ParkingEye now County Court letters

camg

Hi everybody.

I received the standard private parking fine by Parking Eye from overstaying in Morrisons Camden.

I read advice on forums just telling me to ignore it, so I have done so until now. The letters are looking a bit more official, and now the sum has risen to £200.

I have not appealed at all, and worry it is too late to now.

The latest letter to come through is from: County court Business Centre and is a 'Judgement for Claimaint' although they mispelt Judgement as 'Judgment' on the letter?

Anywho, can somebody please let me know what I should do from here, carry on ignoring or appeal in some format?

I appreciate any advice as this is getting so stressful.

Thanks in advance.

bazster

No forum I know of would've advised you to ignore a County Court claim, which it seems you have done. It's all over now, you failed to file a defence so ParkingEye has obtained a judgment (yes, judgment) against you.

You could ignore the judgment if you don't care about your credit rating, but it will go on your credit record. Theoretically ParkingEye could try to enforce it with bailiffs, but I've never heard of them doing this.

If you never received the court papers in the first place you could apply to have the judgment set aside, but this will cost you, and in any case from what you say I get the impression you did receive the court papers and simply ignored them, so I think you'll have your work cut out persuading a judge to set aside.

If you don't want this to affect your credit record your best bet might be to simply pay up, and pronto.

Redx

its been 18 months since MSE forums told people to IGNORE these invoices and never to ignore any LBCCC or MCOL

that ignoring attitude has led to this, but bazster has summed it up in a nutshell, its a slam dunk for PE and an expensive lesson learned by yourself

Coupon-mad

I have not appealed at all, and worry it is too late to now.

You are here too late. You are right to worry and too late to do much except sue Morrisons (I would actually do that if I were in your shoes as this was their agent and they won't want a small claim about it). But you'd need a lot of preparation and reading and research & most people wouldn't want to try.

Another option would be to apply to the Court to 'set aside' the judgment (but it costs you £155 unless you are on high level benefits). And you would have to convince the courts you have a very good prospects of successfully defending the claim if it gets set aside for a hearing instead. You could then try to reclaim the £155 as well as defend the claim.

BUT - to achieve that you would have to research the issues using forum advice which was here all along - so far you have completely missed the fact that we DO NOT ADVISE IGNORING THESE PCNS AND HAVE NOT SINCE EARLY 2013. Sorry but I don't hold out much hope of you managing to get it set aside if you couldn't find page one of advice at the time of the PCN.

I hope you prove me wrong, I really do, but the level of research needed when you got the PCN was so minimal compared to your options now - and you may not even win if you achieved a hearing, because PE send a legal representative and some defendants are tied up in knots. Once you Googled and found an OLD thread from 2011 or 2012 you should have thought - 'hang on, that's a pretty old thread!'... then one click was all you needed to get to page one and learn NOT to ignore it. Blame Google and blame the fact you aren't forum savvy and didn't realise that you are only ever one click away from page one of any forum where a thread sits. What you did was like reading an old newspaper instead of a current one.

Now you would have to read up on set aside, court defences, learn about the PE v Beavis case - basically read, process and deal with a great deal more information than you would have needed to read when you got that little PCN (easily appealed, far too late now).

You have lost in Court 'by default' as you must have ignored Court papers. Even five years ago on old threads we NEVER told anyone to ignore Court papers! You fell foul of relying on Google results and not looking at the date of what you read, like this person:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/66347529#Comment_66347529

I am so sad that you didn't read our current advice at the time of the PCN. Sorry.