A man's keen detective work has unveiled hundreds of 'errors' in a parking company's records after a series of visits to a retail estate landed him with a £100 fine.

Lawrence Carnie visited Curry's in Tower Retail Park on Crayford Road, Dartford on June 10 to look at new TVs.

The 58-year-old was only shopping for 30 minutes before he left. The car park has a maximum stay time of three hours.

He then visited the shopping estate the next day; again staying for just half an hour.

However 10 days laterJune20 he received a fine of £100 for allegedly staying in the car park for 23 hours.

After appealing the fine through independent adjudicators, Popla, the parking company Group Nexus released a 356-page document showing all activity across that 24-hour period.

According to the data, Lawrence was spotted entering at 3.20pm on June 10 and then leaving at 1.30pm the next day with no other data entries for his car.

He decided to look through the entire 9,920 entries in the document and claims there are some anomalies.

The man from Kenwyn Road noticed that 135 cars arrived or left twice - 67 entered two times and 68 left twice.

There was also a single entry where one car exited the car park three times without entering.

On top of that 799 visitors were only spotted entering or leaving once - 8% of all visitors across the time period.

Lawrence also discovered 96 cars were recorded entering on June 10 and not spotted leaving that day with 100 cars leaving June 11 which did not arrive that day - this would mean a maximum of 196 people would also have fines.

He said: "I'm almost on a bit of a crusade at this point.

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/1105749

"I've given up on ranting about my fine because I feel I've got them.

"I appealed the ticket but they said their evidence is proof of my stay but that one night they have 196 cars left unchecked meaning at 3am that car park should've been half full.

"How can they be issuing fines off of this? Their data is so bad."

A banker by trade, Lawrence used his knowledge of analytics and placed all the logs into a spreadsheet.

From there he deduced that the Group Nexus' data appeared to be missing a number of entries.

His appeal is still pending a verdict but Lawrence is confident the verdict will be in his favour.

Group Nexus were asked for a comment and it said: "This case concerns an appeal we have already received and responded to.

"The challenge was rejected and the PCN upheld on the grounds that the motorist overstayed the free time allocation.

"Issues with the cameras are extremely rare. When there is one, we virtually always find evidence of it on the system. In this case we investigated the claim and could find no evidence that this vehicle had visited the site twice.

"This case is now with the independent adjudicator."