Parking Eye, Sankt Augustin Retail Park, Grantham

g0wfv

I have had confirmation from South Kesteven District Council that they have taken action against ParkingEye as a result of my FOI request as follows ...

Dear Mr XXXX

Thank you for your email.

We have written to the company responsible for the display of the advertisement around the car park asking them to remove them or to apply for consent for their display. They have been given until the 05th October 2015 to respond.

I must inform you that the case is a low priority as the signs do not cause a road safety issue and their impact on amenity is negligible.

If you require any further information, please contact me.

Kind regards

XXXX
Planning Enforcement Officer
South Kesteven District Council

Low priority or not, the ball is now firmly in ParkingEye's court!

That's a bit of pain inflicted, I wonder how much more PE want to endure?

As an aside, SYPA have informed me that C&W have requested the background to the parking charge from PE and someone will be in contact by the end of the week.

ampersand

Good work g0wfv. :-)
Targeted persistence pays.

g0wfv

UPDATE:

Nothing heard from SYPA since they got back to me saying they'd requested C&W, as their management agency, look into this matter (a month ago!) - I have chased, but no reply to emails (shocking service!) I shall go back to square one and send to their "generic" email address rather than the avenue of communications I had opened up in a last ditch effort!

Anyhoo, an evidence pack has now been received by (new) POPLA from PE, however PE have stated they will send the evidence independantly to me. There is no way of seeing the evidence submitted to POPLA on their site (I gather there wasn't with old POPLA anyway!)

This raises a few (maybe rhetorical) questions ...

Q1. How can POPLA guarantee that the evidence they are in receipt of is the same as PE send to me separately? (Can any evidence I base a rebuttal on actually be what I should be rebutting?)

Q2. How does this effect the timeframe (7 days from today's date) in which I have to "comment" on PE's evidence? Their postal version may arrive days from now (or more likely after the 7 days), leaving me very little time to think about things before putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard!) - Do PE have form for submitting postal evidence to the motorist late?

Q3. Is 2000 characters really enough for a rebuttal?

Q4. Has anyone any pearls of wisdom yet on the new POPLA system? Are there any accepted avenues of communication with POPLA via which to submit a comprehensive rebuttal (perhaps via info@popla.co.uk?) Has anybody done so? Are they receptive to phone calls to highlight late submission of postal evidence (or lack of) from the PPC?

Into the unknown .....

Guys_Dad

You have an ace up your sleeve. "The landowner, Buckminster Estate, sub-lets to another company, South Yorkshire Pensions Authority (who I assume engaged C&W to manage the retail outlets and PE to 'manage' the car park)"

Not only will PE have to show that they have a valid contract with SYPA, but you will demand that the contract between SYPA and Buckminster is produced so that you can trace PE's authority right back to the actual landowner.

Make sure that you demand that PE produce the full paper trail back to the actual landowner. It may be that SYPA do not have authority to engage a PPC or that there are limitations on their authority. You need to spell that out to POPLA.

g0wfv

Not only are C&W the management agency of SYPA, they are in turn the tenant of the Buckminster Estate! Could be interesting unravelling that little bundle of paperwork!

I'm just in the process of getting my head around who to chase and who has the power to do what!

EDIT: Yeah I just realised I'm repeating my earlier post here - head frazzled trying to compose a letter to all three companies!

Coupon-mad

2000 characters is not enough - POPLA will learn - so a few of us have instead emailed a PDF rebuttal to info@popla then taken note of the time of the email and gone to the 'comments' box and written a few bullet points and referred to the email attachment, asking POPLA to consider it part of the comments.

Not sure what POPLA will make of it and I have no decisions back yet but so far the admin team at POPLA have been quite on the ball and communicative about a couple of issues I had - and they let me submit a POPLA appeal where the code was from June (that's another story but it shows they are flexible).

g0wfv

Guys_Dad wrote: »

You have an ace up your sleeve. "The landowner, Buckminster Estate, sub-lets to another company, South Yorkshire Pensions Authority (who I assume engaged C&W to manage the retail outlets and PE to 'manage' the car park)"

Not only will PE have to show that they have a valid contract with SYPA, but you will demand that the contract between SYPA and Buckminster is produced so that you can trace PE's authority right back to the actual landowner.

