£70 Parking Fine in non P&D Car Park

chrissie55

Euro car parks are absolutely excremental! A couple of years ago there was an Easter procession in our town, & a minibus of disabled people (with blue badge & ID) parked in the LIDL car park adjacent to the council's (free on Sundays & BH) 1 - there was no visible warning, but the ill-mannered attendant slapped a £70- fine sticker on it & couldn't even speak civilly to the driver! I gave out to LIDL & Euro about it - never had a reply, but warning signs appeared in the car park within weeks.

bluelagoon_3

taxiphil wrote: »

I've highlighted the key word in red - If

If a parking company could convince a judge that a driver is liable to pay £130, a figure which is comprised of one penalty stacked on top of another penalty, then I'd be amazed.

The law does not recognise the concept of penalties for breaches of contract.

Besides that very fundamental point, I can't see how the claimant could prove a contract even existed, or could prove who the driver was.

I've never seen any evidence of such a case ever having succeeded in a court.

It's not a penalty. The initial discount is an incentive to pay and this has been accepted in Court.

I've answered your other points in other posts.

bluelagoon_3

chrissie55 wrote: »

Euro car parks are absolutely excremental! A couple of years ago there was an Easter procession in our town, & a minibus of disabled people (with blue badge & ID) parked in the LIDL car park adjacent to the council's (free on Sundays & BH) 1 - there was no visible warning, but the ill-mannered attendant slapped a £70- fine sticker on it & couldn't even speak civilly to the driver! I gave out to LIDL & Euro about it - never had a reply, but warning signs appeared in the car park within weeks.

There's no excuse for being rude and there should be adequate signage but simply being disabled does not exclude someone from being issued with a parking charge.

bluelagoon_3

AlexisV wrote: »

To be honest, I don't believe you.

These implied contracts are a joke. Unless you have a contract in writing, or proof of a verbal agreement, all the tickets private firms put on cars are completely and utterly unenforceable.

All tickets unenforceable? Well these three cases beg to differ for a start.

HARROGATE COUNTY COURT (No. 7QZ73627)
COVENTRY COUNTY COURT (No. 7QZ80996)
BIRMINGHAM COUNTY COURT (No. 6QZ93881)

Optimist

AlexisV wrote: »

To be honest, I don't believe you.

These implied contracts are a joke. Unless you have a contract in writing, or proof of a verbal agreement, all the tickets private firms put on cars are completely and utterly unenforceable.

I disagree, contracts can be formed by persons acting in a particular manner, there is no need to even talk to the other party. Whether a contract is formed comes from Smith vs. Hughes (1871) the formation of contract doesn't actually rely on the intention of both parties.

Even if one or both parties never intended a contract to be formed, the test from Smith vs. Hughes is that would the hypothetical reasonable person assume that there was the intention to form an agreement based on the actions of both parties.

You can try to dispute it by stating unfair contract terms, ie was the sign was visible, clear, etc. But it doesn't mean that a contract wasn't formed if you could see the terms and conditions from where you were parked.

taxiphil

bluelagoon wrote: »

CCTV is rather good at proving who the driver was and if that’s not available then a Norwich Pharmacal Order will do the job (rarely used but is an option and compels the Registered Keeper to reveal the driver under oath).

CCTV? OK, so you've got a clear image of a man getting out of a car and walking off. You don't recognise him and neither does anyone else in your organisation. What are you going to do with the images to find out the person's identity? Put up Wanted posters on lamp posts?

With regard to an NPO disclosure order, firstly it would cost the claimant thousands of pounds in non-recoverable court costs just to attempt to find out the driver's identity. Why would they throw away thousands of pounds to potentially recover £100 or so?

Secondly, an NPO is only granted by a judge when the wrongdoing is considered fairly serious and the stakes are high (e.g. damages for libel). I very, very much doubt a car park charge would fall into that category. Not even the police have ever used NPOs for speeding offences when the registered keeper uses the well-known loophole of not remembering who was driving.

An NPO may be an effective threat in some cases, but to action one would be a nonsense.

bluelagoon wrote: »

Also things like insurance certificates in force on date of the ticket being issued would reveal who the drivers of the vehicle are.

