Parking Charge Notice and confusion over the new Protect of Freedoms Act

Katrin174 · 27 November 2012 at 12:32PM

Hi,

I recieved a Parking Charge Notice from Parking Eye the other day for the amount of £85 or £50 If I pay within 14 days.

I basically went to Pizza Hut and was there for 28 minutes when apparently I was only allowed 10 minutes unless I was a pizza hut customer.

The letter quotes from the protection of freedoms act 2012, stating that I as the registered keeper am required to pay up unless another person was driving my car and then I need to provide their detatils within 28 days.

There are two photos of my car in this letter showing my car in the baywith the time, however £50 seems very high for being 18 minutes over my allowed time.

What should I do? and What does the Protect of Freedoms Act actually mean in regard to private parking charges?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Kat

Plushchris · 27 November 2012 at 1:00PM

You say you went to Pizza hut so surely you would be allowed over the 10 minutes?

In any case just ignore them.

peter_the_piper · 27 November 2012 at 1:01PM

You have two choices, as I see it.
1) ignore them.
2)appeal as you were a customer and when they reject the appeal, insist on a popla number, it is free to you, £32 to them. Its quite likely they will give in then.
If not you are still able to ignore them whether the popla appeal is in your favour or not.

grant_uk · 27 November 2012 at 1:11PM

You're not required to do anything with regards to a speculative invoice from a private parking company. The worst they can do is sue for loss of earnings, which don't amount to much for a free Pizza Hut car park.

They know that.

They also know that the probability of them ever embarking on such court action is minuscule to the extreme. The letters they send are designed to panic people into paying up before they get round to researching exactly how enforceable their notices actually are. They use ifs and maybes about court action, debt collectors and possible detrimental effects on people's credit rating.

It's all cobblers.

Their business model is built on people panicking and paying. Otherwise they send a standard series of letters out, each sounding more threatening than the last, but eventually stopping if no-one bothers to respond.

Enough people pay up for it not to be an issue for them.

All October's change in the law meant was that any court action could be directed at the registered owner if the driver couldn't be identified. You still don't need to tell them anything. All letters will just go to the registered keeper.

All you need to do is ignore them. My wife received a similar invoice from Parking Eye, which we duly ignored. We got a second follow-up letter which went similarly unanswered and then they just stopped, which was hugely disappointing.

pogofish · 27 November 2012 at 1:12PM

There is no confusion over POFA. The basics have not changed one bit.

Just ignore these scammers and anything they or their fake solicitors/debt collecters send you.

Katrin174 · 27 November 2012 at 1:16PM

hello thank you for your quick responses. Sorry I wasnt clear, I meant that I parked in pizza hut but went to tesco which is 2 mins away. Do you think that I should still ignore them even tho I was technically in the wrong??

FatAndy · 27 November 2012 at 1:22PM

Katrin174 wrote: »

Do you think that I should still ignore them even tho I was technically in the wrong??

Technically the land owner can only claim a "reasonable pre-estimate of losses suffered" and this is clearly nowhere near £85 they (or rather their agents) are claiming so they are also technically in the wrong. Consider your technical wrong to be more than cancelled out by the PPC's technical wrong and continue to ignore.

Katrin174 · 27 November 2012 at 1:24PM

thank you Andy. In that case I will ignore all letters from them.

Coupon-mad · 27 November 2012 at 2:31PM

Glad you got some responses but TBH this 'new law' guff has been covered endless times. In eight weeks, since the Act, we've been constantly asked about the new law.

It has been discussed to death TBH and you could have just searched the forum - just the word 'Freedoms' would have done the trick - but we always reply because it's important that people know that fake PCNs have not suddenly become magically enforceable!

So here's the same old summary that I post, yet again

:

The registered keeper doesn't 'have to' do anything at all. These fake PCNs are as unenforceable as they ever were - it's just that these scam firms are now able to aim their threatogams at the registered keeper if they are not informed who the driver was.

Big deal...the keeper can still make paper aeroplanes out of them as we always did, just as shown by Tim Cary, the expert Solicitor in this Watchdog clip!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAIcdi9niHA

A SUMMARY:

As far as private parking ticket scams are concerned, for a vehicle where you or family are the registered keeper*:

Any fake PCN issued for an incident up until 30th Sept 2012 = IGNORE IT.

