I live north of the river in London and my parents live south of it, in the Tunbridge Wells. I have long been a registered user of the Dartford Crossing for fear of forgetting to pay to cross – and thus incurring an automatic fine. This means that the cameras at the bridge and tunnel recognise my car number plate and immediately deduct £2.50 from my bank account when they see it going over or under the Thames.
I found myself in an automated telephone queuing system. I was caller number 73
Or it did mean this until something went wrong. After my usual crossing in April, I started to get text messages from ‘Dart Charge’ to say my account was ‘dormant’ and I needed to ‘re–register my card details’. This sounded ominous, so first thing on the Monday morning after my weekend in Kent, I attempted to do this. I tried several times but each failed. The website simply wouldn’t accept the card numbers. It would just stall. So I tried every debit or credit card I have – and then all of my wife’s cards too.
None of them would work on the Dart Charge payment system. So I wrote a lengthy email to explain this, to give myself a basis on which to later appeal the fines which I now felt certain would be coming my way. And, slightly obsessively, I repeated this process every working day for the next two weeks – failing each time to register a card and then communicating this in an email. And each time I wrote to them I received an automated response and a different reference number. I was clogging up their inbox – and they mine – if nothing else.
In late April, the expected fines arrived, by post, one for each crossing, £145 in total, less if I paid within two weeks. At this point I decided to try to actually phone them.
I found myself in an automated telephone queuing system. I was caller number 73. When I finally reached number one, over an hour later, the woman who answered insisted that I had come through to the wrong department – but promised that she could connect me to the right one. Instead, she sent me right back to where I started. Only now I was down to number 89 in the queue. I braced myself for another hour on hold.
Finally I got back to number one and this time a man answered who was much more helpful. Or rather he didn’t actually help me but he was, at least, more sympathetic. In fact, he explained that he would like to help me but was powerless to. He did give me the email address of the department that he was sure, he said, would be able to make the whole thing better.
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So I wrote to them – a long and detailed explanation of everything that had happened, with all my many case reference numbers included. Their reply came the very next day. It told me that they weren’t the department I needed and gave me what they said was the correct email address that I should write to. It was the same email address that I had written to – the same email address they were replying from. At this point I began to express my frustrations on social media.
I took to Twitter, as they say, writing a series of angry posts. This ranting brought me to the attention of a reporter from the Daily Telegraph who had discovered that what had happened to me had apparently happened to many others too. She then included me as a case study in her news report about the cock-up, politely describing me as ‘driver John Sturgis’ rather than, say, ‘obsessive angry man’ – which is what I was becoming.
My cameo in the Telegraph then saw me approached by a producer from BBC Radio Essex who had also been covering this growing scandal on their patch. I duly appeared as a phone-in guest on their breakfast show, to date the most Alan Partridge moment of my life. I was so in character that at one point I said: ‘They keep asking for my feedback – well I can think of one or two words I’d use to describe their performance but I better not say them on air.’ As well as Alan Partridge, I was also by now beginning to think of myself as a consumer justice champion: the new Mr Bates. Mr Sturgis against the Dartford Crossing.
The scale of the scandal was growing: the BBC now estimated that as many as a million people could have been wrongly fined like I had been. What a mess. A couple of days after that breakfast show, my phone rang – and it was a woman from Dart Charge. She was very, very apologetic. It was a very bad line and she had quite a strong accent and I couldn’t follow everything she said. But the core message seemed to be that I had won my appeals and that everything was going to be OK from now on.
So it was that I happily motored off to see my dear old mum and dad again, my confidence in crossing the Thames newly restored. I sailed over the river and down to Tunbridge Wells on the Saturday – and back under it on the Sunday. My trip was traffic-free, sunny, lovely.
I suddenly got the fear and went online to check that everything was OK – only to discover that everything wasn’t OK
It wasn’t until Monday morning that I suddenly got the fear and went online to check that everything was OK – only to discover that everything wasn’t OK. I had misunderstood what that woman on the telephone was telling me. They hadn’t restored my auto-pay status, they had just apologised for and waived my two previous fines. And though I could still pay my £2.50 for crossing on the Sunday, I was too late to pay the Saturday one. This could only mean one thing: another fine is coming my way and I’m going to have to explain all of this all over again.
It was after the Dartford Crossing was held up by Just Stop Oil activists two years ago, strangling the M25 and consequently stalling road transport across the south-east, that the government felt moved to introduce the Public Order Act 2023. This prohibits any act ‘which interferes with the use or operation of any key national infrastructure in England and Wales.’
The crossing undoubtedly is a key piece of national infrastructure: the bridge and tunnel are the most significant things to come out of Dartford since Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. So by the logic of that act, it would be entirely appropriate to prosecute selected civil servants from the Department of Transport. The systemic failure they are responsible for is certainly interfering with key national infrastructure.
When I first used the Dartford Crossing as a newly qualified driver in June 1985 – before the bridge part even existed – you’d lob a few coins in a bucket to make the barrier go up. The biggest anxiety was that you might miss your throw. Of course, when it was built we were told the fee to cross it would only apply until the cost was paid off. That was supposed to be in 2003. But here we are all these years later.
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