Premier Park - Formal Demand

Baxt

Hi All,

Many thanks for all of your replies! They have been very helpful. I had emailed BPA's said contact and have been in communication with them. This is the reply I have recieved although it seems fairly generic...Do I continue to ignore? What sort of things should I expect to come from Premier Park?

Dear Mr Baxter



Approved Operator Scheme BPA Ref: 03XXX-XXXXX



Many thanks for your e-mail received concerning the parking incident you experienced with Premier Park Ltd.



The Approved Operator Scheme and its Code of Practice was developed by the BPA to bring a degree of regulation to an industry without primary legislation. Regrettably as we are not a regulatory authority, we are not empowered to become involved in individual disputes between you and the car park operator and have no power to overturn an operator’s decision. Therefore, any action regarding your individual circumstances are out of our control and should be directed directly to the operator. Although we sympathise with your predicament we have no power to get an operator to cancel or refund any parking enforcement charges.



I have contacted the operator concerned to seek to determine whether they are non-compliant of our Code, as this operator is a member of the BPA.



If a member is found to be non-compliant of the Code, they would be subject to our Sanctions Scheme, where Operators who are non-compliant the Code can expect to receive a number of penalty points depending on the severity of the offence. As with driving offences, once an operator’s ‘licence’ has reached twelve points in any given 12-month period, then they are likely to be faced with suspension or expulsion. The Code of practice can be reviewed on our website;



Many thanks for bringing this matter to my attention and I will be in contact on conclusion of the investigation.



Yours sincerely





AOS Investigations Team


Many Thanks for any help you can provide!

Coupon-mad

What you will be wanting then is the BPA to get them to cancel, or send you a fresh POPLA code, or send you a copy of the previous rejection letter which you can check for the encrypted date in the POPLA code (if there was one!).

Baxt

Hi All,

I have finally received a reply from the BPA after asking for another POPLA code. Their reply has not been very helpful at all, I almost feel a little silenced by the reply. Please find below the email;

---

Dear Mr Baxter

Approved Operator Scheme BPA Ref: 03885-G0L8R1

Thank you for your e-mail received concerning the parking incident and related correspondence with Premier Park Ltd that you have sent to us. I can confirm that this organisation is a member of the BPA Approved Operator Scheme and as such is expected to adhere to our Code of Practice which you can review on our website –

If a member is found to be not compliant with the Code, they would be subject to our Sanctions Scheme where Operators can expect to receive a number of penalty points depending on the severity of the offence. As with driving offences, once an operator’s ‘licence’ has reached twelve points in any given 12-month period, then they are likely to be faced with suspension or expulsion.

This investigation has been concluded and I wanted to inform you of our findings.

Premier Park have responded to my request for information regarding your complaint.

The parking operator has confirmed that the parking charge notice was issued due to you parking in a no parking area. They have confirmed that there was signage giving the terms and conditions of the car park.

The operator confirms that they received your appeal on the 3 December and they responded on the 13th rejecting your appeal and enclosing POPLA details and the verification code required. I have attached a copy of the letter for your perusal.

On the 23 January you called the operator stating the rejection letter had not been received by yourself and in view of this they offered as a gesture of goodwill a payment of £80 if received by 5pm that day. They state that this offer was rejected by you

Having looked at the Code in relation to this issue, I have to inform you that there is no material breach of the Code in our opinion. It is within the boundaries of our Code for an operator to send out a Notice to Owner and reminders, which both ask for the driver details and outline what they will do if payment is not received; the question of whether the letters sent out by Premier Park Ltd constitute harassment is not for this organisation to pass judgement on and would be better asked in relation to Consumer Credit Legislation – as such we are unable to take any direct action on your behalf.

Notwithstanding the fact that we can’t offer you any direct assistance in this matter, I trust that this letter offers you sufficient background to help you decide on your next course of action. Although we sympathise with your predicament we have no power to get an operator to cancel or refund any parking enforcement charges.

Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and endeavouring to assist us in our efforts to drive up standards in the parking industry.

Yours sincerely

Approved Operator Scheme Team

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I am now really unsure of where to go with this as they seem reluctant to supply me with a POPLA code and do not offer any further solution.

Any ideas/advice would be much appreciated.

Many Thanks!

