PCN escalated to Court proceedings **EDIT - I WON**

Coupon-mad

Littlewadie said:

Sorry for the confusion, yes this is from a second set of debt letters I have received over the last couple of months from PPLegal on top of the court case already in motion.
So I should be cheeky enough to email them back & the court? Suppose I have nothing to loose.
Would I also need to send it to BW Legal?

Yes go on, reply to PP Legal and copy in BW Legal, then forward the whole lot to the court, appending a copy of the PPLegal demand again and saying what I suggested you say to the court.

Littlewadie

Coupon-mad said:

Littlewadie said:

Sorry for the confusion, yes this is from a second set of debt letters I have received over the last couple of months from PPLegal on top of the court case already in motion.
So I should be cheeky enough to email them back & the court? Suppose I have nothing to loose.
Would I also need to send it to BW Legal?

Yes go on, reply to PP Legal and copy in BW Legal, then forward the whole lot to the court, appending a copy of the PPLegal demand again and saying what I suggested you say to the court.

I have emailed the court already asking for the letters to be placed in my evidence, I have not received a reply as of yet. I included all letters, wrote what you said to and also copied it to BW. 

Coupon-mad

I recall you did already send those letters to the court. 

But this week, have you now emailed what I suggested?  It's not cheeky, it's your interpretation of  trading style of Premier Park Ltd writing to tell you they were no longer proceeding (that's one way to read that letter).

Littlewadie

Someone got a bit uppity about my reply to their reply, this is what I have received today regarding the reply I sent them in reference to them being the same company and dropping the case.

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We write further to your email of 05 June 2020.

 

We recommend that you review the footer of our previous correspondence and email as the same clearly details our company name and number.

 

For your convenience PPLegal is a trading style of PP Management Services Ltd, Company Number 11453590.

 

Please note that ****** is not a Claim Reference and we note, our correspondence clearly states “Payment of the outstanding balance is required within fourteen days of this correspondence, failing which, the above referenced Parking Charge Notice will be referred to Premier Park Ltd.’s Solicitors who are instructed to commence litigation for recovery of the outstanding monies forthwith”. Accordingly, we are uncertain how you have interpreted the above statement and concluded that we intended to commence litigation in this matter when the opposite is made explicitly clear from our first correspondence.

 

Our involvement in this matter was, to correspond with yourself in an attempt to settle the above referenced outstanding Parking Charge Notice on behalf of Premier Park Ltd, and we have previously confirmed that our instruction in this matter was erroneous. Please note, our correspondence is not and does not pertain to be a formal Letter Before Claim as required under the Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims. There is, accordingly, no requirement for our correspondence to contain any prescribed information as contained within the Protocols. Despite this our correspondence contains the contact details of charities and organisations who can offer free and impartial legal and/or debt advice as prescribed in Pre-Action Conduct to ensure that Debtors are able to properly understand the correspondence together with the course of action as set out in the same.

 

As previously set out we are concerned that you failed to highlight the above erroneous instruction in a timely manner choosing instead to not mitigate the affects you are now claiming. Despite this, we note that you at liberty to provide the Civil Courts any correspondence which you feel is relevant to this dispute.

 

We thank you for contacting us.

Coupon-mad

Littlewadie said:

Someone got a bit uppity about my reply to their reply, this is what I have received today regarding the reply I sent them in reference to them being the same company and dropping the case.

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We write further to your email of 05 June 2020.

We recommend that you review the footer of our previous correspondence and email as the same clearly details our company name and number.

For your convenience PPLegal is a trading style of PP Management Services Ltd, Company Number 11453590.

Please note that ****** is not a Claim Reference and we note, our correspondence clearly states “Payment of the outstanding balance is required within fourteen days of this correspondence, failing which, the above referenced Parking Charge Notice will be referred to Premier Park Ltd.’s Solicitors who are instructed to commence litigation for recovery of the outstanding monies forthwith”. Accordingly, we are uncertain how you have interpreted the above statement and concluded that we intended to commence litigation in this matter when the opposite is made explicitly clear from our first correspondence.

Our involvement in this matter was, to correspond with yourself in an attempt to settle the above referenced outstanding Parking Charge Notice on behalf of Premier Park Ltd, and we have previously confirmed that our instruction in this matter was erroneous. Please note, our correspondence is not and does not pertain to be a formal Letter Before Claim as required under the Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims. There is, accordingly, no requirement for our correspondence to contain any prescribed information as contained within the Protocols. Despite this our correspondence contains the contact details of charities and organisations who can offer free and impartial legal and/or debt advice as prescribed in Pre-Action Conduct to ensure that Debtors are able to properly understand the correspondence together with the course of action as set out in the same.

