Time to force a legal change.

patman99

When the Con-Dems were conned into adding S.54 of POFA, they insisted on an independant appeals service being set-up, and so it was, with POPLA coming into existance.

Move forward to 2014 and along came the IPA with it's 'kangaroo Court' appeals service & PPCs started to jump ship.

What I propose is that we all contact our MPs and encourage them (via sheer public pressure) to pass a Law making POPLA the only legal independent appeals service.

The basis of the letter/email to your MP should be on the lines of -

"Dear xxxx,
As a result of the passing in to Law of the Protection Of Freedoms Act, the private parking industry was required to set up an independant appeals service for private parking tickets.
This they did with the Parking On Private Land Appeals service.
POPLA fits the bill due to

• Fully independant form PPCs
• Requires both sides to submit evidence, but doesn't let either side see the evidence submitted by the other.
• Decisions made by named independant assessors.

Since 2014, another private parking Approved Operator Scheme, namely the Independant Parking Committee, has been in existance. This organisation operates an appeals service. However, this is not considered 'independant' as -

• It's registered Director is also a Director of the IPC.
• As part of it's appeals process, the appeals service passes-on the driver's appeal to the PPC in order to allow the PPC to base their evidence on the information submitted by the driver.
• The appeals service makes it a requirement of the registered keeper to identify the driver at the time of the parking offence.
• The appeals service uses anonymous assessors.

In light of the not-so-independant nature of the IPC's independant appeals service, I wish to ask you to put forward a bill to make POPLA the only legal independant private parking ticket appeals service.


Regards,


"


Obviously, there are folks out there who may wish to edit/amend the above in order to create a highly-polished template, so I will refrain from emailing my MP until such time as we have a killer of a communication to send.

Redx

dont wish to nitpick but with such an important letter I would have thought that running it through a spellchecker would have been a good idea ?

too many spelling mistakes, which I am prone to at times , hence it definitely needs editing , then polishing if needs be

good idea though

kidstaxi

patman99 wrote: »

When the Con-Dems were conned into adding S.54 of POFA, they insisted on an independant appeals service being set-up, and so it was, with POPLA coming into existance.



POPLA fits the bill due to

• Fully independant form PPCs
• Requires both sides to submit evidence, but doesn't let either side see the evidence submitted by the other.
• Decisions made by named independant assessors.

POPLA do let each side see the evidence, don't they?

Yes, a good idea.

HO87

Agreed. The letter needs a lot of polish but, in any event, I'm unsure that the letter's basis is entirely correct.

1. POPLA independent. Are you sure?
2. Who gets to see what?

I'd suggest that the more significant current issue is the number of PPC's who are dropping POFA and reverting to the pre-POFA approach that the RK is most likely to be the driver. I'm absolutely sure that having granted keeper liability (after considerable lobbying) and putting in place an entirely reasonable set of safeguards for it, that Parliament would be greatly impressed by whingeing PPC's who simply won't (or more precisely "can't") jump the bar. That's aside from the complete failure to demonstrate GPEOL - by the entire business sector.

The absence of any legal foundation for the current PPC business models is the real issue not the fluff and distractions that their apologists - BPA and IPC - have engineered into existance to give an air of legitimacy to an otherwise unadulterated rip-off. POPLA, the AOS (of which ever flavour) and all of the other initiatives are simply efforts at polishing a t*rd. Silk purses and pig's ears also come to mind.

Dr._Shoe

patman99 wrote: »

"Dear xxxx,
As a result of the passing in to Law of the POFA, the private parking industry was required to set up an independant appeals service for private parking tickets.
This they did with POPLA.
POPLA fits the bill due to

• Fully independant form PPCs
• Requires both sides to submit evidence, but doesn't let either side see the evidence submitted by the other.
• Decisions made by named independant assessors.

Since 2014, another private parking accreditation compnay, namely the Independant Parking Committee. This organisation operates an appeals service. However, this is not considered 'independant' as -

• It's registered Director is also a Director of the IPC.
• As part of it's appeals process, the appeals service passes-on the driver's appeal to the PPC in order to allow the PPC to base their evidence on the information submitted by the driver.
• The appeals service makes it a requirement of the registered keeper to identify the driver at the time of the parking offence.
• The appeals service uses anonymous assessors.

In light of the not-so-independant nature of the IPC's independant appeals service, I wish to ask you to put forward a bill to make POPLA the only legal independant private parking ticket appeals service.


Regards,

1. You need to say what POFA is.
2. It may be a good idea to say what POPLA is too.
3. The average MP might want a brief overview of the appeals procedure.
4. The language is a little clumsy so here's my best shot based on what the OP wrote (OK, it's more wordy but I've translated it into "politicalese"):

Dear xxxx,

As part of the Protection of Freedoms Act, (POFA 2012) keeper liability was introduced by Government on the proviso that the parking sector provided the motorist with an impartial appeals process and that the service is funded by the sector. The accreditation body is called the British Parking Agency and is the largest agency of its kind in Europe. The BPA appeals service is called the Parking On Private Land Appeals (POPLA) and delivers completely impartial judgements on a case by case basis. Parking enforcement companies cannot access DVLA data without the authority and cooperation of the accreditation body.

However, many of the less reputable parking control companies found that they were making, what they considered to be, too many judgements in favour of the motorist. For this reason since 2014, many of the parking enforcement operators moved to a new accreditation body called the Independent Parking Committee. This body hears appeals through a subsidary called the Independent Appeals Service. Studies have shown that far from being impartial, they have a vested interest in finding in favour of the operators.

