Dart Charge Penalty Notice – what you DON’T know!

Last Updated on September 1, 2023

Received a Dart Charge Penalty notice?

Have you received a Dart Charge Penalty Notice even though you have set up a pre-payment or automatic payment account?  You are not alone.  Are you wondering why you are being fined £70 by Dart Charge when you already have done everything you need to in order for payments to go through automatically each time you use the Dartford Crossing?  I did. Here’s what I had to do to resolve the penalty notice.

Dart Charge Penalty Notice  – why did you get fined?

Some time around 2014 all the toll booths on the Dartford Crossing were removed.  In principle this seemed like a good idea.  After all the original agreement when the Dartford Crossing was constructed was that after the crossing had paid for itself (by charging a toll) then there would no longer be a charge for using the bridge or the tunnel.  In fact the charge should have stopped being levied back some time around 2003.  So the Department For Transport was fifteen years late, but hey, better late than never.

But the toll booths on the Dartford Crossing were not removed because there would no longer be a toll charged.  The toll booths were removed because payment would now be taken through the Dart Charge website, which is run by the Department For Transport.  The publicity surrounding the move to online payments made it all sound so simple.  The process running thus:

1. Sign up for an account on the Dart Charge website
2. Register your vehicle registration numbers and payment details
3. Drive over (or under) the Dartford Crossing
4. Take it easy while the payment toll for your crossing is extracted from your payment method automatically

From a safety perspective removing the toll booths is something I’m in favour of.  The insane race / bundle / inevitable collisions when the many lanes of traffic merged into far fewer lanes is not something any motorists are likely to miss.

So I got a Dartford Crossing penalty charge, where did I go wrong?

I’m going to keep this part of the blog post as simple as possible by breaking it down into two parts.

What I did before I got fined

In 2016 I signed up for a Dart Charge account and entered my payment details (a debit card) and my car registration number.  Between 2016 and 2018 I used the crossing four times.  So there and back twice.  I didn’t receive any penalty notices so thought nothing more of it.  The system worked.  Or so I thought…

How I got fined by Dart Charge

On the 13th June 2019 my band had a gig in Brighton.  So driving from Ipswich to Brighton included a trip over the Dartford Crossing, and then the following day I drove back through the Dartford Tunnel.  I did this safe in the knowledge that my car and payment details were all set up on the Dart Charge website to take the toll for the crossing automatically.

On the 24th June 2019 I received a Penalty Charge Notice from Dart Charge, including the bold, all caps text ‘DO NOT IGNORE’.  I didn’t ignore the fine.  I shrugged it off and assumed there must be some mistake because I KNOW I had the toll covered.

Just to be on the safe side I thought I had better log into my Dart Charge account to ensure my registration number was correct in my account.  When logging in I spotted a notice declaring that the site was in ‘Alpha’ status, meaning there might be a few technical issues.  ‘No shit’ thought I to myself.

I checked my car registration details and they were correct.  There was £5 showing as outstanding in my account.  I thought this was odd but wasn’t too alarmed.  So I checked which debit card I had registered with Dart Charge.  There were no payment details associated with my account.  Oops.  That would nearly explain why no payment had gone through.

Hold on, bear with etc, this is where things get tricksy

I tried entering my payment details six times.  The website fell over six times.  For my day job part of my role is being the person on the other end of sites like this ensuring things keep working.  So I tried a bunch of troubleshooting exercises, like logging out then back in, trying the payment in a different browser.  All sorts.  Nothing worked.  I was unable to add any payment details.  Frustrated I decided that as the site was in Alpha they must still be fixing the payment system and I decided to try again the next day.

The next day I tried entering my payment details again and the system worked perfectly.  Or to be more precise the payment details were recorded by the system adequately.

Despite the fact I now had payment details logged with Dart Charge I could still see no way to clear the £5.00 that my account was declaring I owed.  I even called my wife into the room to check I wasn’t just missing something obvious.  I wasn’t.  There was no ‘pay now’ button or link anywhere on the site once I had logged into my account.

I decided to leave the fine to stew for another day; clearly I was getting nowhere with this new, improved, simple toll payment system.

When I checked my account again the next day my outstanding payment was showing as zero.  I had also received a confirmation of payment email from Dart Charge.  Job done.  Or so I thought…

The second penalty charge notice from Dart Charge

This morning I received a second penalty charge letter through the post.  Yet again the gravity of the situation was expressed to me in grave terms in bold type.  Payment for the crossing had been taken, I even had a receipt with yesterday’s date on it.  Surely I can ignore this letter.  Sadly my dealings with Government departments in the past have made me wary.  I decided I should call Dart Charge just in case.  This is where things got weird and a little confusing.

