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I won vs PCM at Heath Parade in court
MSTFOX
Posts: 1 Newbie
I won!!! Case dismissed.
A big thank you to all of you who have shared their knowledge and experience on this site - it is truly invaluable to people like myself who get caught up by these scams.
I was totally naive and underprepared until 2 days before I went to court which is crazy considering how much info there is about this notorious site but it is amazing how much knowledge a person can acquire in 24 hours! I read through most of the posts pertaining to heath parade and reformulated my witness statement for my own practice more than anything else to provide a basis of my defence (my original was laughable, written from a sense of burning injustice rather than any understanding of contracts etc). It was basically a cut and paste from the parking prankster, edited to make it slightly more specific to my case. here it is below:
Evidence in defence:
1) I am the registered keeper of the vehicle in question. On 18/03/2017 I was driving from Cardiff to London with my wife and my 2 daughters aged 11 and 8. My younger daughter complained of feeling unwell with severe lower abdominal pain. This is most out of character for her. My wife who is a consultant physician in Emergency Medicine turned to look at her and immediately instructed me to pull over. I pulled over at the nearest safe place to do so without obstructing traffic on this busy road which was in the lay-by where the alleged parking infraction occurred. The lay-by appears to be part of a public highway with no information close enough to be read by an approaching driver that would suggest it is private land or otherwise restricted. The car was stopped for less than 5 minutes whilst my wife examined our daughter.
2) I subsequently received a Notice to Keeper from the Claimant, alleging that a charge of £100 was due to them. I appealed to the claimant online and this was rejected. I did not further appeal to the Independent Appeals Service (IAS), the allegedly independent body appointed by the Claimant’s trade body, the Independent Parking Committee (IPC). My research revealed that the IAS, far from being independent, is a subsidiary of the IPC, which in turn is owned and run by the same two Directors who also run Gladstones Solicitors, the individuals in question being John Davies, and William Hurley. Such an incestuous relationship is incapable of providing any fair means for motorists to challenge parking charges, as well as potentially breaching the SRA Code of Conduct. As such, the Claimant does not come to this matter with clean hands.
3) The notice is a parking charge. I contest that I was merely stopped to facilitate examination of an ill child. Supporting case law would be Jopson vs Homeguard Services Limited at Oxford County Court (9GF0A9E), June 2016 in which Judge Harris stated:
The concept of parking, as opposed to stopping, is that of leaving a car for some duration of time beyond that needed for getting in or out of it, loading or unloading it, and perhaps coping with some vicissitude of short duration, such as changing a wheel in the event of a puncture. Merely to stop a vehicle cannot be to park it.
4) The IPC code of conduct states that a grace period must be allowed in order that a driver might spot signage, go up to it, read it and then decide whether to accept the terms or not. A reasonable grace period in any car park would be from 5-15 minutes from the period of stopping. This grace period was not observed and therefore the operator is in breach of the industry code of practice. Additionally no contract can be in place by conduct until a reasonable period elapses.
5) The signage is forbidding and makes no offer to the motorist. There can therefore be no contract. The Claimant’s signage with the largest font at this site states “No Customer Parking At Any Time”. A further sign with much smaller writing and higher up states “The loading bay is only for authorised vehicles actively loading & unloading when delivering to the commercial tenants of Heath parade”. It is submitted that if these notices are attempting to make a contractual offer, then as they are forbidding they do not fulfil the basic requirement of a contract, which is that each party to the contract must offer valuable consideration to the other party, on clear terms capable of acceptance. In this case neither the Claimant, nor their principal the landowner, is offering anything to motorists. The notices cannot, therefore, reasonably be construed as having created a contractual relationship between the Claimant and the Defendant.
