Dad threatens to challenge ‘tens of thousands’ of term-time holiday fines
The father who won a legal battle to have a local education authority fine for taking his daughter on holiday during term time overturned is preparing to take up the fight for ‘thousands’ of other parents.
Jon Platt from the Isle of Wight has set up a company, School Fines Refunds Limited, to help other parents who believe they’ve also been wrongly fined.
Last month, the High Court said Platt shouldn’t have to pay £120 for taking his seven-year-old out of school for a family holiday to Disney World in Florida.
Platt had argued that the fine was not legal because his daughter’s attendance record was exemplary at 92%.
He told BBC Radio 4 programme You & Yours that he has since been contacted by ‘hundreds’ of parents asking for help to challenge similar fines.
‘Parents are contacting me in their hundreds about this. Local authorities are fining people based upon a single day – or two days, or sometimes five days – of unauthorised absence when they had no reasonable grounds to believe that a criminal offence had been committed," he told the programme.
"And hundreds of thousands of parents have paid millions of pounds in fines when they did absolutely nothing wrong. The only reason they paid them was the fear of the consequences of going to magistrates’ court."
Platt said his firm was prepared to take ‘tens of thousands’ of cases through the courts.
"This idea that local authorities took upon themselves that they were obliged by national statute or national guidelines to issue mass numbers of these fines is a fallacy,’ he said.
"We will take tens of thousands of cases through the courts and local authorities will have to explain to a judge why they thought it was within their power to fine parents who had done nothing wrong."
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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