One of the main reasons for the impartiality is the fact that one of its directors is also a director of Gladstones Solicitors who specialise in collecting unpaid parking penalties.

In view of the vested interests of the IPC and the persistant flauting of the provisions set out in POFA 2012 by their subsidary the IAS (namely the lack of transparency in their adjudications) I would like you, as my parliamentary representative, to propose any amendments to the POFA that would be neccesary to ensure that the BPA is the only recognised accreditation body for parking enforcement.

patman99

This is why I posted this thread. It gives everyone a chance add their input and edit the document to create a worthy and strong document.

Half_way

POPLA fits the bill due to

• Fully independant form PPCs

Thats debatable, the paymasters of POPLA are non other than the British Parking Association limited, and there are apparently other links in there as well. Is Nick Leicester still involved somehwere in the mix?

Cornucopia

Dr. Shoe's version is definitely better.

Couple of minor quibbles:

para 3: should this be lack of impartiality?

para 4: should this be "flaunting"?

I wouldn't worry too much about being overly positive about POPLA. "POPLA good, IPC bad" is a nice, simple narrative for MPs to get their heads around.

Hot_Bring

Half_way wrote: »

[/LIST]
Thats debatable, the paymasters of POPLA are non other than the British Parking Association limited, and there are apparently other links in there as well. Is Nick Leicester still involved somehwere in the mix?

Agreed and it's made me check Nominet. Strange, I'm sure popla.org.uk used to be shown as being owned by the BPA ?

Regardless, London Councils have broken their contract with Nominet :

Rule 7 in the T&Cs - "PO Box addresses (or equivalent services) are not permitted"

Hmmmm .....

Registrant:
London Councils

Trading as:
POPLA

Registrant type:
Other UK Entity (e.g. clubs, associations, many universities)

Registrant's address:
P.O. Box 70748
London
EC1P 1SN
United Kingdom

Complaint has now gone into Nominet ( be funny if they suspended the domain name :rotfl:)

BlackSpangle

I'm not even sure that primary legislation is needed in this matter. Asking for primary legislation, even amending an existing act, is time consuming and, absent compelling reasons, unlikely to get into a party manifesto.

Generally speaking, primary legislation will dictate the need (in this case) for an independent appeals service, free to the motorist. But it is unlikely to stipulate who should be running it.

It seems to me that access to keeper data is at the crux of the matter. Absent that data, PPCs will be extremely hampered in abusing motorists with egregious claims.

Perhaps, at minimum, we could get is a tightened code of practice, mandated by the DfT, stipulating what characteristics an acceptable IAS should be, namely:

1. The motorist must be able to see the evidence ranged against him/her BEFORE assessment, and have right of challenge to it.
2. The adjudicator must be named in all communications. A judgement from anonymous parties is always suspect.
3. The adjudicator is not free to assume facts not in evidence. Recently the Prankster highlighted IPC's IAS's assessor as saying that the driver was probably the keeper, because the keeper didn't name the driver. Wrongly, in fact, but the point being that there was no evidence to make this assumption in the first place, and a competent assessor should have known that.
4. There must be no presupposition that the claims of any party are valid prior to assessment. It is very clear that IPC's IAS automatically assumes that the GPEOL calculation is valid prior to adjudication, when it is clearly not.
5. All objections raised by the appellant must be considered (even if subsequently rejected). So, just because someone muffs up one point, doesn't mean their entire appeal collapses.
6. A clear process for rehearing/reassessment must be available in the event of misconduct from an assessor. This re-hearing, if held, must be free of charge to both the motorist and the operator.
7. The relationship between the ATA and its IAS must be published and validated yearly as sufficiently independent by the DVLA.
8. (This one is probably not going to fly) The DVLA shall publish the complaints raised against each operator for abuse, together with the number of complaints upheld. If an operator has above a given threshold upheld, its KADOE contract is suspended. Any operator making a request on behalf of a suspended operator will be similarly suspended.
9. If an operator changes ATA, but has failed to update its signs within a reasonably time (e.g. 30 days) then no KADOE information can be sought until its signage has been updated. The point being that a motorist might refuse to park in IPC car parks, but if seeing a BPA logo, he might choose to do so. If the signage is misleading, he could argue he never formed a valid contract because of misrepresentation of the PPC.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't care if we have 10 different IAS's, but the standard principles of justice must be displayed by all. The IPC's lapdog falls pitifully short of any acceptable standard.

I would also love some other stuff about no-shows at court, but the problem there is one of enforcement. We need a Civil Restraint Order against some PPCs, but courts are super-reluctant to issue those, even if clearly deserved.

Lastly, it does none of us any good for this to become party political. There's no reason that a Tory, Labour, Lib-Dem, UKIP person etc could not get behind such proposals, since they represent justice for the population at large. Hence, the OP's original comment using the 'Con-Dem' label doesn't help the case. People really do shut off consideration when they see (apparently) party political slogans in a communication, if it doesn't align with their existing beliefs.

Some other CoP elements like consistency of practice would also be nice, but I'm not sure how to word that.

Any ideas?

BlackSpangle

One more thing:

1. Every appeal to the selected appeals service must come with a reference to a current, available, unredacted contract between landowner and operator. The appeals service should automatically grant an appeal if there is no explicit transfer of authority to issue tickets and pursue debts in the operator's name.