Help with parking charge notice. Please.

ShatteredDad

Their letter isn't very well put together to be honest. Looks like it has been written by a twelve year old.

Umkomaas

You're in danger of sleepwalking into something much more complicated to extricate yourself from.

Send them the 'drop hands' letter and see how they respond. It's the best advice you have so far. No one is going to come along with a wand to magic away a £10 charge.

This thread is now 83 posts long and we seem to be getting nowhere.

ShatteredDad

Umkomaas - Please expand on 'You're in danger of sleepwalking into something much more complicated to extricate yourself from'. This is clearly what I am concerned about, hence the questions and the effort to be diligent before I make a decision on what to do.


The issue with just sending the 'drop hands letter' is that they have stated that if I am not happy with their offer of £10 then I can appeal to the IAS. So I'm concerned that they will just disregard any further correspondance and then I have deal with the fall out.


I am sorry if you feel this thread is too long and we haven't gotten anywhere. I completely disagree actually, I have learnt a lot and I've had the charge reduced to a managable amount.


I have clearly rubbed you up the wrong way by not jsut following your advice. I've apologised. But there are a lot of other members on here and I don't think it is silly to want to gather further opinions before I make my next move. But apologies if I am wasting everybodies time.

Carthesis

Umkomaas wrote: »

You're in danger of sleepwalking into something much more complicated to extricate yourself from.

Send them the 'drop hands' letter and see how they respond. It's the best advice you have so far. No one is going to come along with a wand to magic away a £10 charge.

This thread is now 83 posts long and we seem to be getting nowhere.

Agreed. You're thinking about the ins-and-outs of the letters they send far too much - like they've been written by professionals and solicitors, instead of the minimum-wage, ex-nail-technician, customer-service-reject, low-rent operatives these firms employ because to get anyone competent would eat into profit margins. Even the solicitors they use can't put together a decent letter, let alone a court case.

Your options at this point are:

1) Pay them the tenner, by cheque, with an accompanying letter stating that you are taking up their offer to pay £10 which you are deeming to be a full and final settlement, and that you don't want to hear from them again unless its a letter to you confirming the matter is settled;

2) Make the counter-offer to pay the £3.50 that you should have paid on the day so that they have incurred no loss, with the other costs being theirs to bear the brunt of, as you will bear the residual costs you have incurred. Point out to them that the court case in your original appeal demonstrates that they have no chance to prevail should they take you to court, and that them not accepting in the circumstances will only serve to demonstrate their unreasonable behaviour to the judge;

3) Make the full 'drop-hands' offer as suggested by Umkomaas, and wait to see what they say.

4) Wait for them to respond properly / write to them to encourage them to respond properly to your appeal, either accepting or rejecting your appeal, then move on through POPLA (if they're BPA) or ignoring them if they aren't;

5) Just continue to ignore them for 6 years.

In any case, keep copies of all correspondence.

You just have to pick one. Personally, if you're worried about your partner stressing out about a court case that won't happen and are inclined to pay a small amount to make it go away, I'd be pushing for Option 2.

These are now your only options.

ShatteredDad

Thanks Carthesis. I'll chew on that tonight and make a decision. I won't bother anybody again unless I get a court letter, thanks to all and everyone who has helped.

Carthesis

It's not about "bothering" people per se - you're making the same mistake a lot of people do in that you seem to think you're dealing with sensible, reasonable people here, and you aren't.

They're barely even competent to walk and breathe at the same time, so you don't need to spend hours contemplating their responses - mainly because they won't have spent that long writing them. Big blocks of pre-prepared text they'll copy and paste verbatim into a template letter, that won't make sense because they don't parse logic and common-sense in the same way as, y'know, *actual humans*.

Umkomaas

I have clearly rubbed you up the wrong way by not jsut following your advice.

It's just frustration that 10 days ago I'd taken time to offer decent advice with no subsequent response from you (not even a simple click on the 'Thanks' button to acknowledge that you'd read the advice), yet today you come back asking

Can anybody advise what they would do in this instance before I go ahead and send them their £10 scam money?

as if no workable advice had been given and with no reason why the advice I'd given in the post immediately before was being rejected or discounted.

The very few regulars that do the heavy lifting in giving advice here are under real pressure to try to satisfy the demands of hundreds upon hundreds of motorists for strategies to disentangle themselves from the parking industry's spiders' webs they find themselves in. We are sorting out dozens of new cases daily. The advice we give is sourced from hundreds of hours of personal research time into thousands of parking cases and is given freely.

Frustration occasionally comes to the surface!