Vcs letter before claim...mistake of calling VCS when receiving NTK...Help!

Suggii

apologies for my misunderstanding. thankyou for clearing that nosferatu1001.

below is my skellie, which i tried and reduce and move some points above. i hope it sounds better.
if its all good, i will print it out.

IN THE COUNTY COURT AT XXXX
CLAIM No: XXXX and XXXX
BETWEEN:
VCS LTD (Claimant)
-and-
XXXX (Defendant)
SKELETON ARGUMENT ON BEHALF OF DEFENDANT (NAME)
1.The Defendant asks the court to dismiss the claim due to the below grounds:

A Factual Basis
2.If a contract exists, which is denied, then it was impossible to complete due to a breakdown, making it difficult to leave the car park within the 10minute grace period.

3. With reference to the defendants witness statement para xx, the signage at the site is in the name of Excel Parking LTD, only one sign in the claimants CT1 tariff board mentions VCS in small print, when the remaining signs are Excel Parking.
a. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires that information given is unambiguous; with reference to the defendants witness statement paragraph xx, an average consumer is therefore expecting to form any contract with Excel and no one else. (Exhibit XX)


Lack of Contract

5. It is for the claimant to prove that a contract had been entered into.

6. In the Defence, the Claimant was put to strict proof that they have a contract from the Landowner to pursue charges and take enforcement action in court for parking charges. The claimant has not been able to provide this. They have merely produced a poor quality terms and conditions of a contract with Excel Parking. That was fixed for a period of 60 months from 15th January 2010, which had expired in 2015.

7. The Claimant’s WS referenced Thorton v Shoe Lane Parking 1971 2 QB 163. The case provides that the signage must be sufficient to create the contract. In this case it was not. In ParkingEye Ltd v Beavis [2015] UKSC 67, the sign is much clearer and found to be sufficient. Furthermore, Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking was a barrier car park where the driver would stop and take a ticket and was shown a clear sign at the barrier. The car park in this case is not.

8. The Claimant referenced Vine v Waltham Forest LBC [2002] 1 WLR 2383, 2390 as signs being ‘the only method’ of stopping unauthorised parking. Other methods of enforcement, such as ticketed barriers, are viable. Furthermore, it is argued that in this case, the signage is not ‘sufficient and adequate’ as was stated in Vine v Waltham Forest LBC.

9. The design of all signage is intentionally hard to read making the less important parts larger than they need to be and making text smaller in favour of unused space, and without sufficient illumination given the time of the events (Defendant’s witness statament paras 5 and 23). No signs clearly highlight the charge of £100 as was done in the Beavis case.

10. The signage at the entrance to the car park is impossible to read while driving due to either size and being hidden behind a gate (Defendant’s witness statement para xx) while the rest of the signage was at the far ends of the car park. Therefore, no contract could be entered into.
11. The visibility at the time is further proven from the claimants Exhibit CT2 that shows the ANPR images of the vehicle in transit, the visibility of the images is poor as it was 5pm in the evening, you can only just make out the VRN, and headlights of the car. This only proves further as it would have been difficult to see signage in poor lighting.


Procedural Basis

12. The claim made via Money Claims Online (MCOL) is broad and unspecific. It does not utilise the 1080 character limit. MCOL explicitly allows claimants to submit further particulars outside the platform.

13. The Charge Notice (Claimant’s Evidence CT2, Defendant’s Evidence SA2) clearly states the value of £100. There is no explanation in the particulars for the additional £60.

a. These sums have been held to be unrecoverable (ParkingEye v Beavis [2015] UKSC 67). It is an abuse of process for the Claimant to issue knowingly inflated claims. The Claimant should know their claim is inflated due to their case history.

14. As well as the cases highlighted in the Defendant’s Witness statement paras 15 to 17, many County Court Judges have refused all added parking firm 'costs' in County courts, such as these cases, struck out in recent months without a hearing:

15. In Claim number F0DP163T on 11/07/19, District Judge Grand sitting at the County Court at Southampton, struck out a overly inflated (over the £100 maximum Trade Body and POFA 2012 ceiling) parking firm claim without a hearing for that reason.

16. In Claim number F0DP201T on 10/06/19, District Judge Taylor echoed an earlier General Judgment or Order of DJ Grand, who on 21st February 2019 sitting at the Newport (IOW) County Court, had struck out a parking firm claim. The Order was identical in striking out all such claims without a hearing. The Judge stated: ‘IT IS ORDERED THAT The claim is struck out as an abuse of process. The claim contains a substantial charge additional to the parking charge which it is alleged the Defendant contracted to pay. This additional charge is not recoverable under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, Schedule 4 nor with reference to the judgment in ParkingEye v Beavis. It is an abuse of process from the Claimant to issue a knowingly inflated claim for an additional sum which it is not entitled to recover. This order has been made by the court of its own initiative without a hearing pursuant to CPR Rule 3.3(4) of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998...’

