Britannia Court Claim Received

kessik

Yes it has, it's August 16 at Southampton and we need to have everything in by July 27. I am finishing the Witness Statement and we will drop it over to the Court by Tuesday afternoon and send a copy also to BW Legal. I just wanted to ask a couple of questions because it seems from the Claimant's paperwork that they have an answer to everything we said and I'm wondering how I can phrase the statement.

Coupon-mad

We want to see your WS. This is a normal stage but we's like to check what evidence you are adducing and what your WS says, and what theirs says!

You worry me that you are impressed by the amount of paperwork & photos.

kessik

Here is the Witness Statement. Can I get an opinion please?


IN THE COUNTY COURT AT SOUTHAMPTON
CLAIM NO. #######

Between:
Britannia Parking Group Ltd t/a Britannia Parking (Claimant)
-and-
Mr ## (Defendant)

---

WITNESS STATEMENT – Mr ##

---

1. Preliminary

1.1 I, xx of #### am the Registered Keeper in this case. I am unrepresented with no exposure to Court proceedings. I trust the Court will excuse my inexperience.

1.2 Attached to this statement is a paginated bundle of documents marked TH1, TH2 etc to which I will refer

1.3 I will refer to the Claimant’s evidence using the page numbers in their Witness Statement (P1, P2 etc)

1.3 The facts in this statement come from my personal knowledge. Where they are not within my own knowledge they are true to the best of my information and belief

1.4 I assert that I am the registered keeper of the vehicle in question in this case. The Defendant denies being the driver at the time of the supposed event, and therefore puts Claimant to strict proof that any contract can exist between the Claimant and themselves.

1.5 At the time in their notice to driver was issued it is possible for a family member to have been the driver, but I have no obligation to name them to a private parking firm. It remains the burden of the Claimant to prove their case.

1.6 The Claimant asserts that the Defendant’s refusal to communicate and/or provide the details of the driver entitles the Claimant ‘to hold the Defendant liable for the unpaid parking charge’ however as PATAS and POPLA Lead Adjudicator and barrister, Henry Michael Greenslade, stated in the POPLA Annual Report 2015 on the subject of Keeper Liability “Further, a failure by the recipient of a notice issued under Schedule 4 to name the driver, does not of itself mean that the recipient has accepted that they were the driver at the material time.” (see TH 1)

1.7 It is denied that any contract was entered into between the Claimant and I

1.8. It is denied that the Claimant has the authority to bring this claim. The proper Claimant (if any debt exists, which is denied) would be the landowner.

1.9 I am not liable to the Claimant for the sum claimed, or any amount at all, and this is my Witness Statement in support of my Defence already submitted

2. Background

2.1 The claim refers to a parking incident involving vehicle #### on 24 September 2018 at the location of Portswood Shopping Centre, Portswood Road, Southampton, SO17 2NH

2.2 Whilst I was the Registered Keeper of the vehicle concerned, there is no evidence of the driver. The claimant has issued a notice to keeper which is not compliant with the strict requirements of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 as it fails to show any period of parking as per paragraph 8 (2)c PoFA 2012

2.2 The Defendant neither admits nor denies being the driver at the time of the supposed event, and therefore puts the parking company to strict proof that any contract can exist between the Claimant and themselves.

2.3 At the time that their notice to driver was issued it is possible for a family member to have been the driver, but I have no obligation to name them to a private parking firm. It remains the burden of the Claimant to prove their case.

2.4 There was no requirement upon me as keeper to respond to what appeared to be junk mail, and in any event was not a matter where a registered keeper could be in any way legally liable as the law stood at that time. No adverse inference can be drawn from my lawful decision to ignore a random letter, impersonating a parking ticket yet with no basis in law.

