NCP Autopay and parking fine

Foxtails

Hi, hoping for some advice for my daughter please, she’s very stressed by the situation she finds herself in and has done nothing wrong. (Sorry for the long post).

My daughter regularly uses the Great Northern Warehouse Manchester 2 car park and has the app to autopay on exit.  She has done this for several months.  Out of the blue at beginning of August she receives 5 letters (yes 5! all relating to a week in May) from Trace debt collector saying she had received several letters previously and she now owes £800 payable in 10 days for non payment of parking charges. She hadn’t received anything from NCP or them!! Her online account shows no outstanding balance. 

She spoke to NCP as too late to  appeal online and she didn’t have any reference number to use if she could. They gave her an appeal reference number and told her to send an email to appeals department explaining what she had told them, that it was their error etc for not taking the payment plus she had not received any correspondence. She had checked emails, junk etc. She was told to speak to Trace as they couldn’t.  She gave Trace the appeal reference number and was told they would put the claim against her on hold. They also went on to tell her that there were 5 further dates showing non payment of parking charges in June passed to them from NCP, so she now owes £1600!! Again they are dates all together.  Again has heard nothing from NCP. It is obviously their error with the app and not taking payment and it’s not her not paying! 

It is now over 6 weeks since she sent email. She only received the auto reply when sent and heard absolutely nothing from NCP since. She spoke to NCP yesterday (on the phone for 1 1/2 hours) and all they could tell her was it didn’t look like they had even looked at it yet but they couldn’t be sure and they had no way of contacting the appeals department either by phone or email!  They said Trace would be the ones that would contact her. She spoke to them and they hadn’t heard anything, although they said it was taking longer than usual.

So what should she do now? The way she has been treated by NCP is dreadful. She has done nothing wrong. She wasn’t given the chance to sort things prior to it going to the debt collectors. Surely the timescale is not acceptable.  It is causing her great anxiety..
TIA

Coupon-mad

Contact the app provider and ask them what went wrong on these occasions. Is it that she made payments but the app failed, or that NCP bounced the money back and didn't take it, or what

Ask them to confirm the position in detail BY EMAIL as you need it as evidence to make a complaint to the BPA.   Do not just have a phone conversation, as that has as much evidential worth as the paper it's written on.

Did you get different headed notepaper Trace letters, firstly the one with the magnifying glass logo top left, threatening that she 'will get a CCJ' amd patronising her about the pre-action protocol, then followed by a set of letters  with 'Trace Legal Dept' and scales of justice logo, pretending that they have a Litigation Manager? 

So has she got 5 letters from Trace or fifteen by now?  Please send photos of them to @ParkingMad, who is collating Trace letters for a complaint to the BPA which is what she also needs to do.

We have seen other NCP cases this year where they failed to take money paid by credit card. Was she paying by card?  It might be that her bank can provide the email evidence she needs to show the transactions were made but refused by NCP.

Finally, is her car registered to an old address?  Check the logbook!

D_P_Dance

She owes nothing unless a judge says so, and vertainly not £160 as they have added what appears to be an extra unlawful amount fof £60 or debt collection. Judges have dismissed an entire claim because of this. Read this and complain to your MP.

Excel v Wilkinson

At the Bradford County Court, District Judge Claire Jackson (now HHJ Jackson, a Specialist Civil Circuit Judge) decided to hear a 'test case' a few months ago, where £60 had been added to a parking charge despite Judges up and down the country repeatedly disallowing that sum and warning parking firms not to waste court time with such spurious claims.   That case was Excel v Wilkinson: G4QZ465V, heard in July 2020 and leave to appeal was refused and that route was not pursued.  The Judge concluded that such claims are proceedings with 'an improper collateral purpose'.   This Judge - and others who have since copied her words and struck dozens of cases out in late 2020 and into 2021 - went into significant detail and concluded that parking operators (such as this Claimant) are seeking to circumvent CPR 27.14 as well as breaching the Consumer Rights Act 2015.   DJ Hickinbottom has recently struck more cases out in that court area, stating: ''I find that striking out this claim is the only appropriate manner in which the disapproval of the court can be shown''.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/16qovzulab1szem/G4QZ465V Excel v Wilkinson.pdf?dl=0

Terry1931

Who said £160? 

KeithP

Terry1931 said:

Who said £160? 

Simple arithmetic.

The OP mentions five letters totalling £800.

NCC1701-A

Foxtails said:

...receives 5 letters (yes 5! all relating to a week in May) from Trace debt collector saying she had received several letters previously and she now owes £800 .....

.......They also went on to tell her that there were 5 further dates showing non payment of parking charges in June passed to them from NCP, so she now owes £1600!! ....

Someone's calculator also doesn't seem to work, £800/ 5 = £160, or £1600/ 10 = £160.