Again, this would require a very expensive application for a disclosure order and still wouldn't prove a single thing. Anyone can legally drive someone else's vehicle without being a named driver if they've got fully comp insurance on their own vehicle. So you'd have narrowed down the number of possible drivers to about 20 million people.

bluelagoon wrote: »

If the signs are there to be seen and a reasonable person would see and understand them – then yes, if you park on the land then the contract exists and its terms and conditions are lawful. It is possible to enter into a contract by your actions, for example, entering a car park. You see the signs and agree to the charges by parking there - this creates a contract by action.

We could spend many pages arguing about contract law as there are many shades of grey when it all hinges upon a sign. But it would be a brave lawyer who argued that offer, consideration and acceptance had happened on the basis of a sign which the defendant may argue they never even spotted. Again, it would not be economically viable to employ a lawyer to even argue the intricacies of contract law when the maximum gain to the claimant is so small.

bluelagoon wrote: »

The BPA guidelines state a standard charge should not exceed £75 (we charge £60) and the maximum increase should not exceed £150 (we charge £135).

The BPA is just a commercial industry body - there's nothing official about it. And guess where their interests lie?

From their website:

the BPA represents, promotes and influences the best interests of the parking and traffic management sectors

Those figures have no basis in law whatsoever and are pretty meaningless. I would guess they've been formulated purely in business terms as they strike a 'balance' between making a tidy little profit whilst keeping the charge low enough to deter most people from going through through the hassle of court.

bluelagoon wrote: »

If the parking charge isn’t paid within 14 days then the company we use to manage the car park has to take action and incur costs to recover the money. This is why it increases and it is enforceable.

In post #39 you said the charge is £60 in the first 14 days but "newly increased" to £130 (plus the court fee) if it goes to court. If they could prove their actual costs of typing out the court claim and posting a Letter Before Action were £70, then jolly good luck to them, but personally I'm 99.99% sure the judge would laugh at that.

bluelagoon wrote: »

The increase is not a penalty, they just offer an early payment discount as an incentive (and this has been accepted in Court).

It's not an "early payment" discount, though! It's a discount for waiving your civil right to put your defence before a court! They can flower it up with words like "discount" or "incentive" however they want, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's coercion.

Again, it comes back to the fact that their actual losses/costs do not suddenly increase by £70 on the 14th day; it's just a threat to encourage payment.

bluelagoon_3

taxiphil wrote: »

CCTV? OK, so you've got a clear image of a man getting out of a car and walking off. You don't recognise him and neither does anyone else in your organisation. What are you going to do with the images to find out the person's identity? Put up Wanted posters on lamp posts?

With regard to an NPO disclosure order, firstly it would cost the claimant thousands of pounds in non-recoverable court costs just to attempt to find out the driver's identity. Why would they throw away thousands of pounds to potentially recover £100 or so?

Secondly, an NPO is only granted by a judge when the wrongdoing is considered fairly serious and the stakes are high (e.g. damages for libel). I very, very much doubt a car park charge would fall into that category. Not even the police have ever used NPOs for speeding offences when the registered keeper uses the well-known loophole of not remembering who was driving.

An NPO may be an effective threat in some cases, but to action one would be a nonsense.



Again, this would require a very expensive application for a disclosure order and still wouldn't prove a single thing. Anyone can legally drive someone else's vehicle without being a named driver if they've got fully comp insurance on their own vehicle. So you'd have narrowed down the number of possible drivers to about 20 million people.



We could spend many pages arguing about contract law as there are many shades of grey when it all hinges upon a sign. But it would be a brave lawyer who argued that offer, consideration and acceptance had happened on the basis of a sign which the defendant may argue they never even spotted. Again, it would not be economically viable to employ a lawyer to even argue the intricacies of contract law when the maximum gain to the claimant is so small.



The BPA is just a commercial industry body - there's nothing official about it. And guess where their interests lie?

