Council threatens car parking operator with legal action over delayed repayments to customers

Worcester City Council is to take legal action against operator Flowbird over a delay in repayments to customers who are said to have been wrongly charged multiple times for parking in its car parks.

The local authority said: “Despite council officers meeting with Flowbird on a twice-daily basis for over two weeks now, the matter is still unresolved – and this morning (13 October), the council was informed that none of the promised refunds had yet been processed.”

Worcester said it had informed Flowbird of duplicate payments on 28 September and immediately asked it to cease processing, which it did two days later.

Flowbird was then instructed to make refunds as soon as possible and the company initially told the council that refunds would be made by 7 October .

When this deadline was not met, Flowbird told the council that refunds would start appearing in customers' bank accounts the week commencing 10 October.

Shane Flynn, Director of Finance at Worcester City Council said: "This is a frustrating situation. The fact that the issue of delayed payments has risen again, despite assurances last year that it wouldn't, is bad enough, but this has been compounded by duplicate payments being taken from people's accounts and refunds having not been processed for two weeks.

"In some cases, people have been left hundreds of pounds out of pocket – this is completely unacceptable and, in our opinion, a gross breach of the contract we have with Flowbird and for that reason we have issued a contractual breach notice.”

Flynn added: "The council is not absolving itself of responsibility in trying to get this issue sorted and we are doing all we can to keep customers updated with accurate information on the situation, but despite our best efforts, Flowbird has offered little information over the past week.

"Unfortunately, the council has no control over the processing of these payments. The transactions are contained within the international banking system and we are reliant on the service providers to manage them. We have instructed them to reverse the duplicate payments immediately, but like our customers, we are still waiting for this to be done. The council can make emergency refund payments where necessary and also reimburse charges – we will ensure no-one is left out of pocket as a result of this incident and I would again urge people to get in touch if they have incurred such costs."

The city council said more than 200,000 duplicate payments had been taken from customers' accounts and Flowbird had accepted responsibility for this issue.

“It has impacted 15,000 car parking sessions and has resulted in around £400,000 of income relating to duplicate payments being incorrectly received by the council. The council wants to reassure customers that a formal stop has successfully been put on all these transactions to ensure they are not duplicated any further.”

Worcester said that, along with actively pursuing a legal remedy to bring about the full and automatic payment of refunds as soon as possible, it would be reviewing its contract arrangement with Flowbird.

Flowbird is the manufacturer of the car park payment machines and owner of the software within the machines and the council has a contract with them.

A spokesperson for Flowbird said: “This is clearly a terrible error and we offer our apologies to everyone affected. We are working with the merchant services provider to get refunds processed as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, there have been some delays due to the complexity of secure payments and the reprocessing.

“We do not receive interest on the money taken and those affected will be compensated for any charges incurred as a result. We are supporting Worcester City Council to ensure people are compensated financially but we cannot handle requests directly.

“Once again we offer our sincere apologies, to those affected, for what is a difficult situation and we hope to move forward shortly.”