As previously set out we are concerned that you failed to highlight the above erroneous instruction in a timely manner choosing instead to not mitigate the affects you are now claiming. Despite this, we note that you at liberty to provide the Civil Courts any correspondence which you feel is relevant to this dispute.

We thank you for contacting us.

Dear PP Legal, 

Your reply is further evidence of the various 'PP' trading names engaged in desperately digging a hole.  On what basis did you choose the trading style ''PP Legal'' yet you are not regulated by the SRA?    I intend to use this portal to complain about your firm and will be reporting you to Trading Standards:
https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers

Kindly confirm: are any of the various PP guises and companies, regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority?   When replying, perhaps you could explain your company's conduct so that I have given you a fair opportunity to respond before I report the companies (all of them) for operating as what appears to an average person to be either a fake legal firm or an unregulated debt collector.  Please confirm which is the correct interpretation, or is it that your Directors believe that they can get away with such conduct because parking charges fall between the cracks of the FCA remit?

I draw your attention to the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Consumer Credit sourcebook which your staff can read here (May 2020 source 50): https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/CONC.pdf  which includes mandatory principles including:

Duty not to use misleading names:

''A firm must not carry on a credit-related regulated activity under a name which is likely to mislead customers about the status of the firm or the nature of its business, or in any other way. [Note: section 25(1AD) of CCA]''.

(1) ''In relation to CONC 2.2.3 R, an example of where a name may mislead is if the average customer of the firm is likely to be misled by the name of the firm.

 (2) Examples of the matters concerning a firm's status or the nature of its business about which its name may mislead customers include: 

(a) the identity or nature of the firm;  

(b) its commercial or profit-seeking status; 

(c) its role, including any relationship with any other person; 

(d) the extent of its authority; 

(e) stating or implying that the firm is a public body or that it is related or connected in some way to a charitable, not-for-profit or governmental or local governmental organisation or to the courts; 

(f) the nature of the products or services supplied; 

(g) the cost of those products or services; and 

(h) the scale of the business including its geographical scope. 

(3) A firm which operates under a variety of trading names should take particular care to ensure that customers are not misled as to the identity of the firm, or the nature or scale of the firm’s business''.     

Even if the FCA rules don't apply, the law does.  Misleading company names breach the CPUTRs.  I expect you have some idea about what happened to Wonga, who were described by the FCA as using a similar misleading 'legal firm demands' tactic "to maximise collections by unfairly increasing pressure on customers":
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jun/25/wonga-compensation-bill-unfair-misleading-practices

Martin Lewis, founder of consumer website MoneySavingExpert.com, said he welcomed the action being taken, adding: "Using lawyers as fake as its puppets, then having the stomach to charge people for it, is a thuggish tactic, aimed at scaring and intimidating people who are already struggling."

I see that PP Legal at least exists as a 'trading style' of another firm, yet your company name is deliberately chosen to suggest you are lawyers.  Could the intention be to mimic what your Directors perceive as the 'success' of 'BW Legal'?  Thankyou for recommending that I review the footer of your previous correspondence, from which I discovered that PP Management Services Ltd (11453590) share Directors with Premier Park Ltd (06434377).  This looks on the face of it, very much like the Wonga set up then; operating under a variety of trading names, whereby one trading name sends one letter then passes it to the next desk or office, where that employee sends different headed notepaper demands that look like they come from a 'legal' firm and threaten legal action within days. 

This sentence from your reply is particularly desperate: ''Accordingly, we are uncertain how you have interpreted the above statement and concluded that we intended to commence litigation in this matter when the opposite is made explicitly clear from our first correspondence.'' 

Your uncertainty is unfounded.  When an official looking demand says “Payment of the outstanding balance is required within fourteen days of this correspondence, failing which, the above referenced Parking Charge Notice will be referred to Premier Park Ltd.’s Solicitors...''  then it is entirely reasonable for a consumer to interpret the words  ''who are instructed to commence litigation for recovery of the outstanding monies forthwith” as meaning...well...that your clear intention was to extort monies from me within 14 days under threat of Premier Park Ltd intending to ''commence litigation''.  Indeed, I am uncertain how you could interpret your threat any other way.

In any event, I thank you for confirming in writing that your instruction by this claimant was 'erroneous' and that your letter sent on their behalf threatened 'litigation for recovery of the outstanding monies forthwith' on the one hand, yet failed to comply with the pre-action protocol for debt claims, on the other.  This is further evidence of the Claimant's and its Directors' wholly unreasonable conduct by trying to hide behind various trading names whilst harassing a person who you know has protected characteristics.

