Driver handed London Ulez fine for car parked in Manchester

Drivers are being given Ulez fines after cameras wrongly identified their vehicles as being in the charge zone.

Motorists have contacted The Telegraph to report how they were sent fines for non-payment of the Ulez charge in London, despite a different vehicle being captured on the system’s cameras.

In one case the owner was sent a fine relating to non-payment of Ulez for his Ford Mondeo, when Transport for London’s cameras had captured a Nissan SUV.

At the time, the Mondeo was parked hundreds of miles away in Greater Manchester.

The cases emerged after Charles Cooper, 65, was handed a Ulez fine despite donating his car to the Ukraine war effort last summer.

Transport for London (TfL) sent Mr Cooper, of Lymington in Hampshire, a series of fines after automated number plate recognition cameras (ANPR) allegedly picked up the car being driven through London in October.

TfL has since been chasing him for hundreds of pounds in penalties for non-payment through the courts even though the accountant showed that his car was given to Ukraine last year.

After reading about Mr Cooper’s case, Arthur Bailey, a retired designer from Greater Manchester reported that a similar thing had happened with his son’s Ford Mondeo.

He told The Telegraph: “My son received a penalty charge from them with the registration number and correct details of his vehicle. However the vehicle in the attached photograph, the ‘proof’ of the alleged crime, was clearly a completely different vehicle to his, possibly a Nissan SUV and certainly not the Ford Mondeo he owned which had never been within a hundred miles of London.

‘You’d think they’d have better things to do’

“This typifies how incompetent the Ulez system is. You’d think they’d have better things to do than chase fines for the wrong vehicles.”

TfL later established that Mr Bailey’s number plate had been cloned and used on another car, resulting in him being charged. It has since waived the fine.

Another motorist reported that his vehicle has been charged for entering London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone after its personalised number plate was apparently mistaken for one containing similar numbers and letters.

On one occasion last month Hugh Blanchard’s antique silver Mazda, which has the registration plate 444AA, was charged for driving in St John’s Wood, north west London, when at the time it was parked on his driveway in the south London suburb of Bromley.

When he looked at the photographic evidence supplied by TFL, Mr Blanchard, 64, realised the camera appeared to have captured another vehicle that happened to have 444AA as part of its registration number.

On further investigation he noticed the same car also appeared to have been confused with his own two days earlier, this time after being photographed driving through Mill Hill, in North London.

‘My car was sitting on my drive’

“I use auto-pay for my car, and so this confusion over the number plates means I’m getting automatically charged for a vehicle that isn’t mine,” said Mr Blanchard, who works in IT.

“It’s extremely annoying. I know it’s not my car because it was sitting on my drive on both occasions that it was charged for being in the Ulez zone.

“I wonder if others are getting this problem with their cars being charged when they are still in their garage?”

TfL said that Mr Blanchard’s car had been charged by mistake because the correct vehicle’s number plate was slightly obscured when it was photographed by the Ulez camera.

A TfL spokesman said on Tuesday: “After a review of Mr Cooper’s case it is clear that the charge was issued in error. We apologise for any distress caused and have cancelled the outstanding charge.

“We have got procedures to deal with these issues and where people have been charged incorrectly they will be refunded,” said the spokesman.