From their website:

Those figures have no basis in law whatsoever and are pretty meaningless. I would guess they've been formulated purely in business terms as they strike a 'balance' between making a tidy little profit whilst keeping the charge low enough to deter most people from going through through the hassle of court.

In post #39 you said the charge is £60 in the first 14 days but "newly increased" to £130 (plus the court fee) if it goes to court. If they could prove their actual costs of typing out the court claim and posting a Letter Before Action were £70, then jolly good luck to them, but personally I'm 99.99% sure the judge would laugh at that.



It's not an "early payment" discount, though! It's a discount for waiving your civil right to put your defence before a court! They can flower it up with words like "discount" or "incentive" however they want, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's coercion.

Again, it comes back to the fact that their actual losses/costs do not suddenly increase by £70 on the 14th day; it's just a threat to encourage payment.

You're right, we could argue all day about it, however, in the real world in real courtrooms the contracts are accepted as valid, CCTV footage is accepted as proof and the Courts accept the fees charged are reasonable.

Remember we're talking about a £60 parking charge here not a murder case - it's all based on the balance of probabilities in the County Court.

Rather than writing about your theories on the internet perhaps you should set up a business defending all the 'unenforceable' parking charges you write about that have been successfully enforced hundreds of times in the Courts.

By the way, if you're in any doubt, have a look into the publicly available documents for these cases:

HARROGATE COUNTY COURT (No. 7QZ73627)
COVENTRY COUNTY COURT (No. 7QZ80996)
BIRMINGHAM COUNTY COURT (No. 6QZ93881)

All three ended up paying close to £200 in the end. I can find more examples for you but I doubt it would change your mind.

Happy reading.

peter_the_piper

As these three were touted about a lot at the end of last year I am sure we would all be grateful to take you up on your offer of more examples. I, and others, look forward to seeing them.

looby75

bluelagoon wrote: »

CCTV is rather good at proving who the driver was and if that’s not available then a Norwich Pharmacal Order will do the job (rarely used but is an option and compels the Registered Keeper to reveal the driver under oath). Also things like insurance certificates in force on date of the ticket being issued would reveal who the drivers of the vehicle are.

I admit I know nothing about parking fines but even I had to LOL at this bit.

Take for eg my sister and the last parking fine she received. Now there was no doubt what so ever that she was not the person driving the car at the time as she was in hospital recovering from 30+ hour labor and an emergency c-section. Both her partner and their next door neighbor were insured to drive her car, and because of the unexpectedly long labor my poor sister had to go through both SIL and their neighbor had been driving her car on the day that the ticket was issued. Neither can remember exactly who was using the car at the time stated, mainly because SIL was exhausted and neighbor was too busy rushing around helping out to take much notice of the time. As it was they disputed the fine anyway, yes the car had been in asdas car park 3 times that day, but never for more than 30mins at a time and in a different parking space each time. So they wrote to the parking co explaining, got all the usual threats back and decided they had more important things to worry about (ie their new baby) and almost a year later nothing more.

My point is though, even if they were "compelled" to say who was driving they wouldn't have been able to, because they genuinely can't remember.

taxiphil

bluelagoon wrote: »

Rather than writing about your theories on the internet perhaps you should set up a business defending all the 'unenforceable' parking charges you write about that have been successfully enforced hundreds of times in the Courts.

I think we can safely assume you're losing the argument when you resort to sarcasm and vague sweeping statements which have already been put to bed earlier on in the thread.

bluelagoon wrote: »

By the way, if you're in any doubt, have a look into the publicly available documents for these cases:

HARROGATE COUNTY COURT (No. 7QZ73627)
COVENTRY COUNTY COURT (No. 7QZ80996)
BIRMINGHAM COUNTY COURT (No. 6QZ93881)

Happy reading.

There aren't any publicly available documents for those cases.

Those case numbers were posted by someone on Consumer Action Group who claims to run a private parking company. When challenged to post the particulars and the transcripts he chickened out, making those case numbers meaningless.

I have no idea what kind of defence or arguments were used in those cases. If you are privy to the transcripts, then share them on this thread and I'd love to discuss them with you.

Happy reading indeed.