Jarrow woman was issued £32,000 in Tyne Tunnel fines after her employer typed in the vehicle license wrong

A Jarrow woman found herself lumped with over £32,000 in Tyne Tunnel fines after her employer typed in the license plate details of the vehicle they issued her incorrectly.

The woman in question had started a job using a company vehicle which crossed the tunnel regularly, but little did she know that her employer had made a costly blunder.

Even though the company owned the vehicle, she was nonetheless registered as its owner and incurred the fines.

The cost mounted to over £32,000 and she was served with hundreds of notices, warnings and fines, some that were even passed to bailiffs.

The distress the woman experienced because of this made her unable to even sleep on some nights. Initial attempts to contact the tunnel to resolve it had failed.

However, she ultimately went to her MP, Kate Osborne with her story, and her intervention was finally able to bring the Tunnel administration to reason after what had happened.

They ultimately decided to write off £31,200 or so of the fines owned to her. The remaining £800 was nonetheless then billed to her employer who was ultimately liable for the mistake made.

A TT2 spokesperson said: “We refute the claim that the UTCNs were issued incorrectly – the UTCNs were issued correctly. When the tunnel-user received 11 unpaid toll charge notices (UTCNs), she contacted TT2 to query them, and it transpired that her employer (the account holder) had incorrectly entered her car registration. We recognised that this was an unintentional input error, by her employer, and cancelled of all of the UTCNs as a gesture of goodwill. From this point on wards we did not receive any further appeals.