Private Parking Companies - Its RIFE.....

Billtheboy

Now then after being unaffected by this phenomena until recently - Its seems a vast empire is sprouting up in ANY place where people have been parking and a PPC can get their hooks in - we need a e-petition setting up - has this been done yet?

In my research to understand this I have come across so many people that have paid one of these tickets some at 40 quid and some at 90 quid plus! no wonder the PPC's are, or seem to be growing and flourishing.

How can we campaign for this foolishness to end.......I am not an activist type but there are some elderly victims here who have been taken for £££ and they thought it was a parking ticket fair and square - I feel a little helpless - to respond on a larger scale

Its starting to feel like the strong praying on the week and ill informed without a doubt this cannot go on.

I am making some noises locally but its not enough...

RENEGADE_2

Billy your intentions are good - but unfortuntalely, this will never end until a "British spring" occurs which ousts the system. I don't mean those cartoons Cameron and Clegg, I mean the regime that is holding them in place - or their labour opposition during alternate periods.

As far as authorities are concerned, those crooks are registered, are in business for being hired by their clients, they make money and they pay their contributions. The government gets an astranomical sum back each year out of this caper. To pull the plug on it would be a loss, and believe me, vulnerable old ladies are the last of the concerns of the Lib-Lab-Con.

edward123

Billtheboy wrote: »

How can we campaign for this foolishness to end...

Best thing is to educate as many as your family, friends and folks you know from work or play that these false unenforceable tickets can be and should be ignored. By spreading the word far and wide it might be just possible to make the PPC's cowboy scam bussiness far far far less lucrative in the not to distant future than they are now. I believe(some one might correct me on this) 40% of these PCN's are not paid. Can that figure get higher? I think it can and it will. A lot higher. The reason being is as you state, these PPC's are now "rife." This means more and more people will get these tickets and more and more people will get angry. Such an emotion as anger spreads quickly because angry people speak about their anger.

Coupon-mad

Billtheboy wrote: »

Now then after being unaffected by this phenomena until recently - Its seems a vast empire is sprouting up in ANY place where people have been parking and a PPC can get their hooks in - we need a e-petition setting up - has this been done yet?

In my research to understand this I have come across so many people that have paid one of these tickets some at 40 quid and some at 90 quid plus! no wonder the PPC's are, or seem to be growing and flourishing.

How can we campaign for this foolishness to end.......I am not an activist type but there are some elderly victims here who have been taken for £££ and they thought it was a parking ticket fair and square - I feel a little helpless - to respond on a larger scale

Its starting to feel like the strong praying on the week and ill informed without a doubt this cannot go on.

I am making some noises locally but its not enough...

There is a lot more going on than you realise. Much of it has been like banging your head against a brick wall - especially when we wrote to Government Ministers when 'keeper liability' was smoothed through as part of the POF Act. We lobbied against this individually but the deed was done because the Govt still puts its faith in the BPA at the moment.

Best thing to do is discredit the BPA and the PPCs themselves by reporting every breach of Code of Practice to the DVLA as a complaint. That has been working and there are already a handful of PPC banned from DVLA access.

And to address the very crux of the problem by complaining to the retailers and landowners about the actions of their agents. PPCs can only exist all the time that the real businesses are letting them in, letting them leach money from their customers. So tell the businesses what's going on.

Now that we have the POPLA appeals service in E&W it's pretty easy to make a complaint to the PPC - which they will treat like an appeal - but simply COPY IN the landowner or onsite retailer every time. Don't word these emails as appeals, word them as complaints. This has worked recently in this disability discrimination case re a well-known PPC:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4244645

Can be adapted to suit most PPC fake PCNs - especially easy to report a complaint/Notice before Action to the landowner where there's a disability angle or a scam issue such as ANPR failing to spot that a car has visited twice in one day and treated it as one visit.

If you have local retailers currently using one of the banned PPCs then (whether you get a fake PCN or not) just send an anonymous letter to the Store Manager blowing the whistle on the PPC right now, whilst they are newly banned, telling them about their parking agent currently being discredited and currently banned by the DVLA for their breach of the BPA Code of Practice. The Store Managers will be blissfully ignorant of their parking agent's uselessness so it's up to us to tell the retailers. Just look for car parks using Excel, Combined Parking Solutions, MET, VP Parking/AS-Securi-T, and ANPR PC Ltd (not to be confused with other firms of similar names).