The above point was recently tested in the County Court at High Wycombe, in the case of Parking Control Management (UK) Ltd v Bull & 2 Others (B4GF26K6, 21 April 2016), where District Judge Glen dismissed all three claims, stating in his judgment that:
“If the notice had said no more than if you park on this roadway you agree to pay a charge then it would have been implicit that PCM was saying we will allow you to park on this roadway if you pay £100 and I would agree with Mr Samuels’ first analysis that essentially the £100 was a part of the core consideration for the licence and was not a penalty for breach. The difficulty is that this notice does not say that at all. This notice is an absolute prohibition against parking at any time, for any period, on the roadway. It is impossible to construct out of this in any way, either actually or contingently or conditionally, any permission for anyone to park on the roadway. All this is essentially saying is you must not trespass on the roadway. If you do we are giving ourselves, and we are dressing it up in the form of a contract, the right to charge you a sum of money which really would be damages for trespass, assuming of course that the claimant had any interest in the land in order to proceed in trespass.”
While this is a County Court decision and therefore not binding, it is on all fours with the present case and may be considered as persuasive. A full transcript of the Approved Judgment for the above case will be provided in the event that this case proceeds to a hearing.
6) In addition, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 rules that if signage has multiple interpretation the interpretation most favourable to the consumer applies. It is clear from this the signage with the largest font should apply.
7) In the alternative, if it was held that the signage was contractually valid, it would be impossible for a motorist to have read the terms and conditions contained therein from a moving or stopped vehicle, and if the vehicle is stopped, the ‘contravention’ according to the Claimant is already committed.
The above point was recently tested in several cases regarding Hayes and Harlington station. There a similar situation arises as the vehicles were charged for briefly stopping but the signs are far away from vehicles and high up
In all cases it was ruled that no contract was entered by performance as the signage could not be read from a vehicle. No transcripts are available but as PCM UK were the claimant in all cases they will be fully aware of the cases; C3GF46K8, C3GF44K8, C3GFY8K8
8) In addition to the £100 ‘parking charge’, for which liability is denied, the Claimant’s legal representatives, Gladstones Solicitors, have artificially inflated the value of the Claim by adding costs of £50 which I submit have not actually been incurred by the Claimant, and which are artificially invented figures in an attempt to circumvent the Small Claims costs rules using double recovery. The Court is invited to report Gladstones Solicitors to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority for this deliberate attempt to mislead the Court, in contravention of their Code of Conduct.
9) I have not received any information from the claimant with regards to his contract with the landowner despite multiple requests so am unable to comment upon its legality.
I believe that the facts stated in this witness statement are true.[/I]
I was able to download the land registry entry as alluded to by zaklondon however was initially disheartened to see that Genesis housing was registered as the keeper now but a little more probing revealed that they had only purchased the land last year (for >£1.8 million!!!) and that it was owned by the different company at the time I was involved (choices for graham park limited)
As I live in Cardiff, I had requested that the court hearing be near me in Blackwood civil court. I guessed correctly that Gladstones wouldn't be bothered to sent a representative and if they did, it would probably cost them a bit of cash. They only paid the court fee at the very last minute (16.30pm on the final day), I don't know if this is one of their tactics to give people false hope that they might not proceed!?
Here's what happened on the day.
Dressed for the role, 3 piece suit, brogues, leather satchel etc (Clerk asked was I the solicitor for PCM!!). Gladstones didn't send representation which was a huge relief. I had also printed off all the relevant cases and the land registry form which proved invaluable even though I hadn't included them in any bundle with the witness statement. The court was hardly busy at all so it gave me loads of time to discuss the case in detail with the district judge. He appeared truly flabbergasted that any company could consider the signage appropriate to enter into any contract and agreed wholeheartedly with the whole forbidding signage argument (the Bull case notes were really helpful here). He also questioned the role of the attendant and considered that a more appropriate course of action for them would be to advice the driver that they were parked illegally and to move on rather than send them a PCN. He highlighted inaccuracies in their own witness statement notably that they even said that by leaving the car unattended that I entered a contract when it was obvious that I had never left the car both from all my correspondence and the photos. he also questioned their authority based on the land registry details that I had showed him.
