Help with PE - 2nd LBCCC

newholme30

Thanks Daisy

It is frustrating given the gusto in which they issue the claims yet they do not have the decency to confirm the charge is cancelled. I have reapproached Briant but he has chosen to not respond to any further contact which is disappointing. Certainly I will try again as you suggest.

I had actually drafted the below which I was going to forward to [Text removed by MSE Forum Team]. Really am very very angry about this whole affair, particularly given the circumstances of my friend on the other thread.

Thoughts welcome.

FOR THE PERSONAL ATTENTION OF THE HEAD OF DEPARTMENT

Reference – XXXXXX
VRM – XXXXXX

Dear Sir/Madam

Pre-action Conduct of impending county court proceedings

I am writing to seek your assistance concerning your legal department's conduct of this matter. Essentially the crux of my complaint is that I am being bombarded with irrelevant and non-compliant template letters, whilst my own letters go unread and unanswered. I am frankly shocked and appalled that a legal department (which I am presuming is supervised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority) would treat a member of the public in such a shoddy manner.

For your information a summary of the situation to date is set out below:

On XXXXX you sent me a 'Letter Before County Court Claim'.

On XXXXXXX I replied, informing you that the Letter Before County Court Claim did not comply with the Practice Direction on Pre-action Conduct. In that letter I explained exactly what information you are required to provide in your Letter Before County Court Claim (although it does seem somewhat ironic that I - an unrepresented potential defendant with no legal training should be forced to advise a LEGAL DEPARTMENT how to conduct a court case!).

On XXXXXXX you replied with a generic template letter which completely failed to address the issues that I had raised in my earlier letter.

On XXXXXXX I replied to that letter repeating the requests for information contained in my earlier letter, to enable me to prepare my formal Response, as required under the Practice Direction. To date I have received no reply to that letter.

To my utter astonishment, I then received a further Letter Before County Court Claim from you dated XXXXX, which - despite the fact that I have already pointed out the shortcomings in your standard Letter Before County Court Claim remains defective and non-compliant with the Practice Direction.
I also communicated my concern over this parking charge with your employer, Mr XXXXX of XXXXX, who after checking their records confirmed to me by email on XXXXXX that he had contacted you to cancel this charge.
Despite this communication from the Landholder and my subsequent emails to you on XXXXX and XXXXX, I am further amazed to have still not received written confirmation from you that the charge is cancelled!
I should now be grateful if you would do me the courtesy of providing me with written confirmation that this charge has been cancelled and also provide a full and detailed response to my complaint.
I have taken the time to set out my concerns clearly so that there can be no misunderstanding about how seriously I view your staff's (mis)conduct.

If you fail to do so, I will be forced to the conclusion that your department's conduct of this matter is designed to deliberately obstruct the court process to the advantage of your client. Such conduct would amount to a clear breach of the SRA Principles as set out in version 7 of the Handbook published on 1st April this year, and as such I would be left with no alternative but to refer my concerns to the SRA for investigation.

Please Note: I require your full and detailed reply to this letter within 14 days, failing which I shall forward my file of correspondence to the SRA for investigation. No further notice will be given.

cc. The Landholder

zzzLazyDaisy

Hi, that looks like an adaptation of one of mine

Just a few comments:

1 the Head of Department is [Text removed by MSE Forum Team]. She is the supervising solicitor, so in view of all the hassle I would address the letter to her personally and head it up FORMAL COMPLAINT

2 the landholder is the Principal (not the employer)

3 I am concerned that the issue of them failing to act on the Principal's instruction to cancel the charge is going to get lost in this detailed letter, so I would also send the short letter separately to the [STRIKE]chimps[/STRIKE] normal address

4 when cc'ing the landholder I would make it clear in the covering letter that you are enclosing a copy to them as PE acts as agent on its behalf, that as Principal it is jointly and severally liable for its agent's continued harassment of you, that PE continue to threaten court proceeding against you, and that since they seem to be either unable or unwilling to exercise any control or restraint over their agent's actions, you will be filing a counter claim for harassment in the forthcoming legal proceedings and you will be making an application to the court to join in xxx as a defendant to those proceedings.

hth

Daisy

newholme30

I do love your work Daisy; a certain way with words that should grab their attention!

