County Court Case - Gladstones acting for Euro Parking Services [Update - I WON]

mrdeepee

Hi guys,

Looks like we're going to court with this as I've just received the Witness Statement from Gladstones. I've attached a copy here and if you've got any feedback to the statement that I can respond to in mine, please share. I'm sending my own witness statement tomorrow:

Castle

That "Statement of truth" from the claimant starts "The Defendant believes"; have they copy and pasted something else by mistake?

mrdeepee

Very likely. They got the name if the court wrong at the beginning. Also they said they've included the font size of their signs to show they were very visible and yet they didn't provide this info anywhere. 

1505grandad

Also  -  Para 31  -  THE DEFENCE

What is this "Bevis" case that is distinguished?  -  (surely they are not trying to insinuate that the OP is careless  -  looks as though spelt correctly in draft D posted previously).

Castle

According to Google this is a "Drive-Thru" and time spent using the "Drive-Thru" is not parking.

Umkomaas

In regard to the £60 'contractual costs' you will need to include in your WS this statement helpfully provided by legally qualified, regular forum contributor @bargepole.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities ('DLUHC') has published, as of 7 February 2022, a statutory Code of Practice which all private parking Operators are required to comply with. This states, at Section 9, that 'The parking operator must not levy additional costs over and above the level of a parking charge or parking tariff as originally issued.'  In the present case, the Claimant has added a sum of [INSERT FIGURE HERE], described as '[INSERT DESCRIPTION HERE]', which is clearly contrary to the intention of the Code. Whilst it is accepted that the new statutory Code does not take full effect immediately, it clearly sets out the Government's intentions regarding private parking, and the Court is invited to strike out this element of the claim, irrespective of the determination of any other element.,

mrdeepee

I have also just noticed that the Site Plan submitted by the Claimant in their Witness Statement shows there are 9 signs at the site, when in fact there are only 5.

Umkomaas

mrdeepee said:

I have also just noticed that the Site Plan submitted by the Claimant in their Witness Statement shows there are 9 signs at the site, when in fact there are only 5.

You can rebut that in your WS to undermine their assertion, but you will need proof to back up your position. 

But - what deadline have you been given by when to submit your WS?  As a rule of thumb, because PPC low-rent legals are notoriously late in submitting their WS, when we see one before the defendant has submitted their own, they have very often missed the deadline and are in peril of a judgment in default being awarded against them. 

mrdeepee

Umkomaas said:

mrdeepee said:

I have also just noticed that the Site Plan submitted by the Claimant in their Witness Statement shows there are 9 signs at the site, when in fact there are only 5.

You can rebut that in your WS to undermine their assertion, but you will need proof to back up your position. 

But - what deadline have you been given by when to submit your WS?  As a rule of thumb, because PPC low-rent legals are notoriously late in submitting their WS, when we see one before the defendant has submitted their own, they have very often missed the deadline and are in peril of a judgment in default being awarded against them. 

I have actual pictures from the site to show there are only 5 signs at the site. The claimant's evidence is an aerial diagram of the site, marking where the signs are, and a pdf printout of the signs, not a photograph of the actual signs at the site.
Deadline for submission of WS is today and I'll be doing that via email

mrdeepee

Hello guys,

Thanks to the information gathered from this forum, I was able to correctly navigate the County Court system as a defendant, on behalf of my missus, and I'm pleased to say that we won the case and even got £40 costs awarded.

I wanted to give a summary of how things played out during the hearing, as I'm sure it'll help other motorists that are going to court.

The arguments I used in the defence are as follows:

1. The claim is tainted by an abuse of process because the claimant has added £60 "contractual costs", which constitutes double recovery because Parking firms must choose between a Beavis-level charge calculations or loss-based damages. The added £60 means they're seeking to plead their claim in both. I provided a transcript of the judgement in Britannia Parking v Crosby (Southampton Court 11.11.19), where the judge basically threw the case out because of this.

2. The ParkingEye Ltd v Beavis [2015] UKSC 67 Case is distinguished and the global sum of £160 in this claim is a penalty

3. The claimant provided as evidence of their right to pursue the claim, a contract with the landowner, which was heavily redacted. I argued this wasn't acceptable because the redactions made it impossible for the defence to assess the rights of the claimant to pursue the claim, since the information required to assess this had been redacted. I mentioned the Court of Appeal case of Hancock v Promontoria (Chestnut) Limited [2020] EWCA Civ 907, where the judges

I fleshed out these arguments properly in the defence, but it was all to no avail because the judge DIDN'T accept any of these as grounds to rule in our favour. She basically said there's enough case law that allows her to rule in favour of the claimant on these points. This leads me to conclude that as a matter of law, motorists currently do not have any legal arguments to make about parking firms not being able to issue the fine or charge the amount they currently do.