3 Claimant Has No Authority To Bring The Claim

3.1 The claimant is not the landowner and has failed to supply any contract clearly stating they have legal permission to pursue parking contraventions on behalf of the landowner. The Claimant puts forward evidence (see P1 and P2) purporting to be a ‘Letter of Authority between CBRE Management Services Ltd (ie the Landowner) and the Claimant (Agreement) which sets out, inter alia, the Claimant’s standing and rights to manage and enforce the regulations in situ.’ The Agreement is redacted and has the Landowner’s signature cut-and-pasted, in isolation, onto what the Claimant calls P2 of the Letter of Authority’ but could in fact be confirming authorisation of anything and not necessarily the Claimant’s authority to manage the car park.

4 Inefficient Signage At The Site

4.1 The Claimant’s Notice to Keeper indicates the Contravention as ‘parked longer than the maximum time permitted’

4.2 Whilst the Claimant has provided a map of the site and added numbers (P3), presumably to indicate where signs are placed there are no corresponding numbers beside the photos of signage.

4.3 The Claimant's signage does not set out the terms in a sufficiently clear manner which would be capable of binding any reasonable person reading them. The signs are too high to read whilst driving a vehicle into the car park (which is accessed through a poorly lit tunnel) and are difficult to identify and read once the vehicle is parked. Without exception none of the signage has a light source trained on it at night and all notices are approximately 8’ – 10’ off the ground – in some cases the sign is on private property (P13 is on a walkway at the back of a restaurant); in others inaccessible (it’s not possible to get close enough to read P14 due to the volume of shopping trolleys in front of it). The terms on the Claimant's signage are also displayed in a font which is too small to be read from a passing vehicle, and is in such a position that anyone attempting to read the tiny font would be unable to do so easily. It is, therefore, denied that the Claimant's signage is capable of creating a legally binding contract.

4.4 The undated signage on P3 of the Claimant’s Witness Statement corresponds to what they call the Welcome signage on the overhead map and does not state a charge of £100 for overstaying. This is the signage that faces the entrance to the car park. The signage in the tunnel entrance to the car park (P10) does not state a charge of £100 for overstaying – therefore neither of the two (questionably) ‘entrance’ pieces of signage that a driver may see, were they clearly visible and illuminated at night, indicate that there is a charge for staying past two hours of parking.

4.5 The Claimant’s photographs were all taken between 14:25 and 14:30 in the afternoon in February (P4 – P17). The situation was markedly different when the alleged offence took place, i.e shortly before 7pm on a September evening when night had fallen – the ANPR photographic evidence supplied by the Claimant (P18 andP19) shows quite clearly how dark it was. To imply that signage that is visible (but not legible) in the early afternoon light compares in any way to the conditions during the alleged offence and somehow proves that the signage is therefore adequate is clearly ludicrous.

5 Inflation of the Parking Charge and Abuse of Process

5.1 This claim inflates the initial £100 parking charge total to £237.24 in a clear attempt at double recovery. The Defendant trusts that the presiding Judge will recognise this wholly unreasonable conduct as a gross abuse of process and may consider using the court's case management powers to strike the claim out of the court's own volition. Judges have disallowed all added parking firm 'costs' in County courts up and down the Country. In Claim number F0DP201T on 10th June 2019, District Judge Taylor sitting at the County Court at Southampton, 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. One was the same serial Claimant as in this case (Britannia, using BW Legal's robo-claim model) and one an IPC member serial Claimant (UKCPM, using Gladstones' robo-claim model) yet the Order was identical in striking out both claims without a hearing:
The District Judge stated that
“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.”

5.2 Not only are such costs not permitted (CPR 27.14) but the Defendant believes that the Claimant has not incurred legal costs. Given the fact that BW Legal boasted in Bagri v BW Legal Ltd of processing 'millions' of claims with an admin team (and only a handful of solicitors), the Defendant avers that no solicitor is likely to have supervised this current batch of cut & paste Britannia robo-claims at all. According to Ladak v DRC Locums UKEAT/0488/13/LA the Claimant can only recover the direct and provable costs of the time spent by legally qualified staff on preparing a claim in a legal capacity.