17.That is not an isolated judgment striking a parking claim out for repeatedly adding sums they are not entitled to recover. In the Caernarfon Court in Case number FTQZ4W28 (Vehicle Control Services Ltd v Davies) on 4th September 2019, District Judge Jones-Evans stated:

''Upon it being recorded that District Judge Jones-Evans has over a very significant period of time warned advocates [...] in many cases of this nature before this court that their claim for £60 is unenforceable in law and is an abuse of process and is nothing more than a poor attempt to go behind the decision of the Supreme Court v Beavis which inter alia decided that a figure of £160 as a global sum claimed in this case would be a penalty and not a genuine pre-estimate of loss and therefore unenforceable in law and if the practice continued he would treat all cases as a claim for £160 and therefore a penalty and unenforceable in law it is hereby declared [...] the claim is struck out and declared to be wholly without merit and an abuse of process.'' Exhibit XX

Claimants Witness Statement.

18. Claimant's witness statement is from a Paralegal, Charlotte Trayers, representing the Claimant, has been employed by the company since July 2019. As the alleged contravention took place in February 2018, none of the statements provided in her witness statement can be of her own knowledge. She is not aware of the alleged offence, the location, the signage or the facts in this case.

19. Furthermore, this is proven in the Claimants witness statement Paragraph 50 that refers to the parking overstay of 30 minutes, when the PCN notice to keeper, it mentions the duration of stay is 29minutes.

20. The Claimant’s Evidence CT1 shows a number of pictures of signage around the car park. None of these pictures are legible, as they are taken a year before the alleged contravention. The claimant is presenting a false representation of the car park at the time.
a. The sign artwork provided by the claimant in CT1, there are two sign boards that have contradictory wording to each other and questions to whether they are false evidence to what the actual sign on site may have been. The large sign with tariffs mentions in small font about the £100 fine “discounted to £60 if payment is received within 14 days of the PCN”. However, the info board 660 x 1252mm, Design 2 mentions about £100 fine “discounted to £40 if payment is received within 14 days of the notice issue date”.


21. Paragraph 36 states the Claimant is intending to rely on the ParkingEye v Beavis case. This case can be fully distinguished from my case due to the following facts;

a. There was neither contractual offer made giving a licence to park nor any promise made, or contract agreed based on any prominent signs or properly marked lines.
b. There is no comparable legitimate interest or commercial justification for charging more than the landowner could claim by way of restitutionary damages.
c. The Beavis case, which was dependent upon Mr Beavis being the driver who accepted a clear contract, formed by unusually prominent signage. Strict compliance with the BPA Code of Practice and the clear, prominent terms on brief signs was held to be paramount. None of this applies in this material case. Exhibit XX the Beavis case sign.

22.The Department for Transport "Know Your Traffic Signs" publication states that "drivers may stop to pick up or set down passengers" (defendants witness statement para 5) where waiting restrictions are in force, yet the Claimant avers that the Defendant is in breach of the advertised terms and conditions; namely stopping in a zone where stopping is prohibited - this is not the case, the claimant has not provided proof of the “No Waiting/stopping" signs that had been breached. In addition, there are no markings on the carriageway to indicate that restrictions are in force, eg. yellow or red lines.

23.There has been no "grace period" applied to allow the Defendant to read the Claimant's signage. For these reasons, the case of VCS v Ward, on appeal in the County Court before His Honour Judge Saffman, should not have a bearing in this instance. This is because with respect to VCS v Ward, HHJ Saffman accepted that the signage (being the entrance and 66 repeater signs) represented an offer of a contractual licence, which was accepted when the user drove onto the private land. In this instance, the text is too small to alert the user to the fact that they are entering private land, and is therefore, not capable of creating a legally binding contract.
24.The claimant at Paragraph 52 cites Vehicle Control Services Limited V Alfred Charles Crutchley (2017), which can be dismissed as it was a case based on “stopping on a roadway where stopping is prohibited”. There is no relevance to this case.

25. The claimant is intending to rely on Chaplair v Kumari to attempt to justify an unknown £60 “debt recovery charge”. This case is distinguished from the case above by the following facts; the Beavis case established that a parking firm cannot seek or plead a sum in 'damages'. Chaplair v Kumari is also distinguished. Far from supporting this attempt at double recovery, Chaplair was a decision about contractual fees set in lease terms, whereas parking charges are capped by the POFA/the will of Parliament at the sum on any Notice to Keeper, and not higher, and the Beavis case confirmed this by only allowing £85 and no bolt on 'damages' or imaginary debt collector costs.

