Father who won legal case for term-time holiday absences starts company to help other parents recover fines

'Hundreds of thousands of parents have paid millions of pounds in fines when they did absolutely nothing wrong'

Jon Platt won a high court battle over taking his daughter on holiday during term time and is now starting a company to help other parents who did the same thing to recover fines (PA)

The father who won a high court battle over taking his daughter on holiday during term time will fight on behalf of other parents who believe they were wrongly fined for doing the same.

In May the High Court ruled in favour of Jon Platt, who took his youngest daughter on a family holiday to Florida without permission, after he refused to pay a £120 fine from the Isle of Wight Council.

Now, the businessman has set up a company whose sole purpose is to help people, via group litigation, recover money where they have been unlawfully fined.

He was aware of "dozens of cases" of parents being wrongly issued with penalty notices, Mr Platt told the BBC Radio 4 programme You & Yours.

"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.

"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."

He warned that if local authorities do not comb through their records of penalty fines and "do the right thing", his new company School Fines Refunds Limited was prepared to take on thousands of claims.

"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."

Mr Platt has denied that he took set up the company purely for profit.

In a post on the Facebook page for School Fines Refunds Ltd, he wrote: “There are people out there who will say that I only set out on this course of action so I could make money from the action I am now taking. I did not at any time choose to be prosecuted by the Isle of Wight Council.”

He continued: “I am not at all certain I can make a penny at this, indeed it might cost me tens of thousands of pounds of my own money. Anyone out there who thinks that they might be able to do this then please feel free to jump in. I will sell you this company for exactly what I have invested to date.

Press Association