Please Help - have to submit a defence asap - very poor signage at non pay and display car park

RapidD

bargepole said:

On the question of whether they should be excused attendance, CPR 27.9 says that if a party does not wish to attend the hearing, and wishes the Judge to consider their case on paper evidence only, they must notify the Court and the other party at least 7 days before the trial date. It's not clear from the above whether they actually did that.

This is interesting and thank you for the information. I wish I had know this before the hearing but I really didn't expect them not to show up so I wasn't prepared for this eventuality. 

In fairness to the court they did mention some of this but I was slightly confused. They put in their witness statement that 'the claimant' wasn't going to attend court but I assumed Gladstones would do this in their stead. The admin person said that Gladstones had emailed them and asked to be excused, they categorically didn't contact me informing me of the same. The admin person asked if they had let me know, my response was that their witness statement had mentioned the claimant wouldn't be appearing but I was unsure whether a legal representative would be attending, as they hadn't notified me either way.