5.3 In addition to the original parking charge, for which liability is denied, the Claimants have artificially inflated the value of the Claim by adding purported Solicitor's/ Legal Costs of £110, which I submit have not actually been incurred by the Claimant.

5.4 Whilst £110 may be recoverable in an instance where a claimant has used a legal firm to prepare a claim, Britannia Parking Ltd have not expended any such sum in this case. This Claimant has a legal team with salaried in-house Solicitors that files hundreds of similar 'cut & paste' robo-claims per month, not incurring any legal cost per case. The added 'legal' cost is in fact an artificially invented figure, which represents a cynical attempt to circumvent the Small Claims costs rules and achieve double recovery because the in-house Solicitors cannot possibly be believed to be paid in the millions per annum for their services.

6.0 Confusing Evidence

6.1 The Claimant, in point 74 of her Witness Statement writes:
‘From a mitigation point of view the Defendant had an initial period of 14 days from the date of the PCN to pay the sum of £50 failing which the charge would revert to the original amount of £85’
In fact the Parking Charge Notice dated 2 October 2018 clearly states ‘Parking Charge Amount Due £100…..discounted to £60 if paid within 14 days of the date of issue’ (P21) The evidence has been confusing for the Defendant and provides further proof that, far from incurring costs by preparing an individual claim the Claimant is merely ‘cutting-and-pasting’ incorrect and non-applicable information from a template.

7.0 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.

Statement of Truth

I believe that the facts stated in this Witness Statement are true.

KeithP

Why not just edit your post to make it more readable?

kessik

Is that okay now?

Coupon-mad

Is this the retail park where it's owned by a different company now, calling the landowner authority into question?

This is the wrong paragraph, if it was a postal ANPR PCN. Para 8 is for windscreen PCNs:

paragraph 8 (2)c

kessik

Yes, that's the same one. When we were there it was September 2018, the PCN came at the start of October and I believe that the landowner didn't change until December 2018 so I thought it was pretty cut and dried that we can't dispute landowner authority. It wasn't a ticket left on the windscreen, it was a letter through the post. Should I remove the line about the PoFA then?

Redx

Use the correct part of pofa for PCN,s that are Postal and no windscreen ticket was issued. There are two scenarios, a windscreen ticket followed several weeks later by a postal NTK, or a postal NTK within 14 days where no windscreen ticket was issued (usually Anpr camera captures), it's one or the other

Always dispute landowner authority and make the claimant prove they have it, never assume or omit

kessik

It was a postal NTK within 14 days. I've read the PoFA over and over and I can't work out what I should be putting instead of what I put originally. I've looked at heaps of witness statement on here and I can't find one with the same set of circumstances. I can't get past the second paragraph on my WS and I don't even know if the rest is any good or worthless

kessik

Does my point at 6.0 about Confusing Evidence have any merit, pointing out that their mitigation has just been cut and pasted from a different, earlier case?



IN THE COUNTY COURT AT SOUTHAMPTON
CLAIM NO. #######

Between:
Britannia Parking Group Ltd t/a Britannia Parking (Claimant)
-and-
Mr ## (Defendant)

---

WITNESS STATEMENT – Mr ##

---

1. Preliminary

1.1 I, xx of #### am the Registered Keeper in this case. I am unrepresented with no exposure to Court proceedings. I trust the Court will excuse my inexperience.

1.2 Attached to this statement is a paginated bundle of documents marked TH1, TH2 etc to which I will refer

1.3 I will refer to the Claimant’s evidence using the page numbers in their Witness Statement (P1, P2 etc)

1.3 The facts in this statement come from my personal knowledge. Where they are not within my own knowledge they are true to the best of my information and belief

1.4 I assert that I am the registered keeper of the vehicle in question in this case. The Defendant denies being the driver at the time of the supposed event, and therefore puts Claimant to strict proof that any contract can exist between the Claimant and themselves.

1.5 At the time in their notice to driver was issued it is possible for a family member to have been the driver, but I have no obligation to name them to a private parking firm. It remains the burden of the Claimant to prove their case.

