County Court Action - Parking Eye

D_P_Dance

They have wasted your time, now waste some of theirs, send them an invoice for your time at £19.00 an hour.  When they ignore you send them a letter before claim

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/letter/letter-before-small-claims-court-claim. 

If they ignore that you have up to six years to take them to court.

beingtakentocourt

This was my WS:

In the County Court at xxxxx Claim Number: XXXXXXXX 

Between ParkingEye Ltd (Claimant) -

and

XXXXXXXXX (Defendant) 

Witness Statement of XXXXXXXX

I, XXXXXXXX, of XXXXXXXXXXX state as follows:- 

1. I am the defendant in the case and the driver at the time of the alleged parking infringement. I will be in attendance at the hearing. This witness statement and the documents to be relied upon have been filed with the court and upon the Claimant. 

2. I refer to paragraph 6 in the witness statement made by the claimant, dated 13/2/2020. The copy of the signage plan is out of date and not relevant to the current layout at the service station in question. I enclose a view of the service station taken from google maps showing the current layout at the service station marked exhibit 16. There are two new buildings not included in the plans submitted by the claimant. Namely, a drive through coffee shop within the car parking area, a new hotel building adjacent to the main service area and a petrol forecourt outside of the parking area but within the ANPR monitored site. It is not possible to verify which of the signs have been relocated since the new buildings have been erected within the parking area. I suggest therefore that the signage plan marked exhibit 3 be deemed unreliable and misleading evidence. 

3. I refer to ‘BPA Code of Practice’ marked Exhibit 17. In particular I draw your attention to section 13 regarding grace periods. Paragraph 13.4 states that parking sites should have a minimum of 10 minutes grace period before enforcement action be taken. This is marked as Exhibit 17. As the ANPR Cameras are located at the site as a whole and not just the parking areas, I believe the grace period at this site should be significantly longer than the minimum 10 minutes. 

4. There are a number of areas within the site which should not constitute parking but do fall within the ANPR monitored site, including the drive through coffee shop and the petrol forecourt area including car wash and air/water station. This is a very different layout to a supermarket parking area where the 10 minute minimum grace period might stand. 

5. Traffic within this service area is often bad, particularly at peak times.

6. Given the layout of the site and the position of the ANPR cameras, which are well away from the actual parking area, and the traffic flow issues that exist on this site, I do not feel the Claimant has adhered to paragraph 13.2 of the ‘BPA Code of Practice’ stating that the claimant ‘must allow the driver a reasonable grace period’. 

7. During my visit to the site I visited the main service area and parked in the normal car parking area. There are a number of normal walking routes from the parking area into the service area that do not have signs indicating the two hour limit. An example of this is shown from screenshots from google street view, marked as Exhibit 18. 

8. Exhibit 18 also throws further doubt on the reliability of the evidence presented by the claimant in exhibit 3. There is signage noted within exhibit 3 which does not appear within the photographic evidence presented in exhibit 18. 

9. Following a stay of approximately two hours within the main service area I drove my vehicle out of the parking area and proceeded to the petrol forecourt, this is not shown within exhibit 3 but is included within Exhibit 16. As shown, this petrol forecourt is away from the main parking area and therefore time spent here should not constitute parking under the terms stated within the contract entered into. 

10. During my time on site, and especially at the time of exiting the site, the traffic flow was very slow. As such, I maintain that I did not stay parked for longer than two hours. 

11. The 32 minutes overstay is easily explained as a part of the normal time spent, between entering site at the ANPR camera and finally finding a space, between leaving the parking space and driving to the petrol forecourt at a time of congested traffic, use of the petrol forecourt, and finally driving from the petrol forecourt and leaving the site at a time of congested traffic.

I believe that the facts stated within this witness statement are true. 

Signed

xxxxxxxxx

beingtakentocourt

This was the site plan submitted by PE:

beingtakentocourt

This is the google maps screenshot. There is an expanded lorry park area, the ramada hotel is nor in the original plans nor is the Starbucks drive thru coffee.

Coupon-mad

Wow, their map was years out of date.  As expected but well done for spotting all this.

Re service stations, the DFT policy (easy to Google and use as evidence) requires a 'minimum' of 2 hours parking time for drivers, so any time spent in the Petrol station or at a drive-thru, is not part of that two hours parking.

This is what to use in any MSA defence or WS - nicely done and nicely worded:

9. Following a stay of approximately two hours within the main service area I drove my vehicle out of the parking area and proceeded to the petrol forecourt, this is not shown within exhibit 3 but is included within Exhibit 16. As shown, this petrol forecourt is away from the main parking area and therefore time spent here should not constitute parking under the terms stated within the contract entered into. 

10. During my time on site, and especially at the time of exiting the site, the traffic flow was very slow. As such, I maintain that I did not stay parked for longer than two hours. 

11. The 32 minutes overstay is easily explained as a part of the normal time spent, between entering site at the ANPR camera and finally finding a space, between leaving the parking space and driving to the petrol forecourt at a time of congested traffic, use of the petrol forecourt, and finally driving from the petrol forecourt and leaving the site at a time of congested traffic.