When I called Dart Charge I was told that I had to pay the £70 fine, although because I was going to pay swiftly this would be reduced to £35.  I told the Department For Transport operative that I had paid for the crossing and had received an email receipt with yesterday’s date on it.

I was informed that the payment I had received a receipt for was for the toll relating to a crossing I made on the 7th October 2018.  So I still owed the toll for the 13th June 2019 crossing.  This crossing was not showing in my Dart Charge account.  Apparently Dart Charge had failed to take payment because the payment card I entered three years ago had expired.  Oops.

At this point I figured it was a fair cop.  Mea Culpa.  So while I had the (admittedly very friendly) operative on the phone I asked for some assistance in paying the fine.  I pointed out that I couldn’t see anywhere in my Dart Charge account that gave me the option to pay a fine.  On top of this confusion my balance was also showing as zero. AND the rogue crossing was not appearing in the list of crossing in my account.

This is when I found out something that I could not have predicted.  In fact I was so surprised by the method for paying the Dart Charge Fine that I’m going to declare the method in a different font, just to emphasise it.

In order to pay your Dart Charge Penalty Notice you need LOG OUT of your Dart Charge account.  When logged out you need to go through the penalty payment process as if you do not have a Dart Charge account.

I know a little bit about website UX (user experience) from to my day job.  Demanding that users log out of their account to perform certain actions is lunacy.  Giving no indication that users are required to log out is frustrating to a level that makes the backs of my eyeballs itch.

So I logged out, went through the penalty payment system and paid my fine.  Only it wasn’t actually a fine, it was just the £5 I still owed for the crossing on the 13th June. Bonkers.

Paying the Dart Charge penalty – conclusions

1. Don’t assume automatic payments means payments are taken automatically
2. To pay your Dart Charge fine you need to log out of your Dart Charge account
3. If you fail to make a payment you might not actually get a penalty charge notice at all (I didn’t get a penalty letter for the lack of payment last October)
4. If you get a new credit or debit card make sure you update your Dart Charge payment method

And finally…

After I made my payment I searched my emails for messages from Dart Charge and found LOADS.  I have no idea who I missed them.  Although I set up Dart Charge on my personal email address, not my work account.  So the message was easily missed.

I have now set up an alert filter in my personal account to flag up any messages from Dart Charge.

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Update to the Dart Charge debacle – 16th August 2023

A couple of weeks ago we were heading off for a weekend away that required us to use the Dartford Crossing. So in a surprising act of logic, I decided to check if my Dart Charge account was okay. It was a good job I checked.

I haven’t driven over the Dartford Crossing for years, so the payment card I had previously added to the account had expired. No problem, I’ll add an up-to-date credit card.

Each time I submitted the new card details the website showed me the swirly thing that denotes that ‘we’re doing something, honest we are!’ and then nothing more would happen.

Two weeks passed and I happened to be in Helsinki for a few days and was chatting to a friend about how great the gov.uk services were. I managed to get myself a new passport in a matter of days, which I was very impressed by.

I remembered that I hadn’t added a new payment card to my Dart Charge account, so fired up my iPad and checked my account. The old card was still showing as the only payment method, but I hadn’t been fined and my crossing still wasn’t showing up in my history. So I tried to add a card again, and it failed again. I tried other cards, and they failed.

I tried to add a card by logging into my friend’s Microsoft Surface, just in case the issue was IOS or Mac related. Same problem. I wondered whether being in Finland might be confusing the website, so switched on my VPN and changed to a UK IP address. Same problem.

A few days later I was back in the UK so tried to update the card details again. This time after logging in I was met by a message informing me that the website was having problems (no shit), and that even if my crossings were not showing in my account I could be assured that they had been logged and would show up at some point.

I had another go at updating my card and after a painfully long wait it actually worked.

Over next few hours I received a little waterfall of emails from the Dartford Crossing website:

When I checked my phone the following morning, I found I had received a slightly larger waterfall of text messages:

Today I went to the Dart Charge website to see if I could verify whether I’ve made a payment or not and got this message:

So I guess I’ll just have to wait it out and hope I don’t get a fine!

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Yet another update to the Dart Charge debacle – 31 August 2023

Another text message has been sent to me, nearly a month since I actually travelled over (and under) the Dartford Crossing.

So I figured I ought to go the Dartford Crossing website and log into my account. The first notice I saw was telling me that there are delays:

When I eventually managed to log in I was informed that I needed to enter new card details (yet again):

So I entered my card details AGAIN, and we’ll see what happens next.