Two Councils Owe Drivers Almost £600,000 in Wrongly Issued Parking Fines

Two councils, six years of mistakes, one bill nobody wants to pay

Elmbridge Borough Council has opened a refund scheme after admitting it wrongly issued 9,318 parking fines in car parks across Esher, Cobham, Hersham, Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge between January 2020 and April 2026. A procedural error meant tickets were handed out at times, or in bays, where the fines had no legal basis. The council has set aside roughly £308,000 to pay them back.

By 20 August, only 826 claims had been paid out. Just 921 people had come forward at all, out of more than 9,000 drivers who were fined in error over six years.

Elmbridge is not the first council to find itself in this position, and the experience of the one that got there first is not encouraging. Reading Borough Council admitted last year that it had wrongly issued 6,136 penalty charge notices between 2013 and 2024, after officials discovered irregularities in the Traffic Regulation Order covering the town’s East Route, a “no stopping” corridor running from Kings Road to Cemetery Junction. Every fine issued on that route had no legal standing. The route also runs through Wokingham Road and partly into the streets that join it, so a driver did not need to be a regular visitor to Reading town centre to be caught out.

Reading ran a twelve-month scheme to trace the drivers it owed money to. It has now closed it. Only 783 claims were approved, 12.8 per cent of the number the council itself estimated it owed. An estimated £289,000 sits unclaimed. Chief executive Jackie Yates apologised to those affected, and the council confirmed it will still process claims from anyone who comes forward, but the active search for those owed money has stopped.

Why so much of the money goes unclaimed

Reading’s own account of the scheme explains the gap. The council wrote to 2,235 people, but contact was limited to motorists whose penalty notices were recent enough that the council still held a valid address. Reading confirmed it did not keep personal data for most PCN payments, which ruled out reaching many of the older cases entirely. There was no cross check against the council tax register or the electoral roll to find people who had moved.

For drivers who had a court enforcement order wrongly issued against them, the council brought in a debt recovery firm, CDER Group, to trace all 147 affected people, then used credit reference agencies to chase those who did not respond. Even with that extra effort, only 69 of the 147 were refunded. A council committee concluded in September that the issue had “been in the public domain with sufficient attention for almost a year” and voted to close the scheme.

A council that fines you knows exactly where to send the ticket. A council that owes you money back does not always keep the records to find you again, and once media attention moves on, the search for you tends to stop too.

Who is affected, and how much it costs

Elmbridge’s error covered specific car parks and specific time windows, not every ticket issued in the borough. Drivers may be owed a refund if they were fined:

Between 8am and 9am, or 6pm and 7pm, from 6 January 2020, in car parks including Berguette, Civic Centre, Heather Place and Highwayman’s Cottage in Esher, Cedar Road and Hollyhedge Road in Cobham, Drewitt’s Court and Manor Road in Walton-on-Thames, and Churchfield Road, Monument Hill and Baker Street in Weybridge.

On any Sunday, from 24 April 2022, in a wider list of car parks that also includes Mayfield Road in Hersham, Ashley Park, Station Avenue and Walton Park in Walton-on-Thames, and Heath North and Heath South in Weybridge.

At Ashley Park in Walton-on-Thames specifically, between 8am and 10am, or 6pm and 7pm, from 6 January 2020.

A single parking ticket in one of these car parks typically runs to £70 or more once the discount for early payment has passed. Multiply that by 9,318 tickets and the borough’s drivers were left roughly £650,000 out of pocket at face value, though the council’s own budget for refunds sits lower, reflecting fines that were never paid or already contested.

How to fight back

Elmbridge drivers who paid a fine in one of the listed car parks, on the listed days and times, from 2020 onwards can apply through the council’s parking fine refund page at elmbridge.gov.uk, or by calling 01372 474 474 for anyone unable to apply online. Applicants need their name and contact details, vehicle registration number, proof of payment and bank details. The council says it aims to pay valid claims within two weeks.

Reading drivers can still submit a claim directly to the council’s parking team, even with the formal search scheme closed. Anyone who received a PCN on the town’s East Route, covering Kings Road, Watlington Street, Cemetery Junction and Wokingham Road, between 2013 and October 2024, should contact Reading Borough Council’s parking services directly with proof of payment.

Drivers anywhere else should not assume their own council is clean. Both errors surfaced only after officials reviewed the underlying legal paperwork themselves, not from a driver’s complaint. Anyone who has kept an old parking ticket from a council car park is entitled to ask the council in writing to confirm the Traffic Regulation Order covering that spot was valid on the date of the fine. If a council cannot produce that order, the fine was not enforceable, regardless of how long ago it was paid.

Why the errors happened in the first place

Neither council has suggested its mistake was deliberate. Reading’s problem traced back to a Traffic Regulation Order for the East Route that had never been properly formalised, meaning enforcement on that stretch of road ran for over a decade without the legal document that gives a council the power to fine anyone at all. Elmbridge’s issue was different in detail but the same in kind: a procedural error in how the car park restrictions themselves were set up meant fines went out at certain times of day, and on Sundays in some sites, when the underlying restriction did not actually apply.

Both errors are the kind that only surface when someone checks the paperwork behind the paint on the ground and the signs on a post, rather than assuming that a working camera and a printed penalty notice mean the fine itself is lawful. For most drivers, a parking ticket looks official enough to pay without question. Neither council disputes that thousands of people did exactly that for years, on tickets that should never have been issued.

What this means if you have an old ticket in a drawer

Local authorities in England are required to keep a Traffic Regulation Order up to date and available for public inspection for any restriction they intend to enforce, whether that is a resident parking bay, a bus lane, a yellow box junction or a council car park. If the order lapses, is drafted incorrectly, or never existed in the first place, a penalty charge notice issued under it has no legal foundation, regardless of whether the driver actually broke the posted rule on the ground.

That principle is what forced both Reading and Elmbridge to open refund schemes, and it is the same principle that has already forced other authorities to hand back money over bus lane and low emission zone fines elsewhere in the country. A driver does not need to have been technically innocent of parking somewhere restricted to be owed a refund. They need the underlying legal order to have been invalid at the time, which is a paperwork question a council has to answer accurately once it is asked directly, in writing, by a driver who knows to ask it.

The wider pattern

Councillor Mike Rollings, leader of Elmbridge Borough Council, apologised directly when the fines came to light in May: “I apologise to everyone affected by this mistake. We’re determined to put this right quickly.” Councillor Kirsty Hewens, the council’s portfolio holder for parking, said the authority was “determined to open the refund process as soon as possible” and pay valid claims within two weeks of approval.

Both councils blamed the errors on paperwork rather than deliberate overcharging, and both moved to refund drivers once the mistakes were found. What the two cases share is a pattern that should worry any driver holding an old parking ticket: local authorities can enforce a fine for years before anyone checks whether the underlying legal order was ever valid, and once that error is found, the burden falls on the driver to come forward, often with proof of payment they no longer have.

Reading’s committee report makes the imbalance explicit. Once a story like this drops out of the news cycle, a council can reasonably argue the issue has had its fair share of public attention and close the search, even while nine in ten of the people it owes money to have never been paid. Elmbridge is still in the early months of its own scheme, with a refund rate running well below its Reading predecessor at a similar stage. Drivers who wait for a letter that assumes the council can still find them, rather than checking for themselves, risk becoming part of the same unclaimed total a year from now.

Sources:

• Elmbridge Borough Council: parking fine refund scheme
• Elmbridge Borough Council: how to apply for a parking fine refund
• BBC: Parking fine refunds totalling £289,000 unclaimed