BPA's prescribed charge

hoohoo

trisontana wrote: »

Here you are :-

[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Parking Eye would have calculated the sum as a genuine pre-estimate of their losses as they incur significant costs in managing the parking location to ensure compliance to the stated terms and conditions and to follow up on any breaches of these identified, including but not restricted to the following examples:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
· Employment of parking attendants to patrol the parking location to include supervisory staff and vehicles, training, uniforms, etc.
· Ad-hoc mobile patrols of the parking location
· Supply & installation ANPR equipment, monitoring and maintenance
· Erection and maintenance of the site signage
· Parking payment and enforcement equipment to include the pay & display machines, hand held devices, cameras, etc.
· Membership and other fees requiring payment in order to manage the business effectively including those paid to BPA, DVLA and ICO
· General costs including stationery, postage etc
· Employment of office based administrative staff along with systems and software
· Contribution to Head Office overheads
[FONT=&quot]Please note that this sum will be clearly laid out on the signage at the parking location which offers the parking contract to the motorist, and by remaining at the site, Parking Eye will contend that the motorist has accepted all of the prevailing terms and conditions of that contract including the charges for breach of contract, and furthermore accepts that they are reasonable. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]We do not feel it is right to seek to change the terms of an established contract after it has been breached. If the motorist was unhappy with the contract terms, then the motorist should not have remained at the location. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Parking Eye’s breakdown of costs does not breach our code of practice and therefore we are unable to investigate the matter further. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Kind regards,[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]AOS Investigations Team [/FONT]

Even if we supposed we lived in some fantasy land where these charges were allowable, this still does not make the charge a GPEOL because these charges have to add up to the ticket price of £100. They don't. According to ParkingEye they add up to £53.

This leave a profit margin of £47, or, conveniently,47%.

Not all ParkingEye's charges are £100; some are less which will decrease their profit margin. Overall their published accounts show they make more than 30% profit on these charges, and their takeover press release forecasts over 30% profit for 2014.

Steve Clarke's understanding of mathematics may not be as good as he thought.

It is clear the BPA are either not competent to judge on the issue of GPEOL or are actively protecting ParkingEye.

HO87

+1

hoohoo wrote: »

It is clear the BPA are either not competent to judge on the issue of GPEOL or are actively protecting ParkingEye.

Indeed. What's more, having gone to the OFT seeking an acceptable definition of GPEOL - and been knocked back - they tried the Trading Standards Institute.

We have yet to see what the TSI have produced but one wonders whether or not that might form part of the putative update to the AOS CoP update due this month. In the past, when updates were favourable to a company/companies, coattails were well and truly trailed and months in advance. On this topic there has been a remarkable silence.

Based on what we have seen to date, one really does have to wonder how on earth the BPA Ltd expect to be able to get a reputable organisation to stand up a definition of GPEOL that turns established law on its head?

teabelly

Sounds like the BPA have the same head in sand idiots as PE as they continually lose in court and at POPLA on the same things but don't have the brain to come up with an alternative.

The BPA are probably realising that once everyone realises the GPEOL defence works pretty much every time PPCs won't have a business. There is no money in policing free car parks. Only a fool would have based their business plan on revenue from fines which is what I assume PE have actually done which is why they're so aggressive and obstinate in the face of reason.

Stroma

The bpa will do nothing to parking eye as they give them the most money, if they sanctioned them then they would be cutting their own throats. Basically parking eye are the bpa, they do everything in their power to aid them in this scam.

You can tell this by the bpa changing the CoP to suit them, they do not investigate complaints against them at all, and they are not the only ones protecting parking eye, the dvla do this as well, they received loads of complaints about them at the time ppcs were suspended for access.

I still have the complaints sent to the dvla about parking eye, roxburghe & excel were suspended for far less than them, I know because it was my complaints that got them suspended. And for clarity this is what they both got suspended for

Excel - suspended because of keeper liability on their signage in Parc Tawe north in Swansea
Roxburghe - suspended because of saying registered keepers were liable for charges, and not drivers on their websites

The complaints about parking eye are far worse, where are the sanctions for them??

nigelbb

trisontana wrote: »

Even Steve Clark admits that at least half of the parking charge notices should never have been issued in the first place. So what are the BPA doing about it? More "education" of the PPCs?

POPLA uphold 60%+ of appeals but 100% of appeals where the motorist points out that the charge is not a genuine pre-estimate of loss.

nigelbb

Aaron_Aadvark wrote: »

The BPA Ltd admitted this to the Parliamentary Select Committee.

http://www.britishparking.co.uk/write/Documents/AOS/BPA_CodeofPractice_2012_v2_March2013.pdf

"19.5 If the parking charge that the driver is being asked to pay is for a breach of contract or act of trespass, this charge must be based on the genuine pre-estimate of loss that you suffer. We would not expect this amount to be more than £100. If the charge is more than this, operators must be able to justify the amount in advance."