Any fake PCN issued for an incident from 1st October 2012 onwards:

- if you were parked in Scotland or NI = IGNORE IT.

- if your 'ticket' is from a firm who are NOT members of the BPA AOS, or are one of five AOS members currently banned from getting data = IGNORE IT.

- if your 'ticket' is from a non-banned by the DVLA!! AOS member in England/Wales, there are 2 choices:

a) IGNORE IT, as ever, playing snap with the threatograms that match our sticky thread 'PPC letter chains' (near the top of this parking forum),

or

b) Appeal it with help from here in how to word it, and insist on a referral to the POPLA appeals service if it's not cancelled. Costs the PPC £32 plus, costs you nothing, it's not binding on you but it is binding on the PPC. If you do not win your appeal then revert to ignore mode.

This option is for those who want to fight back, cost the PPC money and test the POPLA system whilst also getting their PPC's tactics scrutinised; start by reading threads about POPLA. Recent posters have had great success where their case is clearly a very unfair ticket (such as disabled overstay or slight overlap of a white line, etc.) by using email and wording it not as an appeal but a complaint, and copying in the retailer/landowner to that complaint.

Finally, if anyone gets any fake PCN anywhere in the UK in a retail, cinema, fast food or Supermarket car park then even if you choose to ignore the scammers then COMPLAIN IN WRITING to the CEO of the company on site if you were a customer. Do not appeal to them, complain about this protection racket against their paying ex-customers.

HTH

* it is different for hire/lease/company cars as you could find the fake PCN paid for you! Here is a thread about what to do (whether AOS scheme member or not, you need to appeal to hook the PPC in your direction).

SodG24 · 27 November 2012 at 2:39PM

Katrin174 wrote: »

Hi,

I recieved a Parking Charge Notice from Parking Eye the other day for the amount of £85 or £50 If I pay within 14 days.

I basically went to Pizza Hut and was there for 28 minutes when apparently I was only allowed 10 minutes unless I was a pizza hut customer.

The letter quotes from the protection of freedoms act 2012, stating that I as the registered keeper am required to pay up unless another person was driving my car and then I need to provide their detatils within 28 days.

There are two photos of my car in this letter showing my car in the baywith the time, however £50 seems very high for being 18 minutes over my allowed time.

What should I do? and What does the Protect of Freedoms Act actually mean in regard to private parking charges?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Kat

Follow Coupon Mad's advise as she has more patience than me to type the full story. The POFA and POPLA have no real effect despite what the PPCs might suggest in their letters but that's because they lie.

The_Slithy_Tove · 27 November 2012 at 3:21PM

Katrin174 wrote: »

The letter quotes from the protection of freedoms act 2012, stating that I as the registered keeper am required to pay up unless another person was driving my car and then I need to provide their detatils within 28 days.

Does it really say just that? If so, it is misleading and should be reported.

There is a lot of misinformation around concerning the Protection of Freedoms Act. This is largely pedalled by the private parking companies in an attempt to add some kind of legitimacy to their charges, not helped by sloppy and lazy journalism which regurgitates what the parking companies say without checking if it's true or not.

Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 introduces the concept of Keeper Liability for private parking charges if the registered keeper fails to divulge who the driver was. That is all.

It does not make parking charges enforceable (or any more enforceable than they were before, which, on the whole is not enforceable at all)

It does not require the registered keeper to name the driver on request - there is no obligation. If the keeper fails to name the driver, the "liability" (such as it is) reverts to the keeper (see previous point). If the driver and keeper are the same person, then there is no difference anyway.

It does not set out any kind of statutory framework for parking charges, they are still based on contract law or trespass, and in that respect nothing has changed

It does not define the wording that must be used to make parking charge notices "legal", "enforceable" or "valid". The Act sets out wording and points that must be included in order for the parking company to be able to apply keeper liability, but using all the correct words does not make the notice any more legally enforceable than it was before (see point 1)

Parking Charge Notice and confusion over the new Protect of Freedoms Act

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