Britannia Parking - BW Legal - County Court Claim

Mappy3333

I am currently drafting my witness statement and would like to include pictures and videos I have shot of the machine and the misleading prompts it uses. Does anybody have any advice as to how to include the files with my witness statement? Is it best to embed them in the document, use links to a dropbox account or any methods. With regards to submitting the witness statement I was intending on emailing the court and the defendant, can anybody advise whether that is acceptable? Thanks in advance

Umkomaas

A Judge won't be chasing around the internet looking at random links. They will want everything in front of their eyes, on paper.

Mappy3333

Thanks for the response. I’ve no issue including the pictures on paper, but how would anybody suggest I include the videos I have shot. They clearly show that the machine prompts for different actions depending on what button is pressed, therefore I think are key in to how somebody may make a mistake in entering their registration

KeithP

Mappy3333 wrote: »

...but how would anybody suggest I include the videos I have shot.

They must be sent on a 'durable medium' to both the Claimant and the Court.

A 'durable medium' is something that once sent cannot be altered by the sender.

In the case of video, that means you are effectively limited to either a CD/DVD, or memory stick/card.

Your idea of a link to a Dropbox file is not acceptable as you could alter that file after it has been sent.

You also need to consider how you are going to show the video at the hearing. Take a laptop or tablet with you that is capable of playing the chosen durable medium.

Mappy3333

Ok thanks. I will load them on to a memory stick.

KeithP

A video file as an attachment to an email is another example of a 'durable medium', but you might need the explicit agreement of the court and the claimant to accept evidence that way.

Le_Kirk

Mappy3333 wrote: »

Ok thanks. I will load them on to a memory stick.

....... and if you take a laptop, make sure the battery is fully charged; you don't want a situation that happened to a claimants agent (boo hoo) as reported on here a couple of days ago where the lappy battery died and he had no paper back-up!

Mappy3333

Thanks for that Le-Kirk, I did read that report and I certainly wouldn't too be disappointed if it were to happen to the claimant in my case also!!

Mappy3333

Thanks for the help so far. I have called the court and they have confirmed that they will accept the witness statement via email and with attachments. I have drafted the witness statement below. I would appreciate any advice. Thanks

1. I am, XXXX of XXXX, the Defendant in this matter. I assert that I am not liable to the claimant for the sum claimed, or any amount at all, on the grounds the claimant suffered no loss as a ticket was purchased and displayed on the date and time in question. The partial registration number recorded could have occurred due to a number of reasons and was in no way by the defendant to avoid making payment. As no loss was incurred there can be no reason to pursue this matter other than to make excessive money out of people who have complied and purchased a ticket. I am unrepresented with no exposure to Court proceedings. I trust the Court will excuse my inexperience.

2. On Sunday 24th June 2018, I parked my vehicle, registration number XXXX, in the car park of Quayside Poole. I made payment of £2.00 for 60 mins parking, in fact due to my lack of correct change I overpaid by £0.50 as the advertised rate was £1.50. Payment for parking was made using the pay and display ticket (PDT) machine and a ticket obtained. Exhibit 1 parking ticket obtained showing amount paid.

3. Car parks I’m familiar with, require the entering of the numerical of a VRN to prevent the passing on of any residual parking time to other motorists, this allows the operator to maximise revenue. The fact I received a payment ticket led me to believe I’d so far adhered to the instructions and so I displayed my ticket within the vehicle, parked without obstruction and used the car park for the tariff paid without overstay. I returned to my vehicle confident I’d followed all the instructions and unaware of any said contravention.

4. A PCN was later received via the post from the claimant for an alleged breach of their terms and conditions for a non-payment; I felt confused as to why and challenged this with evidence. The PCN allowed me to dispute the charge directly with the Claimant through the use of their internal appeals procedure. I did this immediately after receiving the PCN providing Exhibit A as evidence that I had indeed purchased a ticket to cover my parking period. My appeal was rejected by the Claimant who said that no ticket was purchased on the day in question for the VRM: xx06 xxx. The Claimant insisted payment had not been received for my vehicle and that the penalty payment had now increased from the initial discounted early payment of £60 to £100.

5. It was at realising that the claimant was pursuing me due to an incorrect VRN being entered or recorded. The registration recorded on my ticket was ‘M’. The Claimant offered further instructions to appeal independently or pay up and that failure to do either would lead to means of litigation to recover the penalty which would incur further costs.

6. Any alleged breach of contract was de Minimis. Parking was paid for the entire duration of the stay by the defendant. The Claimant has been made aware of this and evidence has been provided but the Claimant has chosen to ignore it to pursue an unnecessary and inflated claim.

