VCS/BW Legal - writing defence

unhappychappie wrote: »

Hi firstly congratulations on your win, I have a question for you now it's all over if you could go back to the day you got the pcn would you just pay it.? Reason I'm asking is I have a pcn from vcs and I read your thread with great interest and wonder if it's worth all the hassle and stress. I've read loads on here probably way too much for this early stage of my case but I really don't think I have the intelligence to go through writing all the stuff you had to do. And the whole process of hitting the deadlines for the court case. I know it's important to fight these company's I did fight a previous vcs ticket at an airport with the help of this forum but that was when vcs was part of popla if you search my name and I won. I just think all cases will now end up in court and it's one to many hoops to jump through. I value your honest opinion.

I have been thinking about this a lot, even before you asked the question and my honest opinion is i don't know whether I would do it again. As LOC123 says the amount of work you do is soooo disproportionate to the amount of the PCN... it is certainly easier to just pay it and never hear about it again but I'm not sure I could ever bring myself to pay them, to fund what they do, because it goes against every cell in my body... I cannot abide the injustice of it. I fought it, not just for myself but for everyone who doesn't know they can, who didn't find the forum and didn't get the help I got.

However, as Umkomaas says in his signature... you have to be in it for the long haul. There often isn't a quick solution. However, the more of us that have been through it, the more "templates" you can crib things off for your own defence/witness statement/skeleton argument. The information on the forum is overwhelming at times when you have no idea what you're doing but we can't say the help isn't there. Sometimes it just takes a bit of searching for. And If anyone ever wants my documents in Word format I will be more than happy to send them.

I was petrified of going to Court, which I didn't need to be but as you're not you have that in your favour.

In terms of deadlines.... I don't think you need to be worried about handing them an easy win by missing deadlines. You just need to keep your dates clear in your mind and if you have your own thread on here, people will help if you're not sure.

As for whether all cases for VCS will end up in court from now on... someone with more experience might be able to comment on this... but the more people that beat them... surely the less people they will take to court... well that's how a reasonable company would work surely :rotfl: