A driver in Kent is willing to pay thousands of pounds to challenge a parking fine and the reliability of automated ticketing systems used across Britain.

Lawrence Carnie received a £100 parking ticket for a 22-hour stay at a car park in Dartford in June 2020, but he claims his stay was actually two half-hour stays on two consecutive days, as reported by the Daily Mail.

Lawrence wants Automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) in car parks to be scrapped until the data is of a standard that would hold up in court.

According to the RAC, ANPR is “a technology that reads vehicle registration plates to create location data.

“This information is captured by scanners or cameras then cross-referenced for a range of traffic and law enforcement purposes.”

Private parking firm GroupNexus issued the fine and offered to cancel it as a gesture of goodwill after The Daily Mail contacted them.

However, Lawrence believes that cancelling the charge is not an act of goodwill but a response to the company knowing the data was wrong.

He is not satisfied with the response and wants to question the whole operation of GroupNexus.

Lawrence warned the Daily Mail that many people pay incorrectly issued PCNs because they fear debt collectors or CCJs.

He advises people to appeal and demand data from parking companies and to report them to the BPA.

His goal is to expose the company for operating on bad data and issuing PCNs despite knowing the data was poor.

Lawrence firmly believes that the ANPR data provided by GroupNexus is so poor that it would not hold up in court and wants drivers to know this so they can challenge unfair parking charges.

A spokesperson for GroupNexus said: “We stand by our data, the report submitted to POPLA, and their decision to uphold the charge”.