Help! PCN from UK CPM for parking outside a designated bay

[Deleted User]

Your call. You could pay or offer to pay £100 as that is the sum required by the sign and tell CPM you intend to fight the £60.

That way they'd have to want to pursue the claim on a single issue - their costs and, more significantly, their allegedly contractual bolt-on of £60 which inmho is impermissible because:

1. It is in effect a liquidated damages sum (it is not an actual "out of pocket" expense and as such needs to be specified in the contract (sign) from the outset
2. Many signs state additional recovery of costs on an indemnity basis. In order to indemnify the claimant in respect of costs, those have to be actually incurred
3. The £60 is applied at debt collector stage. Those companies, of which DRP are one, work on a "no win no fee" basis, so will not levy a charge for the letters that they write, having failed to recover the fee by the time court proceedings are commenced
4. Interest is charged from the date of the parking event on the £60 but in fact that charge is applied later, so the interest calculation must be wrong
5. Generally legal fees are irrecoverable on the small claims track

Your defence will then major on the fact that it was a genuine bay you were parked in but that the lines had faded and that can not be your fault. The bay was always a designated parking bay but bad parking management had allowed the lines in the park to fade.

If your friendly shopkeepers will do you a statement to this effect, you're in with a decent shout of defending it. Your shopkeeper will be a hero if they come to a hearing with you, which is perhaps the acid test.