His concluding discussion took him over 5 minutes to deliver (even though I was the only one in the courtroom which seemed really rather surreal) and any transcription would be absolute gold dust to anyone else defending themselves at Heath Parade. He even granted me £50 in costs which I used to take my family out for a slap up Chinese meal that night!
I don't know if these county court judgements all get written up for use in further cases but if so I can happily provide the court and case details if would help anyone
A big thank you to all of you who have shared their knowledge and experience on this site - it is truly invaluable to people like myself who get caught up by these scams.
I was totally naive and underprepared until 2 days before I went to court which is crazy considering how much info there is about this notorious site but it is amazing how much knowledge a person can acquire in 24 hours! I read through most of the posts pertaining to heath parade and reformulated my witness statement for my own practice more than anything else to provide a basis of my defence (my original was laughable, written from a sense of burning injustice rather than any understanding of contracts etc). It was basically a cut and paste from the parking prankster, edited to make it slightly more specific to my case. here it is below:
Evidence in defence:
1) I am the registered keeper of the vehicle in question. On 18/03/2017 I was driving from Cardiff to London with my wife and my 2 daughters aged 11 and 8. My younger daughter complained of feeling unwell with severe lower abdominal pain. This is most out of character for her. My wife who is a consultant physician in Emergency Medicine turned to look at her and immediately instructed me to pull over. I pulled over at the nearest safe place to do so without obstructing traffic on this busy road which was in the lay-by where the alleged parking infraction occurred. The lay-by appears to be part of a public highway with no information close enough to be read by an approaching driver that would suggest it is private land or otherwise restricted. The car was stopped for less than 5 minutes whilst my wife examined our daughter.
2) I subsequently received a Notice to Keeper from the Claimant, alleging that a charge of £100 was due to them. I appealed to the claimant online and this was rejected. I did not further appeal to the Independent Appeals Service (IAS), the allegedly independent body appointed by the Claimant’s trade body, the Independent Parking Committee (IPC). My research revealed that the IAS, far from being independent, is a subsidiary of the IPC, which in turn is owned and run by the same two Directors who also run Gladstones Solicitors, the individuals in question being John Davies, and William Hurley. Such an incestuous relationship is incapable of providing any fair means for motorists to challenge parking charges, as well as potentially breaching the SRA Code of Conduct. As such, the Claimant does not come to this matter with clean hands.
3) The notice is a parking charge. I contest that I was merely stopped to facilitate examination of an ill child. Supporting case law would be Jopson vs Homeguard Services Limited at Oxford County Court (9GF0A9E), June 2016 in which Judge Harris stated:
The concept of parking, as opposed to stopping, is that of leaving a car for some duration of time beyond that needed for getting in or out of it, loading or unloading it, and perhaps coping with some vicissitude of short duration, such as changing a wheel in the event of a puncture. Merely to stop a vehicle cannot be to park it.
4) The IPC code of conduct states that a grace period must be allowed in order that a driver might spot signage, go up to it, read it and then decide whether to accept the terms or not. A reasonable grace period in any car park would be from 5-15 minutes from the period of stopping. This grace period was not observed and therefore the operator is in breach of the industry code of practice. Additionally no contract can be in place by conduct until a reasonable period elapses.
5) The signage is forbidding and makes no offer to the motorist. There can therefore be no contract. The Claimant’s signage with the largest font at this site states “No Customer Parking At Any Time”. A further sign with much smaller writing and higher up states “The loading bay is only for authorised vehicles actively loading & unloading when delivering to the commercial tenants of Heath parade”. It is submitted that if these notices are attempting to make a contractual offer, then as they are forbidding they do not fulfil the basic requirement of a contract, which is that each party to the contract must offer valuable consideration to the other party, on clear terms capable of acceptance. In this case neither the Claimant, nor their principal the landowner, is offering anything to motorists. The notices cannot, therefore, reasonably be construed as having created a contractual relationship between the Claimant and the Defendant.
