THE city council has cut ties with the operator of its car park payment machines after last year’s overcharging fiasco.

Bosses at Worcester City Council have informed Flowbird, which runs the machines on its behalf, that it has terminated its deal after a string of problems including last year’s glitch which resulted in almost £400,000 being taken in error from more than 15,000 sessions at the 14 council-owned car parks across the city.

This meant more than 1,500 drivers were overcharged for parking with some seeing hundreds of pounds taken from their bank accounts after being charged multiple times.

Cllr Chris Mitchell, leader of Worcester City Council, said he was “extremely disappointed” and that the payment issues in the last two years meant the council had “completely lost confidence” with Flowbird to deliver the service.

“The decision hasn’t been made lightly,” he said. “It’s a tough decision but one that had to be made. We’ve had two instances now in the last two years, the most recent obviously where £390,000 was wrongfully taken from people’s accounts.

“Fortunately that has all gone back but, unfortunately, I think those two significant breaches of contract have left councillors and officers with no other decision than to part company with Flowbird and to terminate that contract.

“We’ve done that with the intent that we will get a better service for residents and visitors to the city as people have to be able to be confident that when they come into our car parks and put their card against a machine they will be charged the correct amount of money for the amount of time they are staying.

“The city council’s reputation, as a consequence of Flowbird’s failure, has been damaged and that’s just not acceptable to us. We pay them to deliver a service and they have failed to deliver that service.

“It’s extremely disappointing. Having had the first issue in 2021, we were given assurances that the problem had been resolved, it would not reoccur and we were good to go, and we took them on that value having had disruption two years ago and then for a similar thing to happen within 12 months meant we just completely lost confidence in them to deliver.”

The city council said it was less than happy with Flowbird’s lacklustre response last September which saw the third-party parking machine operator miss the refund deadline and break its promise to reimburse all those affected.

As refunds finally began to be made to driver’s bank accounts, bosses at the council said they were “reviewing” their deal with ticket provider Flowbird saying the problems had not been fixed as quickly as they would have liked.

The overcharging fiasco came just a year after Flowbird took payments from drivers more than a month and a half after they had used the city’s car parks.

Last week, the council’s policy and resources committee agreed to move to join forces with new supplier Metric, bringing an end to a nightmare pact with Flowbird and its payment partner Elavon.

New payment machines, which will see the reintroduction of card payments which have been suspended since September, will be installed in the coming months.

Worcester City Council intends to up the fees at its car parks to bring in more money to help fill a hole of at least £1 million in its budget.