Foxtails

Coupon-mad said:

Contact the app provider and ask them what went wrong on these occasions. Is it that she made payments but the app failed, or that NCP bounced the money back and didn't take it, or what

Ask them to confirm the position in detail BY EMAIL as you need it as evidence to make a complaint to the BPA.   Do not just have a phone conversation, as that has as much evidential worth as the paper it's written on.

Did you get different headed notepaper Trace letters, firstly the one with the magnifying glass logo top left, threatening that she 'will get a CCJ' amd patronising her about the pre-action protocol, then followed by a set of letters  with 'Trace Legal Dept' and scales of justice logo, pretending that they have a Litigation Manager? 

So has she got 5 letters from Trace or fifteen by now?  Please send photos of them to @ParkingMad, who is collating Trace letters for a complaint to the BPA which is what she also needs to do.

We have seen other NCP cases this year where they failed to take money paid by credit card. Was she paying by card?  It might be that her bank can provide the email evidence she needs to show the transactions were made but refused by NCP.

Finally, is her car registered to an old address?  Check the logbook!

Thanks so much for the reply. I’ll get her to look into all your points. Does it make a difference which letterhead was on the Trace letters? She’s only had 5 the other 5 haven’t been sent out due to the appeal apparently. She definitely has the NCP app set up to pay via her debit card. So interesting to hear that other cases have occurred where payment wasn’t taken. Were they on this forum?  The address was updated on her log book May I think, could have been earlier. Do you think this could has affected things? Trace have got the correct address seemingly. Should she ask for copies of all previous correspondence sent to her if there was any?  No correspondence arrived from NCP regarding the dates in June either though. So sorry for all the questions..

Foxtails

D_P_Dance said:

She owes nothing unless a judge says so, and vertainly not £160 as they have added what appears to be an extra unlawful amount fof £60 or debt collection. Judges have dismissed an entire claim because of this. Read this and complain to your MP.

Excel v Wilkinson

At the Bradford County Court, District Judge Claire Jackson (now HHJ Jackson, a Specialist Civil Circuit Judge) decided to hear a 'test case' a few months ago, where £60 had been added to a parking charge despite Judges up and down the country repeatedly …

Thank you for your reply. She has not been sent a breakdown of the £160 for each day but when she spoke to them and queried the extra debt collection part they couldn’t tell her what it was for!

Coupon-mad

Yes we had at least one other NCP case where payment was made as far as the victim was concerned but NCP didn't take the money; effectively the transaction was rejected by them.  I seem to recall the victim appealed to POPLA and they had managed to get evidence from their bank.  NCP cancelled the PCN.  No idea which case, sorry. 

Thing is, your daughter can't appeal because she didn't get the PCNs due to them going to her old address.  She has updated the V5C address as well as her driving licence, yes?

Shockingly, the DVLA don't do joined up address data rectification, don't bother to update all databases when a  data subject tells them they've moved, which is a breach of the GDPR 2018.  They know.  I've told them.

@ParkingMad is collating Trace letters for people who want to make a complaint to the BPA (in this case, your daughter's complaint would be about NCP and Trace) and i appreciate that she 'only' has the first 5 so far but they are bad enough in terms of misleading people (and not sending one letter but sending five...trying to get five lots of false added debt collection 'costs').

And what NCP has done is wrong if they rejected payments again, as we've seen this Summer...the dates may even be around the same time as that other person.  But your DD needs to get chapter and verse from her bank as to what their records show about these mysterious failed transactions.

neilsmith58

I can't help Foxtails, but I’m also appealing at least 7 fines incurred at Leigh on sea C2C NCP car park. It’s my belief that NCP somehow lost my online ‘Autopay' details at the beginning on September. I had registered on their Autopay my new credit card early August and charges were taken during that month, however unbeknownst to me no charges were taken during September. This issue only came to light when I received on the 30th September 5 notices (at the same time) dated 28th September for stays on the 1st, 2nd, 7th, 9th and 10th, I have subsequently received 2 more notices dated 11th October, for parking on 21st and 23rd September, which I have again appealed. 

I’ve parked at that car park for over 35 years and so know exactly what is required to stay there. Unfortunately NCP have rejected my first 5 appeals, although they reduced it to an administration cost of £20 for each notice, however if I appeal to POPLA I will lose that ‘offer’.

I know I am not at fault, and had they notified me in good time, not almost 4 weeks after the first ‘offence’, I would have been able to address the problem immediately. I still have not received an explanation from NCP as to how my details were lost, and I'm concerned they had an IT issue that compromised my credit card information. I have checked with MasterCard and they have no records of any payment rejection and so there’s no issues there.

its a shocking situation.

Coupon-mad

Please can you BOTH send your evidence to the head of AOS at the BPA, Sara Roberts, as NCP clearly seem to have a payment reconciliation problem at some sites right now.  Tell her the good folk at MSE parking forum sent you as we are alarmed at the pattern we've seen:

sara.r@britishparking.co.uk