PCN victim

agrmoh

I was issued a PCN from Smart Parking £70 for insufficient paid time, in late Apr 2019 and did not bother to appeal. However now I have received a notice from Debt Recovery Plus Ltd. to pay £170 or a court action against me to recover the amount outstanding. What are my options? I now read the forums and probably made a mistake to CALL them to understand if I can now appeal. Please advise.

Any pointers would be much appreciated from the experienced guru's.

Coupon-mad

You should have send an appeal, these are 100% winnable at POPLA.
Ignore the debt letters and try a retailer complaint, as the NEWBIES thread tells you.

While you are online please do us a huge favour and delete every post you made to bump other threads. It causes us huge extra work/time to read them all, and interrupts those threads which is never fair on those people who started them about their cases.

Please click on your own username, find your posts, and remove all of them except for this one.

The_Deep

Read what Pete Wishert, MP said in the House of Commons recently about Smart Parking.

"I am sick and tired of receiving emails from people complaining about the behaviour of parking companies, telling me that they will never again visit Perth city centre because of the negative experience they had when they had the misfortune to end up in a car park operated by one of these companies. I have received more complaints about one car park in the city of Perth than about any other issue. That car park is operated by the lone ranger of the parking cowboys: the hated and appalling Smart Parking—I see that many other Members are unfortunate enough to have Smart Parking operating in their constituencies. It has reached the stage where one member of my staff now spends a good part of each day just helping my constituents and visitors to my constituency to navigate the appeals process.
…
The BPA does not have the ability to regulate these companies and has shown no sign whatsoever that it is trying to get on top of some of the sharper practices. The BPA gives a veneer of legitimacy to some of the more outlandish rogue operators by including them in their membership, allowing them to continue to operate. The Bill will oblige operators such as Smart Parking to amend their practices."

Now complain to your own MP as nine times out of ten these tickets are scams so complain to your MP.

Parliament is well aware of the MO of these private parking companies, and on 15th March 2019 a Bill was enacted to curb the excesses of these shysters. Codes of Practice are being drawn up, an independent appeals service will be set up, and access to the DVLA's date base more rigorously policed, persistent offenders denied access to the DVLA database and unable to operate.

Hopefully life will become impossible for the worst of these scammers, but until this is done you should still complain to your MP, citing the new legislation.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2019/8/contents/enacted

Just as the clampers were finally closed down, so hopefully will many of these Private Parking Companies.