Parking fine in work car park

maddie2750

Got a parking fine in my work car park - should I pay?

It's a Town and Country Parking PCN - can they track me down through my car reg to chase me to pay it?

Coupon-mad

maddie2750 wrote: »

Got a parking fine in my work car park - should I pay?

It's a Town and Country Parking PCN - can they track me down through my car reg to chase me to pay it?

Meh! Of course you don't pay it!! It's not a FINE either.

Yes they can send you letters, so what?! Phishing emailers send you emails and what do you do with them?

There are soooo many current threads are about these scumbag private parking companies, you only have a read a few!

See my signature for where to click (works with any forum, always look for the breadcrumb trail, usually tiny blue writing at the top of a forum page). Click on the right hand end of the run of >links and hey presto you see the forum the ancient thread comes from.

Then you can read the permanent info 'sticky' thread, currently third from the top 'PPC letters & threats' - get a preview of the letters to ignore - and watch the Watchdog clip on there as well. You'll be fine and can just play snap with each expected letter.

Anyone who pays or 'appeals' a private 'ticket' after coming here is mad or just has more money than sense. It's just a scam.

bondy_lad

dont worry its a fake ticket, so just ignore everything, they will obtain your details for £2-50 from dvla, so what, its a scam, ignore,nothing can/will be done to you as a result of this fake fine, there you go, aint the job just a good one.

Trebor16

if you have permission to park there then you owe them nothing.

muckybutt

maddie2750 wrote: »

Got a parking fine in my work car park - should I pay?

It's a Town and Country Parking PCN - can they track me down through my car reg to chase me to pay it?

Town and Cu*try ! been there done them, ignored all their bull and their debt collector bull afterwards. Never been to court never paid them a penny.

What did I do ? Ignored them simple as that, it'll cost them £2.50 to get your details from the DVLA plus postage etc so let em carry on, for every one person that does pay them and that doesnt know the scam, theres probably 20 or more that wont pay em a penny because they do know the scam.

Stephen_Leak

Never take seriously any company who's initials are an antiseptic.

Firstly, the legal stuff.

Only councils, the police, train operators and Transport for London can impose legally enforceable fines or penalties. A private parking company (PPC) or an individual can't. Even PPCs call their tickets “Parking Charge Notices”, not “Penalty Charge Notices”. In law, they’re called “speculative invoices”.

Any warning signs are usually so badly positioned and worded, that they won’t have created a fair and legally binding deemed contract between the car park owner and a driver entering the car park in the first place. See The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1997 and Excel Parking Services vs. Cutts, Stockport, 2011. This case actually involved The Peel Centre.

All the car park owner (CPO) can claim from a driver in damages for any breach of contract is what they’ve lost as a result. If this is a free car park or they paid, this is £0.00. Demanding more has been judged to be unreasonable and therefore an unfair contract penalty under the terms of The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1997, which is not legally enforceable. See Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co. Ltd. vs. New Garage & Motor Co. Ltd., House of Lords, 1914 and countless cases since.

There are also now two recent court cases, VCS Parking Control vs. Ronald Ibbotson, S!!!!horpe, 2012 and VCS Parking Control vs. HM Revenue & Customs, Upper Tax Tribunal, 2012. In both cases, the judges found that only the car park owner can take drivers to court. The Upper Tax Tribunal is a court of record, equivalent to the High Court, and therefore its judgement sets a legal precedent.

What should I do now?

We don’t condone not paying or overstaying in a pay car park. If you do owe the CPO anything, then you ought to write to them, offering this in “full and final settlement”.

In any event, you ought to advise the CPO that they are "jointly and severally liable" for the actions of their agents, the PPC, and that any further actions by them would be regarded as harassment under the terms of The Protection from Harassment Act 1997. That ought to make the CPO call off the PPC and, hopefully, realise the potential cost of doing business with them.

Don’t appeal to the PPC. They always reject them. What’s in it for them to let anyone off? Actually, there is something in it for them: information. They need to know the identity of the driver of the vehicle involved at the time, because that’s who the alleged contract was with. If they don’t know who the driver was, they have to make do with chasing the registered keeper.

With windscreen notices, an appeal letter will tell them your name and address, and maybe who was driving at the time. If they don’t know who the driver was, they have to buy the details of registered keeper from the DVLA. With postal notices, they’ve done this already. But they still need to know the identity of the driver.

They sometimes say that they have the right to ask for this information. This doesn’t mean that you have to tell them.

However, even if you’ve written and told them who the driver was, it doesn’t make their actions any less unlawful. It just means that instead of harassing the registered keeper, they can now harass the driver.

What will they do to me?

The PPC, then a debt collector and then a solicitor will send you a series of letters. The debt collector and solicitor are usually also the PPC, but using different headed paper. These letters will threaten you with every kind of financial and legal unpleasantness imaginable, to intimidate you into paying.

But, they can't actually do anything, for the same reason that a Nigerian e-mail scammer couldn't sue anyone who didn’t pay them.

What should I do then?

Continue to ignore everything you get from the PPC and their aliases. It does seem counter-intuitive to deal with something by ignoring it. Eventually, they will run out of empty threats, and stop throwing good money after bad.

Actually, TCP may be as morally bankrupt as every other PPC, but at least they realise than enough victims just pay up, that they don't need their unlawful activities exposed to unwanted legal scrutiny.

prowla

I once got clamped in a work car park; my boss told me to park there so I did.

The clamper HR person rather smugly said that I would have to pay the release fee; I told her that my boss authorised me to park there and that I was claiming overtime at an hourly rate higher than their fee for the time I was waiting, so the longer they took the more profit I was making.

It was released.

(It was also agreed that I would not park there anymore, and not long after my place in the normal work car park queue came up.)