From Patrick Troy's recent appearance before the Select Committee:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmpublic/crimeandsecurity/100128/pm/100128s03.htm

Column 104, Q215

Patrick Troy: "Two things that consumers most when they use car parks, whether local authority car parks or private. One is the size of the penalty charge and the other is the lack of signage. We tackled those two issues head on in our code of practice. You will find that the charge is more or less similar to that in the local authority sector. We try to base it, as far as possible, on that."

So the BPA Ltd would have us believe that the similarity between a Local Authority charge, which is designed to be a penalty, and a PPC charge, which is a genuine pre estimate of loss, is coincidental.

And how can the BPA Ltd "base it" (the genuine pre estimate of loss) on anything? The GPEOL is what it is (and much less than what is being charged).

Outside London the normal council penalty charge is a lot less than £100 e.g. in Norwich it's £70 or £35 depending on severity of the offence.

nigelbb

HO87 wrote: »

+1


Indeed. What's more, having gone to the OFT seeking an acceptable definition of GPEOL - and been knocked back - they tried the Trading Standards Institute.

The OFT recommendations (that the BPA Ltd ignored) makes very interesting reading. The OFT draw the analogy with the £12 that has been deemed acceptable for letters regarding a bank overdraft.

http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/freedom_of_information/FoIA-responses/2012/IAT-FOIA-135010.pdf

Here are some key conclusions from the OFT that really are the nails in the coffin for the whole PPC business model (my emphasis)

Further the OFT expressed the view that a parking charge will not automatically be recoverable, simply because it is stated to be a parking charge. It cannot be used to create a loss where none exists. It will not be recoverable if the court finds that it is being imposed as a penalty. If a parking charge is imposed for parking beyond hours permitted under a contract, in order for it to be recoverable as liquidated damages, the court will need to be satisfied of a number of matters, including that it represents a genuine pre-estimate of the loss incurred and that it meets the requirements of applicable consumer protection legislation, for example the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. The OFT also expressed the view that the court will also need to be satisfied about who the consumer was contracting with and that this is the party bringing proceedings.

Big_Bad_Dad

nigelbb wrote: »

POPLA uphold 60%+ of appeals but 100% of appeals where the motorist points out that the charge is not a genuine pre-estimate of loss.

Alas Nigel, I only wish what you said here were true. Indeed today it may be but I had a very early POPLA case which was rejected and my point was entirely based on this principle. I only labelled it a penalty and I now realise that it doesn't have to be a penalty to constitute NGPEOL. Now I am being sued by them.

Of course I was never going to pay up after the POPLA case. POPLA didn't give me a satisfactory reason why they sided with the claimant; they merely asserted that Parking Eye listed some cases where judges did not find de facto penalties to be de jure penalties (i.e. badly judged cases with partisan adjudicator ignoring existing laws), whilst I on the other hand neither denied the incident nor challenged the case findings. This is known as attacking the straw man - they never disproved my assertion that I was being wrongly penalised, such as by analysing the demand to show how it was an estimate of loss. Incidentally, signage is of complete irrelevance if damages are being claimed. A) You do not need to specify how much you push for if you are claiming losses, you simply assess the damages and provide the figure; If terms and conditions are the overriding factor then "damages" are not relevant (i.e., the sign said you agree to pay £1 million, you parked here, so you owe us). It's no good judges siding with the operator and denying £100 to be penal when no barometer exists to govern precisely what is penal other than the OFT's guidelines on claimants seeking more in compensation than the estimate of loss.

Stroma

The early decisions by popla were experimental on their and our part, we weren't sure what works and what doesn't. The genuine pre estimate of loss has been successful in all appeals that has used it since the beginning of the year. There are some cases it should not be used but in general that alone wins

nigelbb

Big_Bad_Dad wrote: »

Alas Nigel, I only wish what you said here were true. Indeed today it may be but I had a very early POPLA case which was rejected and my point was entirely based on this principle. I only labelled it a penalty and I now realise that it doesn't have to be a penalty to constitute NGPEOL. Now I am being sued by them.

It is true. Your appeal was that the charge was a penalty not that it was not a GPEOL. If you had argued that it was not a GPEOL your appeal would have been upheld. It's impossible for the PPCs to argue that a £100 charge is a GPEOL but more difficult for the appellant to prove that it is a penalty