The following response has been submitted by The Pinner Association Executive Committee to J Sainsbury PLC following their less than satisfactory reply to our original complaint about the introduction of charges for parking at the Pinner Station Car Park which is managed by Euro Car Parks on behalf of Sainsbury’s – see previous correspondence in “News” on this website:
Our Committee has now had the opportunity to digest your reply of 10 June, and offer the following observations. Whilst we acknowledge that other Underground Station Car Parks in the vicinity charge at weekends, our older members have reminded us that free weekend parking was one of the promises made to our community to counter opposition to your company’s planning application for its new store. Scrutiny of your last accounts yields no pressing reason for you to change your original policy. However, insult is added to injury when, as the result of no possibility of purchasing a weekly season ticket, plus the absence of any weekend reduction, the charge for a week’s parking is higher now than at any of the 11 Underground stations in the Borough of Harrow. At our two closest neighbouring stations, Eastcote and Rayners Lane, the cost of weekend parking is less than half that of the cost of parking in Pinner, so fairness suggests that if an increase is necessary, which we would contest, any charge should not exceed that at neighbouring stations.
We are further informed by one of our members that the Car Park is virtually unavailable to disabled potential users because the lifts hardly ever work, and that, when they do, they are so filthy that they should bear a government health warning. We look forward, in the light of increased charges for this apology of a service, to expeditious repairs and deep cleaning.
Turning to implementation of the change, the experience of our members is far removed from your description of it. There was no information posted in the station on the new weekend charges, nor was there any information in your store or its car park that the ground level section of the Station Car Park, which had been open without any barrier or relevant signage for years to store customers, was about to become unavailable to them. Your contemptuous attitude to stakeholders is best exemplified by the fact that a conversation with our President in March was the first Information that TfL’s Director of Planning knew of an increase implemented 4 months earlier.
You state that there was a period when warning letters were sent rather than PCNs to those who did not pay either for weekend parking or for using the hitherto free ground level section of the Station Car Park. However, the letters were completely meaningless as they did not specify the nature of the “offence”. One of our members, on receiving a warning letter from ECP, wrote in January asking what offence had been committed so that information could be cascaded to the community. 5 months later he is still awaiting the courtesy of a reply. The only inference we can draw from this is that, on your behalf, ECP was more interested in extorting unjustifiable penalties than in telling anybody what was going on. It was only some weeks after PCNs were issued and appeals started arriving, that a scruffy handwritten notice appeared in the Store Car Park, followed by a printed ECP one, and eventually, in March, a notice produced by the store near its entrance, presumably in response to complaints we know were made by customers. ECP have also belatedly acknowledged their failures by cancelling some PCNs, but others were not cancelled despite being contested on essentially the same grounds.
This whole sorry episode has left a very nasty legacy in Pinner of hostility and resentment towards your company. We continue, therefore to ask you both to remove or reduce the weekend charges for the Station Car Park, or at least introduce a weekly season ticket at a price comparable to nearby locations, and to cancel / repay those penalties levied on your customers whose offences were committed as a result of inadequate or non-existent communications on the part of your contractors or yourselves. In the hope of a favourable response, we will resist the pressure we are under from our members to escalate the matter further into the public domain.