1.6 The Claimant asserts that the Defendant’s refusal to communicate and/or provide the details of the driver entitles the Claimant ‘to hold the Defendant liable for the unpaid parking charge’ however as PATAS and POPLA Lead Adjudicator and barrister, Henry Michael Greenslade, stated in the POPLA Annual Report 2015 on the subject of Keeper Liability “Further, a failure by the recipient of a notice issued under Schedule 4 to name the driver, does not of itself mean that the recipient has accepted that they were the driver at the material time.” (see TH 1)

1.7 It is denied that any contract was entered into between the Claimant and I

1.8. It is denied that the Claimant has the authority to bring this claim. The proper Claimant (if any debt exists, which is denied) would be the landowner.

1.9 I am not liable to the Claimant for the sum claimed, or any amount at all, and this is my Witness Statement in support of my Defence already submitted

2. Background

2.1 The claim refers to a parking incident involving vehicle #### on 24 September 2018 at the location of Portswood Shopping Centre, Portswood Road, Southampton, SO17 2NH

2.2 Whilst I was the Registered Keeper of the vehicle concerned, there is no evidence of the driver. The claimant has failed to follow the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 to hold the defendant liable for the contravention. A Notice To Keeper (NTK) was sent to the defendant, but it failed to meet the strict conditions as defined under the act, meaning the claimant is unable to hold the registered keeper to account for the alleged contravention.

2.2 The Defendant neither admits nor denies being the driver at the time of the supposed event, and therefore puts the parking company to strict proof that any contract can exist between the Claimant and themselves.

2.3 At the time that their notice to driver was issued it is possible for a family member to have been the driver, but I have no obligation to name them to a private parking firm. It remains the burden of the Claimant to prove their case.

2.4 There was no requirement upon me as keeper to respond to what appeared to be junk mail, and in any event was not a matter where a registered keeper could be in any way legally liable as the law stood at that time. No adverse inference can be drawn from my lawful decision to ignore a random letter, impersonating a parking ticket yet with no basis in law.

3 Claimant Has No Authority To Bring The Claim

3.1 The claimant is not the landowner and has failed to supply any contract clearly stating they have legal permission to pursue parking contraventions on behalf of the landowner. The Claimant puts forward evidence (see P1 and P2) purporting to be a ‘Letter of Authority between CBRE Management Services Ltd (ie the Landowner) and the Claimant (Agreement) which sets out, inter alia, the Claimant’s standing and rights to manage and enforce the regulations in situ.’ The Agreement is redacted and has the Landowner’s signature cut-and-pasted, in isolation, onto what the Claimant calls P2 of the Letter of Authority’ but could in fact be confirming authorisation of anything and not necessarily the Claimant’s authority to manage the car park.

4 Inefficient Signage At The Site

4.1 The Claimant’s Notice to Keeper indicates the Contravention as ‘parked longer than the maximum time permitted’

4.2 Whilst the Claimant has provided a map of the site and added numbers (P3), presumably to indicate where signs are placed in relation to the map there are no corresponding numbers beside the photos of signage. See attached overhead shot of the car park with the Defendant's approximate parking spot.

4.3 The Claimant's signage does not set out the terms in a sufficiently clear manner which would be capable of binding any reasonable person reading them. The terms on the Claimant's signage are displayed in a font which is too small to be read from a passing vehicle, (see TH x for scale of terms and conditions) and is in such a position that anyone attempting to read the tiny font would be unable to do so easily. The signs are too high to read whilst driving a vehicle into the car park (which is accessed through a poorly lit tunnel) and are difficult to identify and read once the vehicle is parked. Without exception none of the signage has a light source trained on it at night and all notices are approximately 8’ – 10’ off the ground – in some cases the sign is on private property (P13 is on a walkway at the back of a restaurant); in others inaccessible (it’s not possible to get close enough to read P14 due to the volume of shopping trolleys in front of it). It is, therefore, denied that the Claimant's signage is capable of creating a legally binding contract.