It was never my burden to highlight your erroneous instruction so kindly stop trying to blame me for your various companies' failures.  I recommend that Premier Park Ltd reviews and discontinues their meritless claim forthwith.  It goes without saying that the correspondence with the various trading names used by Premier Park Ltd's Directors will be shown to the court, should the matter eventually proceed to trial.

Finally, in the matter of costs thus far, I remind Premier Park Ltd that I filed and served my Summary Costs Assessment in early March 2020 and intend to seek my full costs at trial or in the event of a discontinuance.   Your Directors' various trading names are putting me to considerable wasted time and causing immense distress that for the sake of my mental and physical health I could have done without during the current crisis.  In Part 44.2. of the CPRs, the Court's discretion as to costs says:  
''(4) In deciding what order (if any) to make about costs, the court will have regard to all the circumstances, including –(a) the conduct of all the parties''.

yours faithfully, 

YOUR NAME

Littlewadie

where would I or any other person be able to find all this information, is there a website, is it free information? I would like to look at this myself, so I am more informed for future reference.
As always you are a fountain of knowledge coupon-mad, greatly appreciated too.

D_P_Dance

where would I or any other person be able to find all this information,

Nearly/probably everything you will ever need to know about anything can be found by using an internet  search engine.  Nearly all are free.

Coupon-mad

It's just stuff the regular posters have picked up over the years, but the links take you to things like the FCA handbook.  Thing is, I think only consumer credit (CCA 1974) agreements are actually covered by the FCA rules but it's worth throwing in and I covered that, when I said in the letter about even if the rules don't apply to parking charges then the law does. 

And you can google the CPUTRs and the word 'misleading' to see what the law says about that. 

Littlewadie

  After submitting the above response by email, I received this from BW legal within minutes, which was sent to the court and myself.

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We refer to the above matter and the Defendant’s email below.

 

We kindly request this email is placed upon the Court file as a matter of urgency in preparation for forthcoming hearing to be listed. No discourtesy is intended to the Court or Judge. The Defendant has also been copied into the email for service.

 

Upon receipt of the Defendant's email, the Claimant has deemed it prudent to respond to the same. We are therefore responding simply to set out the Claimant’s position regarding this new evidence submitted:

 

1.       It is submitted that without the Claimant’s permission, the Defendant requires the Court’s permission to amend his statement of case pursuant to CPR 17, which has not been granted. It is therefore submitted that this additional evidence should be disregarded.

 

2.       In so far as the court is willing to consider this new evidence, the Claimant has confirmed that PPLegal is the Debt Recovery Company who carry out debt recovery action if payment is not received on outstanding PCNs.

 

3.       PPLegal were erroneously instructed on this matter.

 

4.        The Claimant confirms that the PCN was originally referred to ZZPS (another debt recovery company) to recover the outstanding balance. Upon unsuccessfully doing so, the matter was referred to BW Legal to commence legal proceedings. Due to the PCN not being flagged in the correct status of the Claimant’s (Premier Park) system, the PCN was erroneously referred to PPLegal on 03 March 2020. The Defendant emailed PPLegal on 11 May 2020 (after having received 3x debt recovery letters) and the response detailed in the Defendant’s email was provided in response to her email.

 

5.       For clarification purposes, PPLegal were instructed to commence pre- debt recovery action in error. As such, a detailed response was provided to the Defendant to confirm the same, and PPLegal closed their file accordingly. The Defendant has since provided correspondence which confirms the same.

 

6.       Please note, the Claimant has not discontinued the legal proceedings issued nor will not be doing so. Despite the Defendant’s allegation, it was the Defendant’s responsibility to ensure she complied with the clearly displayed Terms and Conditions, as confirmed by the Supreme Court in ParkingEye v Beavis [2015]. The Defendant exceeded the maximum stay permitted which she does not deny. The breach is therefore undisputable, whilst it is clear that the Defendant is simply attempting to avoid liability for the PCN.

 

We trust the above clarifies the matter and await to receive a Notice of Hearing.

 

Yours faithfully,

Littlewadie

The Claimant confirms that the PCN was originally referred to ZZPS (another debt recovery company) to recover the outstanding balance.

There has been no mention of ZZPS in any previous correspondance or any paperwork or documentation supplied in the WS submitted by BW legal on behalf of premier Park Ltd. I have never heard of them or received anything from them.