Coupon-mad

So go to the NEWBIES thread and the first thing I would do is look at post #3 in the sticky and check that 'POPLA code' against the ParkingCowboys code checker of course! Are they telling the truth - you will soon know the date it was generated and another PPC called UKPC pulled the wool over the BPA's eyes in a similar way the other month so don't assume this lot wouldn't!

http://parking-prankster.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ukpc-and-time-travelling-popla-code.html

Baxt

Hi,

Many thanks for your reply. Unfortunately their dates add up however this was still no help to me and I had never even seen the letter. Their reply is dated on the 13th of December and the first I am seeing of this is on the 27/02/2014 through BPA.

Premier park outright denied my appeal saying that I was parked in a no parking area and that there is plenty of signage in view and sight.

I am worried now that I will have to pay this fine which I cannot afford and have not had any chance of appeal with BPA being of no real help.

I would like to say everyone on this forum so far has been of great help, which I am very thankful for! Any more is much appreciated.

Coupon-mad

1. It is not a fine.

2. What do you think people used to do before POPLA existed? They (we) ignored the whole scam and the World did not end. I have ignored four myself!

3. Premier Park are not very litigious and you will get debt collector letters now. Big deal! Letters! No CCJ, no effect on credit rating. Junk mail (but keep it all).

4. Debt collector stage is covered in post #4 of the sticky thread for NEWBIES and loads of people find themselves ignoring these still, for various reasons.

5. In the unlikely event of actual court papers come back, as we help defend the odd case, too! Can't recall a PP one at all (ever) but very defendable.

HairyMan

Hi everyone,

I just thought I would post because I am currently having the exact same problem with Premier Park.

I received a parking charge notice in mid November and sent a letter of dispute immediately using information from this site.

I did not hear anything else from them until 22/01/14. On that day I received a letter of formal demand, and a letter refuting my dispute, marked as a copy, dated 13/12/13.

The letter did contain a POPLA code, but as in Baxt's case I was denied the chance to use it as I did not receive the letter until after it had expired. (In fact, after looking on the POPLA code checker and the post marks on the envelopes, the letter was sent well after the code expired).

I am now in correspondence with Steve at the BPA, hoping to at least get the chance to appeal through POPLA.

I do find it odd that two letters dated the same day were both 'misdelivered' by royal mail......

I also find it odd that they felt the need to send me a 'copy' of the letter, when they have not issued copies of any other correspondence......

Coupon-mad

Chew2 wrote: »

I am now in correspondence with Steve at the BPA, hoping to at least get the chance to appeal through POPLA.

I do find it odd that two letters dated the same day were both 'misdelivered' by royal mail......

I also find it odd that they felt the need to send me a 'copy' of the letter, when they have not issued copies of any other correspondence......

I TOTALLY AGREE.

I think you and this poster should pm each other and complain TOGETHER to Steve Clark that this is too fishy to gloss over. State clearly (both of you, together) that you suspect PP 'ALLEGEDLY', MAY have printed out letters showing unused POPLA codes from other appellants rejected on the same day*. Very difficult to prove & impossible for you, unless the BPA go in and demand to do a spot check of their POPLA code records matched against appellants, for that day. OR unless at the POPLA end, the codes actually show a surname when generated (I have no idea if the surname gets put in that early)?

It would be interesting for you to compare POPLA codes and see the last 3 digits - are they the same or within a digit of each other?!


* Just to explain, let's say they reject 100 appeals a day and half of of those POPLA codes are (I am guessing) on average, never used by the daft punters who either pay or don't geddit about POPLA. So any PPC has a bottomless pit of pretend POPLA codes from any date to add to a pretend letter (allegedly) if the BPA sniff around.

The_Deep

I would have thought that the non-delivery of a letter is the sender's problem and it is up to them to take the matter up with RM as the recipient has no contract with RM.

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

FWIW the POPLA code is company/date/sequence so it is fairly trivial to generate out of date codes by hand without the need for any clever jiggery-pokery.

There was already the case where one company was sending out deliberately broken codes with a letter in the numeric sequence.

Any example of deliberate deceit should be a complaint to OFT as POFA was a concession to the scammers on the understanding that they'd implement proper processes for dealing with complaints. Not that OFT are not interested in individual complaints so you need to get people to complain repeatedly about a systemic problem across multiple companies to get the lumbering giant to recognise that its wise words have been taken in vain.