7. During the appeals process to POPLA I again provided an explanation and a copy of PDT. My appeal was rejected by POPLA and now I felt trapped in a system designed to fail, to pursue further made it clear the Claimant’s main objective was to take cash.

8. The payment channel did not indicate any failure to make payment, nor prompt to also enter letters as well as the vehicle numbers, a ticket was provided so the Defendant concludes that the contract de facto granted a parking session. If I entered an incomplete VRN (and that cannot be conclusively be asserted as the possibility exists of a machine error) into the ticket vending machine I made a mistake, however the Claimant, via the ANPRS’s software, knew that a mistake had been made and rather than inform me and give me an opportunity to correct it the Claimant chooses to exploit that mistake by using it to claim breach of contract and thereby attempt to obtain money from me by threatening court action. By engaging in this act of active concealment of a fact the Claimant clearly acted without good faith and hence rendered the contract unenforceable. If a contract was entered into by action of remaining on site then as I potentially input a partial VRN I offered a variation on the contractual terms and that by issuing a ticket the claimant by action had accepted the renewed terms. If I had not put the full amount of money into the machine a ticket would not have been issued which is in effect the claimant rejecting revised terms offered by the defendant.

9. Payment was clearly made and the Claimant had sufficient details to allow them to check that, and then they should have rectified their data to match the payment. Whilst it may not have been unreasonable to issue the ticket, this should have gone away pre-issue, once payment was clarified. Indeed, that is the purpose of the protocol to resolve simple points like that without the need to involve the Court. The Claimant pressing on with this is both disproportionate and arguably unreasonable. The PCN stated that the contravention as 'Failed to make a valid payment' and this contravention is denied. The Defendant denies liability for the purported parking charge (penalty), not least because it has been shown that money greater than the correct parking charge (tariff) had already been paid. Exhibit

10. I performed a vehicle search via the gov.uk website to check if indeed as stated in the appeal rejection that it was possible for a vehicles registration to be M, I entered M and the website failed to recognise it and displayed the following instructions “you must enter your registration number in a valid format” thus preventing further use of the site until a valid entry was made. If this simple message had been displayed during payment thus preventing an incorrect/invalid entry as cross referenced via the ANPR then this matter would not be wasting court time. Exhibit gov.uk website

11. The ANPR wouldn’t have recorded a vehicle with the registration M so the pay and display ticket should not have been issued. Failure to make a full payment (inputting of coins into the pay and display machine) would have prevented an issue of a payment ticket so why allow an incomplete VRN entry to issue a payment ticket other than entrapment.

12. The Claimant is a member of the British Parking Association (BPA). It states in the BPA code of Practice the following “21.2 Quality checks: before you issue a parking charge
notice you must carry out a manual quality check of the ANPR images to reduce errors and make sure that it is appropriate to take action.” I contest that manual checks were not carried out particularly following my appeal.

13. I have been honest and transparent that I may have made a mistake in inputting the VRN and to being the driver even though I was not obliged to give out this information; I certainly have not attempted to avoid payment or to conceal the fact I was the driver in an attempt to gain any advantage. This honesty and transparency hasn’t been reciprocated or displayed by the Claimant.

14. The Claimant is put to strict proof that it has sufficient proprietary interest in the land, or that it has the necessary authorization from the landowner. This information has been requested via SAR but has not been supplied.




15. The fact that a payment had been made would have been captured and the claimant had enough information to conclude from their secondary data stream ANPR
that an oversight (human error) had been made, yet instead of rectifying their data to match the payment, they contacted DVLA to obtain my personal details. Parking firms are also prohibited from issuing ANPR PCNs without manual checking by human intervention (BPA Code of Practice and AOS rules).

16. At all times, from the ANPR image, the Claimant knew the correct VRN and it is averred that the PCN cannot have been properly or fairly checked before it was issued, since there was nothing to deter and no legitimate interest in merely penalizing a consumer.

17. The charge offends against the reasonable and statutory expectations of trader/consumer relations requiring ‘open dealing’ and the doctrine of good faith. There was a complete lack of any fair warning on the screen: “are you sure, have you entered your full VRN? A penalty of £100 applies if inaccurate or incomplete number plates are entered here”.

18. I have since re-visited the Poole Quay car park to review how the parking machine at the site works. It is clear to me that the machine prompts are misleading and could potentially lead to an inaccurate VRN entry. Exhibit XX is a video of the parking machine, the machine is ‘asleep’ and the screen is blank. The video shows that if a user presses one of the non-alphanumeric keys the screen ‘wakes’ with the message “Please enter registration number”. Exhibit XX is another video of the same machine again the machine is ‘asleep’ however on this occasion the user presses one of the alphanumeric keys to ‘wake’ the machine. The ‘wake’ message on this occasion states “Please insert coins”. Clearly the prompts are entirely different and could mislead a user to insert coins without providing a correct VRN. Exhibit XX is a picture of the machine and to the left hand side of the screen it is clearly written that the user should ‘follow prompts’.