Where motorists stand a chance, is to hope that they are arguing their case against an incompetent legal representative that has put together a claim that you can pick holes in. This happens a lot more than you might think because the likes of Gladstones still operate under the model of going to court on the cheap & using template arguments in their claims. The level of attention to detail they give to each claim they file in court, is light years away from what you'd expect from a lawyer representing a client in court.

These guys deal with tens of thousands of parking spaces across the country; they chase hundreds of thousands of parking fines every year and the circumstances surrounding how motorists came to be issued with the parking fines are different. To put it plainly, there are many variables at play here and parking firms and their solicitors will not allocate resources to investigate each claim they take to court on its unique set of facts. They won't do this because it'll make their business model unprofitable.

Their current business model is profitable because they can solidly rely on the fact that millions of motorists don't know their rights and will automatically pay any parking fines they get. For those who don't pay up, most will cave when threatened with court action. For those who don't cave at this stage, many will be intimated by the court process and will pay up, settle in arbitration or don't put up a defence. For those cases that go as far as a hearing, the template arguments of parking firms will, more by chance than design, be sufficient to win them some of those cases.

Whichever way you look at it, this is an immensely profitable model because as things stand, the numbers will always work in their favour.

This business model is also what will work to the advantage of the informed and empowered motorist, who is prepared to put in the work to put in a defence that speaks to the unique set of facts surrounding their parking fine.


Here's How We Won

In our case, the claimant presented as part of their evidence bundle, a site plan of the car park showing the location of 9 signs, and they provided pdf printouts of these signs. They also mentioned in their claim that they have regular inspections at the site to ensure their signs and cameras met the "strict requirements" of their Accredited Trade Association, which in this case was the Independent Parking Community (IPC).

In actual fact there were only 4 signs at the car park and the date on the site plan, next to the signature of the "senior manager" who was confirming that the car park had passed inspection, was 4 years before our fine was issued.

I knew there were 5 missing signs because in preparation for our defence, I went back to the site to take pictures of the signs as they were in situ. I also made a video to show the view of the car park from inside a vehicle as a motorist drives around the car park. My pictures and videos showed that there were only 4 signs at the car park and that the signs were sparsely located and not noticeable. All these were submitted to the court as part of our defence.

Gladstones Solicitors didn't send a lawyer to the hearing. Their case was instead argued by a staff of Euro Parking Services, who called himself a "Legal Case Handler", and had clearly never been to the car park in question.

When I pointed out, and showed with my pictures, that he was lying to the court because their site plan showed 5 more signs than there actually was at the site, the guy insisted that the signs were there. He then pointed to the 5 invisible signs in the pictures and said they were really there, effectively asking the judge to ignore the evidence of her eyes.

The judge asked him when last the site was audited, and he said recently. She asked him if he had an exact date and he said he didn't. She then pointed to the date on the site plan which was 4 years before my parking fine was issued, and asked if that could be the last time the site was audited. He mumbled something incoherent, and the judge said she'd accept that date on the site plan, as the last time the site was audited before my wife's visit. She asked him if he'd visited the site himself, and he said he doesn't remember because he visits lots of sites.

The guy then went ahead to brazenly say that my pictures assisted him with proving his claim, as they showed their signs were very visible and impossible to miss. The judge kept a poker face, but I could tell she was baffled at the cheek of the claimant.

To cut a long story short, the judge concluded by saying that the evidence presented by the defence was not there to assist the claimant and it was the responsibility of the claimant to present evidence to support his claim. She said the pdf printouts they provided of the signs were useless in helping her determine how visible their signs were because anything could be made large and visible on a word document. They should have provided pictures to show how the signs were in situ.

She denied the claim and asked if we wanted to make a counter claim for costs, and my wife screamed YES. She asked what our costs were and my wife said she'd had to take time off work to attend the hearing, and this was time she'd have to make up. She further added that I had spent days working on her defence. The judge said she couldn't make any award for the time I'd spent working on the defence but said as the hearing lasted for 2 hours, she'd award costs of 2 hours pay to my wife, which came up to £40.

The judge asked the claimant if he had any arguments to make about this, and surprisingly he said he didn't. She then ordered that they make payment within 2 weeks of the hearing.

So, guys, this was how we beat Euro Parking Services in court.

My final impressions are that the judges are on the side of the motorist, as long as the defence gives them something to work with by putting in evidence pertinent to the individual facts of their case. It's an added bonus if the parking firm puts up a half baked claim like mine did with their site plan and lack of pictures.

As a matter of law though, I don't think existing case law is on the side of the motorist, and this is something that motorists will have to campaign to change.