There's an election coming.

ColliesCarer

The_Deep wrote: »

If someone parks on your land, of course you have just cause to find out who they are. Whether you then send them a polite note asking them to stop, a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter from your solicitor, or a cheeky speculative invoice is up to you, the DVLA have fulfilled their obligation.

But if someone parks on my neighbours land, I have no right to find out who they are and whilst there might be nothing to stop me trying to charge them an extortionate amount of money for doing so, I certainly have no right to pretend I have the legal standing to pursue them through the courts when they don't pay my cheeky invoice.

The_Deep

Indeed, but you are talking about your neighbour's land, not your own, or land which you manage on behalf of a landlord, so, what is your point?

ColliesCarer

My point is - it's analogous to what the PPCs (plural) are doing because they have not been given the appropriate legal authority by the landowner - therefore they do not have reasonable cause.

p.s. if you don't like my use of hyphens as punctuation feel free to correct

The_Deep

My point is - it's analogous to what the PPCs (plural) are doing because they have not been given the appropriate legal authority by the landowner ...

But they have authority to manage car parks, to charge for parking and presumably to contact the DVLA for drivers' details. What they may not have is permission to take transgressors to court. They do not need legal authority to issue invoices, anyone can do that.

HO87

The_Deep wrote: »

They do not need legal authority to issue invoices, anyone can do that.

Correct. Anyone can issue an invoice for any reason but that is not what is being debated. It is the pursuit of that invoice that is at issue and the truth of the situation is that the PPC case crumbles like a dry meringue when examined to any extent. Either they have actually incurred no loss themselves (their whole business model has been constructed to detect so-called infringements and pursue the fall-out) or their principal hasn't either. After all, what loss can there be in a free car park, for example?

The results at POPLA, and at an increasing number of cases from the county court, amply demonstrate that there is no basis for such invoices. These cases are not being lost because of a procedural error or a missing signature but as a result of a fundamental problem with the PPC model.

Despite the fact that a majority of PPC's purportedly base their charges on a genuine pre-estimate of loss many have been demonstrably unable to support that at POPLA or at court. If they cannot support that claim there is no legal basis for their invoice and that does not change from case to case. It therefore follows that any application they make for DVLA data cannot be based on "reasonable cause" as any reasonable cause they had evaporated at the point their GPEOL demonstration failed. In essence, no GPEOL - No reasonable cause.

ColliesCarer

Ably and aptly put H

The_Deep

Well, you can huff and puff all you like, but the fact remains that until you can convince DVLA and the ICO that these disclosures are illegal, you are urinating windwardly.

In my experience, now that clamping has been banned, few people are aware of the predatory practices of PPCs. Until a judge says enough is enough and come down hard on one of them very little will change.

OK, some people are being conned, but from the number of parking tickets which are being "dislodged by the wind" it seems that the PPCs are not the only ones doing the conning.

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

I'll nitpick. There can be a genuine loss at a free car park. I'll give my example, the club car park where at peak times parking is limited and it is reasonable to suggest that they will lose custom.

That being said, we would then expect a gpeol calculation to be based on club capacity, value of membership and some evidence of loss or limitation of membership. Given that a single membership may be worth £500 per year, then you can probably construct an argument to give a reasonably significant value, if you intuitionistic arguments of perception and reputation.

Similarly, a retailer who suffers from people using their car park to go elsewhere could probably claim that an inappropriately parked car blocking the car park when full loses them £X per hour. The perception of a car park having sufficient capacity is important to a retailer attracting customers so I could argue that it Spencer need the car park to be full for there to be a financial impact - retailers often consider 80% to be functionally full - the perception will be that getting a space is a hassle with other cars manoeuvring.

What is notable is that the GEOPL calculations, and indeed the charges claimed are not based on such concepts. A real GEOPL sign must surely have a range of charges for different events - blocking access different to parking so another space cannot be used is different to overstating by 15 minutes is different to wandering off all day.

This, of course would require effort and intelligence to sort out - two commodities that the parking scammers are notably short of.

Hot_Bring

In theory I agree with you and the club example is probably the closest anyone could realistically get to calculating an accurate GPEOL.

With retailers, given most the car parks are shared, it would be nigh on impossible to calculate unless they hire an army of data collectors to work out an average spend IN THEIR OWN STORE per car parked. Even then how do they split the loss if someone uses say three stores ? Equally they would have to differentiate based on time of day and day of the week.

In reality retailers won't ( or can't ) do this and so instead go for the failed PPC model whom provide a GPEOL that is accurate as saying planet earth is 6 billion miles from the sun give or take 200 billion miles.

trisontana

But by setting a time limit for customer parking then a customer might leave the store early and not spend as much money in that store then they had originally intended. So it works both ways.