No standing or landowner authority

19. Further and in the alternative, the Claimant is put to strict proof that it has sufficient proprietary interest in the land, or that it has the necessary authorization from the landowner to issue parking charge notices under defined and to form/offer contracts in their own name, and to pursue payment by means of litigation.

No legitimate interest or commercial justification

20. It is my case that there can be no legitimate interest or commercial justification in pursuing paying patrons for a hundredfold penalty, for the ordinary and reasonable conduct explained in this witness statement.

21. The penalty represents neither a necessary deterrent, nor an understandable ingredient of a scheme serving legitimate interests, and the Beavis case is distinguished.

Unconscionable sum claimed - double recovery - abuse of process

22. In addition to the original parking charge, for which liability is denied, the Claimant has artificially inflated the value of its claim by adding purported but unsupported damages, admin, debt collector or other costs, which I submit have not actually been incurred at all. The claim flows from an alleged (already hugely inflated) contractual parking charge of £100 but the sum on the claim form is more than this sum. I aver that this inflation of the considered amount is a gross abuse of process.

23. The claimant's witness statement refers to the manual checking of the Anpr images and that after reviewing these that the information was then passed to the relevant department to request details from the Dvla. This is an admission that no other manual checks were performed. No cross reference of the PDT machine information nor a manual check of displayed ticket.

24. I invite the Court to dismiss this Claim in its entirety, and to award my costs of attendance at the hearing, permissible under Civil Procedure Rule 27.14.

25. Costs on the claim - disproportionate and disingenuous
- CPR 44.3 (2) states: ''Where the amount of costs is to be assessed on the standard basis, the court will –
(a) only allow costs which are proportionate to the matters in issue. Costs which are disproportionate in amount may be disallowed or reduced even if they were reasonably or necessarily incurred; and
(b) resolve any doubt which it may have as to whether costs were reasonably and proportionately incurred or were reasonable and proportionate in amount in favour of the paying party.

26. Whilst quantified costs can be considered on a standard basis, this Claimant's purported costs are wholly disproportionate and do not stand up to scrutiny. In fact it is averred that the Claimant has not paid or incurred such damages/costs or 'legal fees' at all. Any debt collection letters were a standard feature of a low cost business model and are already counted within the parking charge itself.

27. The Parking Eye Ltd v Beavis case is the authority for recovery of the parking charge itself and no more, since that sum (£85 in Beavis) was held to already incorporate the minor costs of an automated private parking business model. There are no losses or damages caused by this business model and the Supreme Court Judges held that a parking firm not in possession cannot plead any part of their case in damages. It is indisputable that the alleged 'parking charge' itself is a sum which the Supreme Court found is already inflated to more than comfortably cover the cost of all letters.

28. Any purported 'legal costs' are also made up out of thin air. Given the fact that robo-claim solicitors and parking firms process tens of thousands of claims handled by an admin team or paralegals, the Defendant avers that no solicitor is likely to have supervised this current batch of cut & paste claims.

29. According to Ladak v DRC Locums UKEAT/0488/13/LA a Claimant can only recover the direct and provable costs of the time spent preparing the claim in a legal capacity, not any administration costs allegedly incurred by already remunerated administrative staff.

30. The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, Schedule 4 (POFA) makes it clear that the will of Parliament regarding parking on private land is that the only sum potentially able to be recovered is the sum in any compliant 'Notice to Keeper' (and the ceiling for a 'parking charge', as set by the Trade Bodies and the DVLA, is £100). This also depends upon the Claimant fully complying with the statute, including 'adequate notice' of the parking charge and prescribed documents served in time/with mandatory wording. It is submitted the claimant has failed on all counts and the Claimant is well aware their artificially inflated claim, as pleaded, constitutes double recovery.

31. 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 of the cases the Claimant was in fact Britannia Parking using BW Legal’s robo-claim model and the other an IPC member serial Claimant (UKCPM, using Gladstones' robo-claim model) yet the Order was identical in striking out both claims without a hearing:
''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...''

32. 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.

33. There are several options available within the Courts' case management powers to prevent vexatious litigants pursuing a wide range of individuals for matters which are near-identical, with meritless claims and artificially inflated costs. The Defendant is of the view that private parking firms operate as vexatious litigants and that relief from sanctions should be refused.

34. 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 the facts stated in this Witness Statement are true.

Redx

before the part IT IS ORDERED , write


The judges stated