The above point was recently tested in the County Court at High Wycombe, in the case of Parking Control Management (UK) Ltd v Bull & 2 Others (B4GF26K6, 21 April 2016), where District Judge Glen dismissed all three claims, stating in his judgment that:
“If the notice had said no more than if you park on this roadway you agree to pay a charge then it would have been implicit that PCM was saying we will allow you to park on this roadway if you pay £100 and I would agree with Mr Samuels’ first analysis that essentially the £100 was a part of the core consideration for the licence and was not a penalty for breach. The difficulty is that this notice does not say that at all. This notice is an absolute prohibition against parking at any time, for any period, on the roadway. It is impossible to construct out of this in any way, either actually or contingently or conditionally, any permission for anyone to park on the roadway. All this is essentially saying is you must not trespass on the roadway. If you do we are giving ourselves, and we are dressing it up in the form of a contract, the right to charge you a sum of money which really would be damages for trespass, assuming of course that the claimant had any interest in the land in order to proceed in trespass.”
While this is a County Court decision and therefore not binding, it is on all fours with the present case and may be considered as persuasive. A full transcript of the Approved Judgment for the above case will be provided in the event that this case proceeds to a hearing.
6) In addition, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 rules that if signage has multiple interpretation the interpretation most favourable to the consumer applies. It is clear from this the signage with the largest font should apply.
7) In the alternative, if it was held that the signage was contractually valid, it would be impossible for a motorist to have read the terms and conditions contained therein from a moving or stopped vehicle, and if the vehicle is stopped, the ‘contravention’ according to the Claimant is already committed.
The above point was recently tested in several cases regarding Hayes and Harlington station. There a similar situation arises as the vehicles were charged for briefly stopping but the signs are far away from vehicles and high up
In all cases it was ruled that no contract was entered by performance as the signage could not be read from a vehicle. No transcripts are available but as PCM UK were the claimant in all cases they will be fully aware of the cases; C3GF46K8, C3GF44K8, C3GFY8K8
8) In addition to the £100 ‘parking charge’, for which liability is denied, the Claimant’s legal representatives, Gladstones Solicitors, have artificially inflated the value of the Claim by adding costs of £50 which I submit have not actually been incurred by the Claimant, and which are artificially invented figures in an attempt to circumvent the Small Claims costs rules using double recovery. The Court is invited to report Gladstones Solicitors to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority for this deliberate attempt to mislead the Court, in contravention of their Code of Conduct.
9) I have not received any information from the claimant with regards to his contract with the landowner despite multiple requests so am unable to comment upon its legality.
I believe that the facts stated in this witness statement are true.[/I]
I was able to download the land registry entry as alluded to by zaklondon however was initially disheartened to see that Genesis housing was registered as the keeper now but a little more probing revealed that they had only purchased the land last year (for >£1.8 million!!!) and that it was owned by the different company at the time I was involved (choices for graham park limited)
As I live in Cardiff, I had requested that the court hearing be near me in Blackwood civil court. I guessed correctly that Gladstones wouldn't be bothered to sent a representative and if they did, it would probably cost them a bit of cash. They only paid the court fee at the very last minute (16.30pm on the final day), I don't know if this is one of their tactics to give people false hope that they might not proceed!?
Here's what happened on the day.
Dressed for the role, 3 piece suit, brogues, leather satchel etc (Clerk asked was I the solicitor for PCM!!). Gladstones didn't send representation which was a huge relief. I had also printed off all the relevant cases and the land registry form which proved invaluable even though I hadn't included them in any bundle with the witness statement. The court was hardly busy at all so it gave me loads of time to discuss the case in detail with the district judge. He appeared truly flabbergasted that any company could consider the signage appropriate to enter into any contract and agreed wholeheartedly with the whole forbidding signage argument (the Bull case notes were really helpful here). He also questioned the role of the attendant and considered that a more appropriate course of action for them would be to advice the driver that they were parked illegally and to move on rather than send them a PCN. He highlighted inaccuracies in their own witness statement notably that they even said that by leaving the car unattended that I entered a contract when it was obvious that I had never left the car both from all my correspondence and the photos. he also questioned their authority based on the land registry details that I had showed him.
