Help please APCOA ticket

fairycake

Really quite upset as I have had a letter from the above company. This morning re parking from august 1st 2018!
I have checked and we were parked in a station car park on said day,
I know that we were parked in a disabled space with blue badge displayed.
I am not sure what to do .
There are 2 pics , one showing the car entering the car park and one leaving. How do they then know that we did or did not display the badge. Also why have they left this for 5 months before contacting us?
The other thing that puzzles me is that my name on the letter has been shortened. Ie the formal Christian name on my driving licence is different and they would hav got their information from DVLA.
Can someone please advise.
Many thanks.

Umkomaas

The other thing that puzzles me is that my name on the letter has been shortened. Ie the formal Christian name on my driving licence is different and they would hav got their information from DVLA.

They will absolutely have acquired your details from the DVLA, but not from your driving licence. It will have come from your vehicle's V5C (logbook) - do you have that, or is it a Motability vehicle perhaps?

The fact that the ticket is now 5 months old is helpful to you as railway parking is covered by bylaws and there are only 6 months for the train operating company (TOC) to be able to launch a criminal case against you. One further month will see this danger out of the way, so you could open a bit of ping-pong dialogue via second class post with APCOA to ride out that 6 months.

You might find the above a bit confusing, so you will need to read up on it because it is complicated, too much to type it all out for you, but over months and months of these cases, it has been typed out - all you need to do is read some of the recent past APCOA railway threads and get to understand the advice. Use these keywords 'APCOA Railway' in your forum search.

HOW TO USE THE FORUM SEARCH FUNCTION:

Hit your 'Back' button to get back to the forum thread list. On the bar just above the threads you'll see the 'Search' function. Click on the 'Advanced Search' button and on the following page place your keyword(s) in the 'Search By Keyword(s)' and make sure the 'Show Results As' button (at the foot of the window) is changed from 'Threads' to 'Posts'.

The bottom line for you is that APCOA are totally benign and are unlikely to take any action to force any money from you. They do have 6 years for a civil claim (different to a criminal claim by the TOC) so can't give guarantees, but it's more complicated for APCOA to do this than for a standard car park ticket. They have never processed a court case against anyone so far.

Redx

if you had searched the forum you would have found this thread with advice in it

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5945697/apcoa-railway-pcn-advice-please

yours is no different, so the advice is the same, as Umkomaas says above too

and the NEWBIES FAQ sticky thread is the first place to look for everyone, especially newbies, third thread down from the top of this forum

even though a BB was displayed, it was probably a pay and display car park , so it depends what the infingement actually was on the day

the 6 months time out is paramount here and the 5 month delay helps your case

The_Deep

It is the will of Parliament that these scammers be put out of business.

Hopefully that will take place in the near future. The Bill has passed through the HOC without hitch, and goes to the Lords soon. In the meantime involve your MP, the poor dears are buckling under the weight of complaints about these scammers. Read this one which I wrote earlier

This is an entirely unregulated industry which is scamming the public with inflated claims for minor breaches of alleged contracts for alleged parking offences, aided and abetted by a handful of low-rent solicitors. Is has been suggested by an MP that some of these companies may have connections to organised crime.

Parking Eye, CPM, Smart, (especially Smart}, and others have already been named and shamed in the House of Commons as have Gladstones Solicitors, and BW Legal, (these two law firms take hundreds of these cases to court each week), hospital car parks and residential complex tickets have been especially mentioned. They lose most of them, and have been reported to the regulatory authority by an M.P. for unprofessional conduct

The problem has become so widespread that MPs have agreed to enact a Bill to regulate these scammers.

Sir Greg Knight's Private Members Bill to curb the excesses, and perhaps close down, some of these companies passed its Third Reading in late November, and, with a fair wind, will become Law next year.

All three readings are available to watch on the internet, (some 6-7 hours), and published in Hansard. MPs have an extremely low opinion of the industry. Many are complaining that they are becoming overwhelmed by complaints from members of the public. Add to their burden, complain in the most robust terms about the scammers.