Parking company denies it was Scrooge-like after dishing out parking tickets on Christmas Day to volunteers at elderly people's party

Volunteers who gave up their time to Christmas Day to help at a festive party for the elderly were horrified to discover they’d been issued with a parking ticket afterwards.

They had parked at Stadium MK, where a private company called MK1 Parking introduced an ANPR pay system last summer, taking many people by surprise.

Long-established city charity MK Christmas Day Party for the Elderly had organised the event at the DoubleTree hotel for around 100 pensioners who would otherwise spend the day alone. They arranged a slap-up lunch, gifts and entertainment for the guests.

Two of the entertainers were Tammy Sydee and Maria Collins, both local school teachers who perform as a singing duo in their spare time.

They’d parked near the hotel assuming charges would be lifted on Christmas Day. But days later a £60 penalty notice arrived for Maria after her details had been captured on ANPR.

The parking company should be ashamed of themselves,” said Tammy. “Who issues a parking ticket on Christmas Day? The Grinch!? Scrooge? Bah humbug!”

Maria appealed the notice and yesterday (Monday) MK1 Parking agreed to cancel it.

They revealed that Maria was not the only person that had been caught on on Christmas Day – but say it was only because the drivers had failed to register their vehicles in advance for free parking.

A spokesman for the company told the Citizen: “We kindly offered free parking, in advance, for all guests that were attending the Elderly Christmas Event on Christmas Day.However, our terms and conditions states that to be entitled of free parking the vehicles need to be successfully registered on the system through a kiosk. For that we provided a tablet and instructions to register all the vehicles details, as it was agreed with the volunteers of the event.

“For GDPR purposes the System is designed to identify vehicle registration details and not people. We don’t hold information to identify who attended which event and who owns which vehicle, that is why we provided the tablet to the volunteer, with which she agreed and was very glad to do it herself.We can’t hold responsibility for human typing mistakes done during the registration of those vehicles on the tablet.Also, we already cancelled a few parking charge notices resulting from those mistakes, as you can imagine this has a cost for our business, and yet we offered free parking.”

The spokesman added: “Unfortunately, we don’t think we owe any apology since this wasn’t our responsibility and was completely outside our control. We are allowing people to appeal and identify themselves and we are cancelling the parking charges accordingly.”

MK Christmas Day Party for the Elderly has been running since 1979, when the then Mayor of Milton Keynes held a special event at Wilton Hall for 25 OAP guests.

Over the years it has grown and moved to bigger and bigger venues and is run by a host of volunteers, including drivers who collect the guests from their homes.

Find out how you can support the charity here.