Make sure that you demand that PE produce the full paper trail back to the actual landowner. It may be that SYPA do not have authority to engage a PPC or that there are limitations on their authority. You need to spell that out to POPLA.

OK, how would I go about this one? Can I demand that PE produce all the contracts to which it is reasonable to assume they don't have access (not that I want to be reasonable!) I guess it's for them to prove the authority from the landowner and if that means the production of 3 or 4 contracts, then so be it ....

SYPA, as a public authority, can obviously be FOI'd to (attempt to) gain their contracts with both Buckminster Estate and C&W.

PE will no doubt produce a redacted copy of their contract with whoever is principal, so that's the chain complete isn't it?

PE <-> {whoever is principal}

C&W <-> SYPA <-> Buckminster Estate

Not that I can do much with this info in the 7 days before POPLA marches forward with their adjudication, but still handy to keep in the back pocket should the POPLA appeal fail!

g0wfv

OK, so the following is now winging its way to all three companies involved in the ownership or management of the land ...

FAO:
L (Cushman & Wakefield)
W (South Yorkshire Pension Authority)
C (Buckminster Estate)

All,

Forgive the scatter-gun approach to this email.

It has been over a month since your individual correspondences with myself and my partner.

L, you informed me on 14 September our complaint had been passed to your Regional Facilities Manager for her attention.

W, you informed me on 21 September that C&W had requested the background of this from ParkingEye.

We are yet to receive a reply from either of you. I can only assume that ParkingEye have not replied to C&W yet? We have today received notification from POPLA that ParkingEye have submitted evidence in response to our appeal which was submitted well after details were requested from them by C&W. Perhaps some chasing is needed?

C, my partner wrote to you at the beginning of September to which you replied that you are not responsible for the management of the site. You state in your letter of 15 September that SYPA are your tenant, therefore I assume Buckminster Estate is still the landowner(?), therefore I have copied you in on this email.

You may all find it interesting to note that in response to a Freedom of Information request to South Kesteven District Council, it was determined that ParkingEye had erected signage illegally on the land which you own, lease or manage as it is not compliant with the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007. SKDC have since "... written to the company responsible for the display of the advertisement around the car park asking them to remove them or to apply for consent for their display ..." Whether SKDC refer to ParkingEye or one of your companies as the recipient of the letter I do not know, suffice it to say ParkingEye are not complying with statutory legislation when operating on your land by erecting signs without the proper consents. This is wholly unacceptable.

You are all in some way responsible for ParkingEye's actions on your land. I respectfully request you all again look into this matter and get this erroneous charge cancelled forthwith.

We can but apply a little pressure ....

Guys_Dad

When PE submit their evidence they should refer to who their client is as long as you have had No Contract as a valid appeal point and referred to the BP COP which states that the contract should confer authority.

But the client needs to be in a position to offer a contract and if they are not the landowner they may not so you are within your rights to see that they do and may raise this after seeing the PPC evidence. Obviously it would have been better to raise this point before submitting your POPLA appeal but as you didn't have this to hand then make a major point now.

hoohoo

I don't know what you sent to popla but the main point is that no offence occurred because the vehicle visited twice. Any evidence whatsoever confirming this should be enough to win. In theory it is too late to submit new evidence but I would email it in anyway. Consider a witness statement from both drivers, witness statement from anyone who saw you and or vehicle elsewhere. A detailed statement of what you did between visits. Email or phone records. Some phones track your location. Does yours?

You could also google news for ParkingEye to send in a selection of reports from newspapers showing this is common.

Lastly search the pranksters blog for Owens and send the letter from mr Owens as evidence that this is a known occurrence. You could also follow his lead and send a similar complaint to the DVLA and the ico.