A Stirrer Campaign

CLAMPING SCUM, GET OUT OF BRUM

11-01-2008

The Stirrer’s campaign against car clamping officially starts here after hearing yet another tale of woe from a hapless motorist.  What happened to Tori Cannell in Birmingham this week will make your toes curl.

Tori, an actress, popped into Moseley on Wednesday for lunch with friends. 

As she cruised along Woodbridge Road looking for a parking space, she avoided one obvious trouble-spot because there was a big clampers’ warning sign.  It’s not as though she wasn’t looking.

So when she finally parked – on a rough strip of land between the Lloyds Bank car park and a greengrocers shop – she thought she was OK.  Until, that is, she returned and saw immobiliser attached to her wheel.

Yes, she’d been clamped – and yes, there was a warning sign on the wall, roughly eight feet high, and way above her (or anyone else’s) eyeline.

Grudgingly, Tori accepted that she would have to cough up, and rang the phone number the clamping company left on her windscreen.

They warned that she would have to pay a £150 release fee.  Bad enough you might think, but as she headed towards the cashpoint there was another blow.

“Hold on a minute” said the clamper.  “We’ve also called out the tow truck.  It will cost an extra £75 to cancel it.”

Tori’s no fool, and had a better idea. “I said to the clamper that the truck company should invoice me directly, and I’d pay them myself.

“Surprise, surprise, he told me that wasn’t possible.  And he warned me that unless I handed over the cash before the truck arrived, the £75 would rise to £175.” 

Tori felt this extra charge was, in her words “tantamount to extortion”. 

She walked across the road to the nearby police station for help but – all too predictably – was warned that unless she was being threatened they could take no action.

“The clamper said that I didn’t like it I’d have to take it up with the manager,” Tori recalls.

“So I said, OK, let me speak to him.  But they said it wasn’t possible right now because it was 7 o’clock at night.

“It seems to me they can do just whatever they like.”

See also link here

And http://tinyurl.com/2w4xys

Do you sympathise with Tori?  Or should she have been more careful?  Do you back The Stirrer’s campaign to eradicate clamping from the streets of Birmingham and the West Midlands.