Ask the Store Managers (in writing) if that's the sort of agent they want tarnishing their reputation and still dealing with & threatening their customers in their car park. And more to the point, when the car park gets busy over Christmas their agent is going to be as useful as a chocolate teapot - harassing real customers with fake PCNs but with no way to identify any registered keepers.

Parking Management? NO, it never was. A scam? YES. Suggest they Google their parking firm's name and they'll be horrified...

Suggest maybe it's time that parking management is viewed as a job best kept in-house and ask them to test the system (or make some simple enquiries of the BPA or DVLA) if they don't believe that their useless 'parking agent' is currently banned.

Obviously these firms are trying to keep it quiet from their clients. So it's up to us to ID their car parks and blow the whistle on them locally!

Kite2010

There is very few private parking companies which first priority is parking management, most is raising revenues.

I saw someone from UKPC doing the rounds at a retail shopping centre car-park today, making sure people don't spend more than 3 hours in the massive free car-park.

HO87

Kite2010 wrote: »

There is very few private parking companies which first priority is parking management, most is raising revenues.

I saw someone from UKPC doing the rounds at a retail shopping centre car-park today, making sure people don't spend more than 3 hours in the massive free car-park.

Thank you Kite. Absolutely correct. The use, by PPC's, of the word "management" is as great a misnomer as one could wish to see. Whilst they may manage their "farming" activities within car parks that is the beginning and end of it. How on earth can anyone misunderstand the real intentions of these companies when they propose to "manage" car parks by means of two ANPR cameras?

Supermarkets and retail parks need to understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch (which is exactly what these PPC's have been offering). There may well be no direct cost to the supermarket/retail park but the entirely selfish interests of PPC's has succeed in alienating custom and there is most certainly a cost attached to that. I for one have not used Tesco's because of their introduction of a PPC some years ago. I told the manager there that I would not be returning and never have - despite the fact that they did away with the PPC about a year ago. I have not used ASDA for the same reason and their tie-up with TCP. Morrisons have not, to date, taken the PPC shilling and they will receive my custom for so long as they continue to do so. I seriously doubt that I am the only person to have done this.

taffy056

This will never change until people start taking action against the parking companies, management agencies and retailers directly, unless they start getting court claims in numbers it won't change. I encourage everyone who are capable of to issue a claim against these if the invoices are not cancelled. I don't see why a letter before action cannot be sent beforehand particularly if its a breach of the equalities act.

Fed up of hearing of retailers trying to get out of their responsibilities by saying its not us but them. These scammers are their agents of course they are responsible. People are basically being penalised by tesco et al , they make money out of it as they proudly boast

Kite2010

HO87 wrote: »

Thank you Kite. Absolutely correct. The use, by PPC's, of the word "management" is as great a misnomer as one could wish to see. Whilst they may manage their "farming" activities within car parks that is the beginning and end of it. How on earth can anyone misunderstand the real intentions of these companies when they propose to "manage" car parks by means of two ANPR cameras?

Supermarkets and retail parks need to understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch (which is exactly what these PPC's have been offering). There may well be no direct cost to the supermarket/retail park but the entirely selfish interests of PPC's has succeed in alienating custom and there is most certainly a cost attached to that. I for one have not used Tesco's because of their introduction of a PPC some years ago. I told the manager there that I would not be returning and never have - despite the fact that they did away with the PPC about a year ago. I have not used ASDA for the same reason and their tie-up with TCP. Morrisons have not, to date, taken the PPC shilling and they will receive my custom for so long as they continue to do so. I seriously doubt that I am the only person to have done this.

Morrisons in Basingstoke used to have Euro 'mismanaging' their carpark but got rid a few years back (now they have a gate which closes 1 hour after the shop closes)

Some use Parking "invoiced a bus" eye.

Billtheboy

Thank you for the comprehensive replies on this - I see I am very much behind on just what is going on behind the scenes here......I for one feeel I need to do much more and I will be you can be sure of that!

Thank you