26. The claimant also relies on Davies Contractors V Fareham Urban DC (1956) A.C.696. This case can be distinguished as there was no agreed contract, as the defendant was caught up in trying to fix the breakdown problem with the vehicle, rather than reading the tariff board and agreeing to a contract before the breakdown.
a. However, years of precedent regarding the legal principle of frustration, shows this case was an aberration.
b. The claimant refers in paragraph xx, that the defendant was not prevented from fulfilling his contractual obligations i.e. to make a payment. However, this would have still been impossible as going over the 10 minute grace period due to the breakdown already cannot cover the time by making a new payment; it would mean forming a new contract, which is out with the concept of frustration and outside of what the case above reveals.

27. In summary, the Claimant's particulars disclose no legal basis for the sum claimed and it is the Defendant's position that the poorly pleaded claim discloses no cause of action and no liability in law for any sum at all. The Claimant's vexatious conduct from the outset has been intimidating, misleading and indeed mendacious in terms of the added costs alleged.

28. The Court is invited to make an Order of its own initiative, dismissing this claim in its entirety and to allow such Defendant's costs as are permissible under Civil Procedure Rule 27.14 on the indemnity basis, taking judicial note of the wholly unreasonable conduct of this Claimant, not least due to the abuse of process in repeatedly attempting to claim fanciful costs which they are not entitled to recover.

I believe that the facts stated in this skeleton argument are true.

Suggii

does the below cost schedule sound more reasonable?

DEFENDANT'S SCHEDULE OF COSTS


Ordinary Costs


Loss of earnings/leave, incurred through attendance at Court xx/xx/xxx £95.00

Return mileage from home address to Court (e.g. 11 miles x £0.45) £4.95

Parking near Court £5.00

Sub-total £104.95


Further costs for Claimant's unreasonable behavior, pursuant to Civil Procedure Rule 27.14(2)(g)

Research, preparation and drafting of documents (5 hours at Litigant in Person rate of £19 per hour) £95.00

Stationery, printing, photocopying and postage: £35.00

Sub-total £130.00



£ 234.95 TOTAL COSTS CLAIMED

nosferatu1001

So it only took 5 horus to
- resaerrch defence
- write defence
- research and gather evidence for WS
- write WS?

Impressive.

Suggii

It took me longer, but I dont know what the average rate should be. Or whether I would be asking for too much.

nosferatu1001

Hence why I told you to list it out in the way I just did, again

THen write down how many hours you did for each
Roughly

The more you break it down, the better and the higher chance you have of it looking reasonable to anyone reviewing it.

Each case is going to be slightly different on this point, of course. Not every defence will take as long to write or prepare.

Suggii

Does the skellie sound ok?

Umkomaas

You've lost para 4 of the SA, renumber the rest.

You keep asking if the 'skellie' (I hate that term) is okay. I'm not sure what is and what isn't a 'good' Skeleton. It's not much more than an aide memoir for you and the Judge to work through the points you hope to have considered by the court. A bit like a shopping list, so it's a bit like asking 'is my shopping list okay'.

You keep expecting us to provide you with answers, but you seem not to respond to questions we ask of you. For example, in my penultimate post, I asked 4 questions - not a single one acknowledged, let alone answered.

To help you best, you need to be prepared to engage in the two-way process.

Coupon-mad

EXCEL PARKING SERVICES LTD (Claimant)

Thread title says VCS?

Hazza7370

I am sorry to post but I have spent almost all day trying to find my answer and I think I must consider myself stupid because I seem to be missing the point I need.
I drove into a local car park to drop off my son at work. I felt ill when I drove in so I idled in the car for a few moments till I felt better, and then left, it turns out that this was exactly 12 minutes. This was in February 2017, in July this year I got the court letters, I appealed on the basis that I had not parked, the court sent it for mediation, this happened yesterday. Excel said I owed them £185 but they would reduce it by £50 to £135, I told them I believed that I was covered by a grace period, as well as being disabled and explained I took ill. Due to the rules of mediation I had to be prepared to pay something so I offered £25, they refused and counter offered their lowest amount of £100 stating they had a strong case as per the Beavis ruling. I refused and mediation ended. The mediator advised me it will now go back to court. What can I do now, do I still have a defence

Coupon-mad

Mediation wasn't your actual hearing. It was a complete waste of time and you should never have agreed to that phone call, as it has made you think you have no case.

We tell everyone not to try Mediation, which has no place in a parking scam fight.

Your defence is the same as it ever was - it's whatever you put in as a defence. Sounds like you didn't research it here first, oh dear, and haven't read the NEWBIES thread post #2 all about what happens when in court cases.

No asking where the NEWBIES thread is, given my signature below!

And please delete your post from Suggii's thread, as this is hijacking his/her thread.