the officer’s search.

The receipt documented a £3.20 payment at 10:02 for parking until 12:02. It covered the location and time of the officer’s observation, but expressly identified a different registration. The tribunal therefore distinguished proof that money had been paid from proof that the session covered Pritchard’s vehicle.

The officer’s contemporaneous record identified LP21 XKP at 10:14, included a clear photograph of the registration and recorded that no matching paid session had been found. It contained neither the app’s correction history nor information about system updates.

The tribunal accepted that the unreviewed history was a genuine gap in the Service’s record. But that gap did not establish that the search result was wrong. Pritchard bore the burden of supporting cancellation, and her account could not independently confirm when any correction took effect.

The requirement for administrative decisions to have record support did not make an unchecked correction history sufficient, by itself, to cancel the penalty. The officer’s evidence supported the decision on the available record. The tribunal also declined to obtain further information: no further obtainable proof had been identified, and an adjournment was not permitted.

Pritchard argued that she had paid for the correct place and time before the officer arrived. She acknowledged the mistyped registration and the absence of independent evidence showing when the correction reached the system. She asked the tribunal to consider the payment and her account without treating the correction timing as established.

The Service sought to uphold the penalty, relying on the officer’s vehicle identification and unsuccessful payment search. It acknowledged that the app correction history remained unreviewed and asked the tribunal to obtain further information, including the applicable review procedures and opportunities to submit correction evidence.

The officer issued the £50 penalty after finding no matching session for the car at the Leicester parking location. Pritchard subsequently supplied her payment receipt, bringing the registration mismatch into focus.

The decision leaves the correction’s timing unresolved. It does not find that Pritchard failed to pay; it finds that the evidence did not link that payment to her car or disprove the recorded search result. The penalty stands, but the tribunal ordered no payment between the parties.