Why our job on the forums is made twice as hard (facebook!!)

4consumerrights

https://www.facebook.com/groups/dontpayyourprivateparkingticket/

If anyone is on FB and fancies joining that group (or is on it)
Its run by Tony Taylor who used to be a UKPC Parking ticket Warden. All they want to do is push the dont do anything advice. They get confronted with Parking Eyes latest court claim figures and dont like it.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/parkingeye_claims_filed_nov_2013#incoming-551114

Paul Slack Some of the people working for or with these parking scam companies are signing up to push the rubbish about not ignoring these scumbags. I promise you, if you totally ignore everything they send, they give up. Its hard to not respond sometimes but dont. These are not fines. They are parking "charges" and can never be described as a fine. You have no obligation to pay or even respond.

IPC1963

Made me smile I take it you've been removed. Just added this reply before I read your post here:

" What they do is take the fear away from people who haven't experienced the parking scam before. They do know what they are doing and offer good free advice on facebook pages like this and also dedicated motoring forums. Unfortunately its a shame people give advice on pages like this that actually don't know what they are talking about. Ignoring the tickets might be fine for some operators but when you are dealing with the likes of Parking Eye and some of the other big boys its very bad advice they do go to court and unfortunately our legal system is a lottery and some of the judges view parking management as a valid industry. Far better to nip things in the bud with a proper appeal through one of the industry appeal processes based on legal facts if everyone who received a ticket appealed properly the industry would crumble overnight but unfortunately a lot of real research and time is required to do this, this is where parking appeals come in and its a shame that people are viewing them as fighting for the wrong side. I have no ties to parking appeals but I have seen evidence of the success they are having and I do fully understand the process involved in getting these tickets squashed. I suggest people suggesting ignoring or saying everyone should handle the process themselves take some time reading through posts on Pepippo, CAG and MSE and you will see not everyone is capable of handling the process themselves and the parking companies do win in court."

I almost commented the other day when he was spouting on about KPIs. Unfortunately KPIs are a fact of life in any industry, I'm in sales and have KPI's my daughter works at Sainsburys and they have KPIs i.e scans per minute the fact he worked for a parking company and had KPIs doesn't surprise me whether we approve of the industry or not they are running a business and nobody employs somebody to sit on their !!!! and lets be honest all the employees of these companies do is write tickets so it stands to reason they will have KPIs on tickets issued.

I've joined a few of these pages on facebook but unfortunately this one does seem one of the most dangerous.

4consumerrights

Its dangerous and people treat him like some sort of Demi-God just because he used to issue parking tickets and released a few emails.

They just wont accept that times have changed and that ignore is old hat.

Nodding_Donkey

LMAO when you go to that page there is a Facebook 'suggested' link to a FOTL group. I think that says it all.

IPC1963

My comment has now Been deleted from his page I'm starting to think the guy has another agenda.

bazster

Campaigning for everyone to ignore is a perfectly logical and sustainable position. If everyone ignored the PPC "industry" would be dead in days.

Cornucopia

The cult of misinformation. One of the downsides of the Internet.

We have the same thing with Licence Fee issues - a rogue group on FB who give out poor and incomplete information based on a poor understanding of the law.

Cornucopia

bazster wrote: »

Campaigning for everyone to ignore is a perfectly logical and sustainable position. If everyone ignored the PPC "industry" would be dead in days.

Which is fine, but is not achievable at the moment, and since it isn't achievable, the broader, more comprehensive advice is preferable.

In fact, POPLA appeal is good advice because if everyone appealed to POPLA, the system would grind to a halt, too.

bazster

Cornucopia wrote: »

Which is fine, but is not achievable at the moment, and since it isn't achievable, the broader, more comprehensive advice is preferable.

Well it's not going to happen if people don't campaign for it!

Cornucopia

bazster wrote: »

Well it's not going to happen if people don't campaign for it!

There's an art to this campaigning lark. With a practical legal dimension like this, the ideal campaign strategy is beneficial for individuals and for the wider group (and in an ideal world for society, too).

If you need, say, 80% of people receiving PPC invoices to follow a strategy for it to be effective AND it's poor advice for individuals, it's not a great strategy overall. Not least because some of those individuals may come out worse for the advice, and never go on to become part of the 80%.

We have an identical issue with the Licence Fee (and indeed, it's one of the issues that the FB group are keen on). It's possible to ban TVL from your premises using a Common Law device called WOIRA (Withdrawal of Implied Right of Access). It has some potential disadvantages, but if everyone did it, the present TVL approach would be history.

There are now over 10,000 WOIRAs in place and this is the level where there is critical mass, and the upside of being in a huge group outweighs the potential downsides to the individual.

bazster

IIRC it is believed that something like 60% of PPC fake fines are ignored anyway so it's not as if your 80% (or whatever the critical mass might be) is starting from nothing.

The number of individuals who might come out worse for the "advice" is, I would suggest, statistically insignificant. Granted it's not much fun for them, but it's an irrelevance for the wider campaign.

You are also overlooking that the advice people here have decreed is "correct" in some apparently-absolute sense, as though it were handed down on tablets of stone, is actually counter-productive when it comes to putting a stop to the entire racket. PoPLA exists so that Patrick Troy can tell politicians what a splendid job the BPA Ltd. is doing and can we have our fake fines put on a statutory basis please pretty please? Every PoPLA appeal strengthens him in that position, and a successful PoPLA appeal even more so.