Parkingeye County court letter

alex_reuben

About 18 months ago I received a letter from ParkingEye saying i parked for too long in a car park (by about 10 minutes) and requested payment for an £85 fine. I searched on the forum at the time and the general consensus was that ParkingEye have no legal right to request me to pay the fine and that i should basically ignore them. Since them i received a letter about once every 6 months which again i checked on the forum and subsequently binned. Flash forward to today when i received a letter that purports to be from the County Court in the form of a claim form and is now asking for £160 (£85 claim + £25 court fee + £50 solicitors costs). Firstly, is this a real county court claim form and secondly should i pay or continue to ignore?

Thanks in advance.

Redx

if its an MCOL from northampton its likely to be genuine but you can check on the MCOL website

check the NEWBIES sticky thread at the top for dealing with these claims

check parking pranksters PE court guide too

also search this forum using the search box for similar threads as you arent the first and wont be the last

also, stop using the f word too, its not a fine , never was , never will be

its a speculative invoice and this MCOL is for an alleged breach of the invoice, so small claims court and they can chase these for up to 6 years under the small claims service

the original pcn probaly alleged that the driver had overstayed, but if it was after oct 2012 that the RK was responsible (this may have been you, or may have been somebody else, could have been me if I was driving your vehicle)

if it was before oct 2012 then its pre-POFA so only the driver is liable

lastly, only a fool would ignore a county court claim

bod1467

Dates are important here - was the incident before, on or after 1st October 2012?

Coupon-mad

alex_reuben wrote: »

About 18 months ago I received a letter from ParkingEye saying i parked for too long in a car park (by about 10 minutes) and requested payment for an £85 fine. I searched on the forum at the time and the general consensus was that ParkingEye have no legal right to request me to pay the fine and that i should basically ignore them. Since them i received a letter about once every 6 months which again i checked on the forum and subsequently binned. Flash forward to today when i received a letter that purports to be from the County Court in the form of a claim form and is now asking for £160 (£85 claim + £25 court fee + £50 solicitors costs). Firstly, is this a real county court claim form and secondly should i pay or continue to ignore?

About 18 months ago we started saying to all posters not to ignore these - some of us were advising testing POPLA appeals as early as November 2012 in fact. You've missed the current advice ever since then, which is shame as you must now defend this instead of simply beating them at POPLA.
You also seem to be unaware that PE started suing people well over a year ago and have filed some 10,000 claims, so yes, that's a real small claim.

Best bet is to read all the wealth of other recent PE Small claim cases on here and on pepipoo forum below, easy to spot from the thread titles. If you go back lots of pages you will find lots on both forums, MSE and pepipoo:

http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showforum=60

Click on every PE small claim/Northampton thread title and read the advice as if it was for you, read what happened in each case.

And read every link in post #5 here (only post #5 about small claims, not the rest as you missed the chance to appeal and win that way):

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4816822

You will need to acknowledge the claim and submit a defence, there's no getting around it unless you can get the onsite retailer to cancel it (rare). BUT NOT EVERY CASE GOES TO A HEARING SO DON'T THROW IN THE TOWEL AND PAY THE FULL AMOUNT OR ANYTHING DAFT LIKE THAT.

Once you've read some links & plenty of other threads from people who have been there, done that already and beaten PE or negotiated or got the charge cancelled, hopefully you will gain the confidence needed to:

1. Acknowledge the claim online saying she will 'defend in full' (not contesting jurisdiction) within 14 days of the court papers

2. Complain to The onsite retailer or facility (CEO and/or Store Manager if a Supermarket).

3. Complain to them again (Head Office if you've only complained in store).

4. Prepare a decent defence and submit that online within 28 days of the court papers.

5. Maybe get it cancelled completely or at least negotiated down to £50 to make it go away (with retailer/landowner help).

6. If not cancelled or settled for a lower amount, later on, see if the Judge will order POPLA instead or to stay the claim pending the PE Court of Appeal case (PE v Beavis), thus putting off/ possibly avoiding any hearing at all.

It's already covered in the top thread on the forum. It's a shame your research earlier didn't include reading the threads on the first page as you'd never have read a current thread to ignore it after around Spring 2013. Start your reading with post #5 of the NEWBIES sticky thread, this court claim was avoidable but now, it's not, and you certainly cannot ignore it!