Bw legal county court letter

Fineme1

Ok I've re read again, they have included a paragraph 'core terms and conditions'

The terms and conditions referred to above are as follows:

Please enter the FULL and correct vehicle registration into the payment machine when paying the tariff

£80 PCN may be issued to call vehicles which fail to purchase a valid ticket, voucher or permit


Therefore, the fact that they have highlighted this particular statement must mean that this is what was at fault, which explains why they are tiptoeing around it!!

Redx

I suggest you post a redacted defence submission below so people can see the info so far, seeing as you didn't post it earlier

Also read the abuse of process paragraphs by coupon mad posted in the thread by beamerguy and add them to the WS because b w legal will have added spurious costs to the claim

Fineme1

Here it is, not great I'm sure, the more reading I do the more this all sounds less like Dutch..


1. The Defendant denies that the Claimant is entitled to relief in the sum claimed, or at all.

2. It is denied that any contravention or breach of clearly signed/lined terms occurred, and it is denied that the driver was properly informed about any parking charge, either by signage or by a ‘Charge Notice’.

3. The Particulars of Claim does not state whether they believe the Defendant was the registered keeper and/or the driver of the vehicle. As registered keeper the defendant has access to more than one vehicle and there are other named drivers on each vehicle kept by the defendant. The defendant has no recollection of this alleged event. These assertions indicate that the Claimant has failed to identify a Cause of Action. As such, the Claim fails to comply with Civil Procedure Rule 16.4, or with Civil Practice Direction 16, paras. 7.3 to 7.5. Further, the particulars of the claim do not meet the requirements of Practice Direction 16 7.5 as there is nothing which specifies how the terms were breached.

4. Due to the sparseness of the particulars, it is unclear as to what legal basis the claim is brought, whether for breach of contract, contractual liability, or trespass. However, it is
 denied that the Defendant, or any driver of the vehicle, entered into any normal contractual agreement with the Claimant on an equal footing, whether express, implied, or by conduct.

5. At best, parking without authorisation could be a matter for
 the landowner to pursue, in the event that damages were caused by a trespass. A parking charge cannot be dressed up by a non-landowner parking firm, as a fee, or a sum in damages owed to that firm for positively inviting and allowing a car to trespass.
 Not only is this a nonsense, but the Supreme Court decision in ParkingEye Ltd v Beavis [2015] UKSC 67, confirmed that ParkingEye could not have pursued a sum in damages or for trespass.

5 County Court transcripts supporting the Defendant's position will be adduced, and in all respects, the Beavis case is distinguished.

6. The Claimant is put to strict proof that it has sufficient
 proprietary interest in the land, or that it has the necessary authorisation from the landowner to issue charge notices and NTKs, and to pursue payment by means of litigation.

7. It is averred that the landowner contract, if there is one that
 was in existence at the material time, is likely to define and
 provide that the Claimant can issue these unusual ‘Charge Notices’ to cars - following the procedure set out in paragraph 8 of the POFA - or alternatively, postal PCNs where there was no opportunity to serve a CN (e.g. in non-manned ANPR camera car parks, and as set out in paragraph 9 of the POFA). The Claimant is put to strict proof of its authority to issue these vague charges.

8. The POFA, at Section 4(5) states that the maximum sum that may be recovered from the keeper is the charge stated on the Notice to Keeper, in this case £100. The claim includes an additional £60, for which no calculation or explanation is given, and which appears to be an attempt at double recovery.

9. In summary, it is the Defendant's position that the claim discloses no cause of action, is without merit, and has no real prospect of success. Accordingly, the Court is invited to strike out the claim of its own initiative, using its case management powers pursuant to CPR 3.4.
I believe that the facts stated in this response are true

Fineme1

Can the judge award costs against BW Legal on the day if their claim is found to be, err, really !!!!?

KeithP

Fineme1 wrote: »

Can the judge award costs against BW Legal on the day if their claim is found to be, err, really !!!!?

That's not quite how it works.

Costs are strictly limited in the small claims court.

However, if you can convince the court that the Claimant has acted unreasonably, then you can be awarded more substantial costs - but you still have to justify your costs.
It is a very high bar to show unreasonable behaviour, but we have seen here costs of over £1000 awarded.

Have a look at the example costs schedules in the NEWBIES thread.

Fineme1

The court date is scheduled for a day when I normally don't work, but I have the option to work if I wanted to and could therefore earn £xxx (self employed)

Fineme1

Evening all, as I’ve become more informed about all of this, I realise that I could have done a lot better with my defence.

I need to hand in witness statement and bundle on Monday. Can I rewrite my defence more clearly, or expand on the points I’ve already raised? Or can I use my witness statement to discuss the issues I’ve uncovered around abuse of process, data protection, lord dunedins four tests, expanding on the Beavis case and the various ways in which it is distinguished etc

Fineme1

Ok well I attended court earlier this week and while everyone was very polite, it was a loss. The judge, a nice lady, was very understanding of the fact that the witness couldn't be present in person and that the cameras in the car park clearly showed the car going in and going out beyond the ticket time.

She excused the fact that the claim was not clearly described and said that it was difficult for the parking companies to clearly describe the claims due to the way the process was set up. She also thought that the PCN met the POFA regulations.

I made the points around beavis being inapplicable as the car park was free in the beavis case and the car park in my case was paid for and therefore subject to contract law and that the high fees being demanded were punitive but that was strongly challenged as you may expect.

I got in a tangle once with timelines and was I think generally a bit on the humble side.

The bundle had some cases in it that backed up some of the defence points but overall I thought the decision had been made before the hearing and I didn't really strongly challenge the claimant enough as I was under confident on my arguments. Perhaps I should have picked one argument and focussed on that?

Fineme1

I got the impression that the judge wasn't really keen on worrying about whether things were POFA compliant or whether the fact that requesting punitive damages were an abuse of process, although I could have been firmer about that. Are some judges less interested in arguments around the central point that on balance of probabilities the alleged offence occurred and are some judges quite happy with the size of the fines? The lawyers or whoever they were who were chatting in the waiting room before hand were talking about how some judges were good to them and were gossiping about a judge in a nearby city that had given one a hard time, so perhaps theres a lot of judge dependency!

beamerguy

Clearly a judge with a lack of information about the law and does not understand POFA2012 and the supreme court ruling.

She needs to be re-trained, goodness knows what errors she makes in general.

Which court please so we can advise others it's a dangerous one