All suggestions greatly recieved and certainly make sense; I will finalise these later as work beckons but thanks again.

newholme30

Done and double done on this one.

Wow; the forum is very busy tonight with LBCCCs?!?!?

newholme30

SUCCESS - Letter this morning from PE:

We refer to Parking Charge incurred at Fistral Beach car park.

We can confirm this Chare has now been cancelled and there is no outstanding payment due on this account.

To help others in a similar predicament, the Landholder - Britannic Industries / Fistral Beach Ltd (and especially John Briant) was very helpful and understanding as we are very very regular genuine customers of the beach and could prove use of the facilities. Interestingly, of the PE system he noted:

I made some enquiries and managed to get to the bottom of this. As you may or not be aware the system works by taking an image of your registration plate and then matching up that image to the information you enter into the machine when you purchase a ticket.

Unfortunately you entered a digit too many,thereby creating a number that the system could not recognise.Also whoever put the money in only paid £6.20p,not £7.20p which is the daily rate.So you purchased less time than was needed!
with all this in mind I contacted Parking Eye on your behalf and they have cancelled the PCN.


A 'sorry to have bothered you' or 'apologies for taking so long to deal with issue' or 'we should have considered your original appeal properly due to the technical limitations of our system' would have been nice from PE but anyway, just pleased to have resolved this issue. One wonders how many others have been hit with a massive charge for a minor error of registration entry and ultimately amounting to a £1 loss! it will be interesting to recieve [Text removed by MSE Forum Team] response of the letter sent last week.

Finally I would like to thank all on here that have helped me deal with this problem. The advice and support has been excellent.

zzzLazyDaisy

Wonderful! Thanks for coming back to tell us.

On a more serious point - PE's legal department is a 'solicitor's office' for the purpose of complying with law society rules and codes of conduct. [Text removed by MSE Forum Team] is the supervising solicitor, which means that she must monitor all letters in and out of the legal department that are handled by non-legally qualified staff (as far as I know she is the only solicitor, so that means she is responsible for all correspondence emanating from that office).

So do consider making a formal complaint to the SRA about the way this matter has been handled

http://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor.page#how-report-sra

In my view, the way in which they conduct the LBCCC process from the misleading and non-compliant LBCCC to their conduct in not reading or responding to letters from defendants but simply sending out template letters that do not address the issues and concerns raised by the defendant, to their repeated and persistent refusal to follow the procedure laid down by the practice direction on pre-action conduct, are ALL breaches of the SRA Principles (see updated SRA Handbook version 8, published on 1st Oct this year).

I urge anyone who has had dealings with this legal department to make a formal complaint to the SRA. One complaint probably won't get them investigated (there are always crazies out there ready to complain about something) but a steady stream of complaints into their unlawful and unprofessional practices WILL eventually result in an investigation by SRA.

Thats how GPB got closed down recently (another firm of solicitors up to their neck in shady PPC dealings).

Daisy

newholme30

zzzLazyDaisy wrote: »

So do consider making a formal complaint to the SRA about the way this matter has been handled

http://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/report-solicitor.page#how-report-sra

Make no mistake Daisy, I am livid about this whole affair and am looking forward to a full response from [Text removed by MSE Forum Team] to the letter I posted her personally on Friday. If she is silly enough to allow her department to respond using legally inaccurate information, ignore my previous letters and not properly address any of the points I have raised, rest assured the SRA will be hearing about it.

Coupon-mad

Very well done, newholme30! I had already added your success to this sticky thread:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4766249

...to encourage others to complain to Nick or Jon Briant about this scam at Fistral beach, as well as responding and challenging PE's fake PCNs every step of the way. There are people having to defend court claims at the moment over similar experiences in this car park (didn't you have a friend with a court claim over it or am I muddling you up with another poster?).

newholme30

Thanks Coupon - couldn't have done it without the help on here - I do like the 'notorious' bit on your thread btw (the link needs an update as it links back on itself though).

As I said we (friends and family) are very regular visitors to this wonderful location which is being utterly ruined by PE. I have passed on all the information to my friend who will be taking it up directly with Britannic / Fistral.

Coupon-mad

Sorted out the link, thanks!