4.4 The undated signage on P3 of the Claimant’s Witness Statement corresponds to what they call the Welcome signage on the overhead map and does not state a charge of £100 for overstaying. This is the signage that faces the entrance to the car park. The signage in the tunnel entrance to the car park (P10) does not state a charge of £100 for overstaying – therefore neither of the two (questionable) ‘entrance’ pieces of signage that a driver may see, were they clearly visible and illuminated at night, indicate that there is a charge for staying past two hours of parking.

4.5 The Claimant’s photographs were all taken between 14:25 and 14:30 in the afternoon in February (P4 – P17). The situation was markedly different when the alleged offence took place, i.e shortly before 7pm on a September evening when night had fallen – the ANPR photographic evidence supplied by the Claimant (P18 andP19) shows quite clearly how dark it was. To imply that signage that is visible (but not legible) in the early afternoon light compares in any way to the conditions during the alleged offence and somehow proves that the signage is therefore adequate is clearly ludicrous. TH x - TH show the signs in almost identical lighting conditions to those on the evening of the alleged offence

5 Inflation of the Parking Charge and Abuse of Process

5.1 This claim inflates the initial £100 parking charge total to £237.24 in a clear attempt at double recovery. The Defendant trusts that the presiding Judge will recognise this wholly unreasonable conduct as a gross abuse of process and may consider using the court's case management powers to strike the claim out of the court's own volition. Judges have disallowed all added parking firm 'costs' in County courts up and down the Country. In Claim number F0DP201T on 10th June 2019, District Judge Taylor sitting at the County Court at Southampton, 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. One was the same serial Claimant as in this case (Britannia, using BW Legal's robo-claim model) and one an IPC member serial Claimant (UKCPM, using Gladstones' robo-claim model) yet the Order was identical in striking out both claims without a hearing:
The District Judge stated that
“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.”

5.2 Not only are such costs not permitted (CPR 27.14) but the Defendant believes that the Claimant has not incurred legal costs. Given the fact that BW Legal boasted in Bagri v BW Legal Ltd of processing 'millions' of claims with an admin team (and only a handful of solicitors), the Defendant avers that no solicitor is likely to have supervised this current batch of cut & paste Britannia robo-claims at all. According to Ladak v DRC Locums UKEAT/0488/13/LA the Claimant can only recover the direct and provable costs of the time spent by legally qualified staff on preparing a claim in a legal capacity.

5.3 In addition to the original parking charge, for which liability is denied, the Claimants have artificially inflated the value of the Claim by adding purported Solicitor's/ Legal Costs of £110, which I submit have not actually been incurred by the Claimant.

5.4 Whilst £110 may be recoverable in an instance where a claimant has used a legal firm to prepare a claim, Britannia Parking Ltd have not expended any such sum in this case. This Claimant has a legal team with salaried in-house Solicitors that files hundreds of similar 'cut & paste' robo-claims per month, not incurring any legal cost per case. The added 'legal' cost is in fact an artificially invented figure, which represents a cynical attempt to circumvent the Small Claims costs rules and achieve double recovery because the in-house Solicitors cannot possibly be believed to be paid in the millions per annum for their services.

6.0 Confusing Evidence

6.1 The Claimant, in point 74 of her Witness Statement writes:
‘From a mitigation point of view the Defendant had an initial period of 14 days from the date of the PCN to pay the sum of £50 failing which the charge would revert to the original amount of £85’
In fact the Parking Charge Notice dated 2 October 2018 clearly states ‘Parking Charge Amount Due £100…..discounted to £60 if paid within 14 days of the date of issue’ (P21) The evidence has been confusing for the Defendant and provides further proof that, far from incurring costs by preparing an individual claim the Claimant is merely ‘cutting-and-pasting’ incorrect and non-applicable information from a template.

7.0 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.

Statement of Truth

I believe that the facts stated in this Witness Statement are true.