Mother Fined £770 For Mystery Taxi

A mother bombarded with 11 bus lane fines feared she would be dragged into court after a taxi was registered to her home.

Anna Brunskill was horrified when, on April 23, she received a notice from the DVLA telling her a vehicle had been registered at her address in Warrington with a name she did not recognise.

Since then, the 49-year-old has received almost a dozen £70 bus lane penalty notices, totalling £W770.

She said nine of these charges were posted to her on May 15, despite her having no idea who owns the car now tied to her home address.

Warrington Borough Council and the DVLA have already been notified of the matter by the marketing manager.

In the pictures on the penalty papers, Anna saw the car that seemed to have a taxi light on its roof.

Given that there are two roads in the region with similar names, she suggested there was a chance it was an unintentional error.

However, the unexpected amount of fines worried her.

However, Warrington Borough Council, in Cheshire, confirmed it was a ‘genuine mistake’.

Describing the debacle, Anna said: ‘We suddenly got 11 fines in the post.

‘I think that’s what raised my suspicions more than anything.

‘We don’t know this person, we’ve lived at this address for 14 years and we don’t know the car at all.

‘That’s not very nice, it’s a bit worrying especially these days with identity fraud.

‘It’s definitely alarming and the fact that he only bought this car in April just before we started getting these fines.’

When she received the notice that a new vehicle had been registered at her address, confused Anna swiftly rang the DVLA to report this to them.

She said they told her they would open a case for her and then on May 8 Anna received the first bus lane fine for the car that had been registered to her address.

She said rang the local council, who told her to get an acknowledgement form from the DVLA and send it to them so they could pause the charges.

While on the phone with the council, Anna says she was told that there were 10 other penalty charges for the car registered at her address.

A massive stack of them arrived in the mail two days later.

Since then, the DVLA has confirmed to Anna that its records no longer contain her address.

Anna said: ‘It was worrying.

‘I was more worried about the bus lane, to be honest, and the DVLA bit because I thought, you don’t want to not be paying your penalty notices.

‘You can get all sorts of things against your name can’t you if you don’t sort things like that? So that was my main worry.

‘You could get a county court judgement against you.

‘When you’re talking about county court judgements and stuff it can affect your credit history and all sorts.

‘It is absolutely irritating, I probably spent about three hours in total speaking to people, being on hold, waiting for people.

‘They’ve all been very helpful to be fair but time out of your working day isn’t great.’

The DVLA said that any motorist who receives fines or correspondence for a vehicle they do not own should contact Action Fraud, the issuing authority of any fines or penalties and also write to DVLA giving as much information as possible.

They said that if the DVLA is made aware of an error on the vehicle record, upon receipt of satisfactory evidence, the Agency will remove the address details from the vehicle record.

They explained it is an offence to knowingly provide false information or documents to the DVLA under the Road Traffic Act 1972.

A Warrington Borough Council spokesman said: ‘Unfortunately, a genuine mistake was made when the taxi driver’s vehicle was registered with the DVLA.

‘Ms Brunskill’s fines for driving in a bus lane have now been cancelled, and no further action will be taken.’

If these letters had a different name, why did this woman open them? I simply would have sent them back to the sender, but you just don’t want to take any chances these days. If you don’t take action the scammers will probably give your details to other scammers and then things will get far worse.

Some people might say this is a non story, but it’s not, it’s a warning to other readers who would not know what to do, so as well as it being newsworthy it’s also educational.