His concluding discussion took him over 5 minutes to deliver (even though I was the only one in the courtroom which seemed really rather surreal) and any transcription would be absolute gold dust to anyone else defending themselves at Heath Parade. He even granted me £50 in costs which I used to take my family out for a slap up Chinese meal that night!
I don't know if these county court judgements all get written up for use in further cases but if so I can happily provide the court and case details if would help anyone
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Comments
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Court transcripts cost a couple of hundred quid I believe, so whilst it would be great to get it, we cannot expect you to fund it yourself.
Well done on you win, and your diligence in beating these scammers having had to play catch-up.
I suggest a robust complaint to your MP about this unregulated scam and perhaps contacting press local to the location as well as national press, and social media.
Perhaps also a complaint to the SRA might be in order to show the scammer's solicitors did not check themselves that their client had standing to bring this charge, plus their failure to attend. This whole case could have been avoided if they had done a few simple checks including a land registry check that only costs a few quid. Their first priority is to the court, and in this they failed.I married my cousin. I had to...I don't have a sister.
All my screwdrivers are cordless."You're Safety Is My Primary Concern Dear" - Laks0 -
MSTFOX
Well done, great read and well put together
Gladstones ....they gladstones themselves yet again, such a failure of a company
About time PCM got their act together in terms of signs and legals
BOTH ARE FAILURES0 -
What a fantastic result and write up thank you and well done.0
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A superb DIY job, with the only help coming from the forum being just as a reference resource. I'm really impressed.
If only many others who come to the forum could do just a small bit of the research done here, it would make our task so much easier, and their results much more likely to be successful.Please note, we are not a legal advice forum. I personally don't get involved in critiquing court case Defences/Witness Statements, so unable to help on that front. Please don't ask. .
I provide only my personal opinion, it is not a legal opinion, it is simply a personal one. I am not a lawyer.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.Private Parking Firms - Killing the High Street0 -
Well done MSTFOX!
I've bookmarked your defence for future. Thank you for providing such a thorough account!
A very well deserved Chinese indeed!Natwest OD - Start: £1,500 Current: £1,500 | Creation Loan - Start: £2,152.33 Current: £2,082.90 | Barclaycard CC - Start: £5,242.42 Current: £5,416.45 | Novuna Loan - Start: £8,598.43 Current: £8,366.04 | Tesco CC - Start: £9,420.22 Current: £9,885 | Northridge Car - Start: £15,584 Current: £15,017
Starting total on 02.07.2024 is: £42,497.40 | Current total: £42,267.39 (0.5% paid off)0 -
Well done. Don't waste your money on court transcripts. They are not of much relevance these days.0
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Fantastic last minute work!I was totally naive and underprepared until 2 days before I went to court which is crazy considering how much info there is about this notorious site but it is amazing how much knowledge a person can acquire in 24 hours! I read through most of the posts pertaining to heath parade and reformulated my witness statement for my own practice
Hahaha! :TDressed for the role, 3 piece suit, brogues, leather satchel etc (Clerk asked was I the solicitor for PCM!!).His concluding discussion took him over 5 minutes to deliver (even though I was the only one in the courtroom which seemed really rather surreal) and any transcription would be absolute gold dust to anyone else defending themselves at Heath Parade. He even granted me £50 in costs which I used to take my family out for a slap up Chinese meal that night!
Hooray! Wonderful account of scam-beating.
mnkut will be very pleased, He/she has offered to help people with Heath Parade cases:
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/75320482#Comment_75320482
Yay! Another one bites the dust!PRIVATE 'PCN'? DON'T PAY BUT DON'T IGNORE IT (except N.Ireland).
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