Think I'm being taken to court for parking in my own space - what do I do next?

Mirandoch

No, I didn't. But I was sent a paper form, which is the one I've been filling in. Can't do any typing in that one. Even though I'm reasonably computer literate, I just still prefer doing most stuff by hand where I can. But if it's better to print the whole thing out and email it, then I can do that.

Mirandoch

And soon as I finished sending my last reply, a notification from B789 came up

Well I suppose emailing saves any worries about post getting there. All right, I'll download the form and fill in the online version. Hopefully it won't take long now that I've basically already filled it in once and only need copy the same answers.

B789

That's the way to go. We will have none of that Ludditism on here, thank you very much.

Email is probably the most secure way to do any correspondence as it is immediate, fully traceable and, if your handwriting is anything like mine (I should have been a doctor), legible.

Mirandoch

Hope everyone had a good Christmas.

So, ah, I'm going to court tomorrow. The day has finally arrived. Gladstone solicitors sent me an email a few weeks ago to let me know that their client won't be attending, so it will just be me (and my mum for support). I did phone up the county court to make sure the hearing was actually going ahead, because when I read the letter again today I realised I had not paid the court fee of £27. My fault entirely, I know - I didn't read the letter properly the first time and then never looked at it again until today.

It was a nightmare getting through on the phone, but eventually I got through to an actual human who confirmed the hearing was going ahead and that the claimant had paid the court fees. (Good: the more money I can cost them, the better.)

Wish me luck, folks. I've no idea what to expect, but I hope the judgement goes my way obviously!

KeithP

Mirandoch said:

I realised I had not paid the court fee of £27. My fault entirely, I know - I didn't read the letter properly the first time and then never looked at it again until today.

Didn't read it properly the second time either. 
As you've now found out, it's the Claimant that pays the hearing fee.

Mirandoch said:
I've no idea what to expect...

Have you not yet seen this video?...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=n93eoaxhzpU
@Umkomaas gave you that link earlier - on 16 October 2021.
Just three or four people sitting round a table having a discussion.

Mirandoch

KeithP said:

Didn't read it properly the second time either. 
As you found out, it's the Claimant that pays the hearing fee.

*reads a third time*. Ahaha, oh god you're right! My mum read it and missed that part too, to be fair :P

Mirandoch

Case dismissed

It must have been one one of the shortest hearings ever. Not only did nobody from Gladstones show up, they also hadn't informed the court they wouldn't be attending or sent them any evidence. The judge appeared to take a dim view of this and said almost immediately that he would be striking the case off. He did warn me that the claimant could reopen the case in the future and gave a gentle reminder to bring evidence next time (things like my lease, etc.)

So, not a single penny owed. So glad it's all (probably) over now.

PS: I admit, when I was given the date for the hearing a few months ago, that was the moment I largely gave up the fight. Had the parking company persisted and not appeared to have completely given up themselves, who knows, the outcome might have been different today.

Coupon-mad

Mirandoch said:

Case dismissed

It must have been one one of the shortest hearings ever. Not only did nobody from Gladstones show up, they also hadn't informed the court they wouldn't be attending or sent them any evidence. The judge appeared to take a dim view of this and said almost immediately that he would be striking the case off. He did warn me that the claimant could reopen the case in the future and gave a gentle reminder to bring evidence next time (things like my lease, etc.)

So, not a single penny owed. So glad it's all (probably) over now.

PS: I admit, when I was given the date for the hearing a few months ago, that was the moment I largely gave up the fight. Had the parking company persisted and not appeared to have completely given up themselves, who knows, the outcome might have been different today.

Wow that is great news!  So they didn't send any evidence either?! Not even to you?

NICE!  I had my fingers crossed for you.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST!

Now, get your real revenge:

Please do the Justice Committee Inquiry while it is fresh in your mind, if you want to change things:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/80375249/#Comment_80375249

The Committee invites evidence on:

• What the current level of delay in the County Court is

• The ways in which the County Court engages with litigants in person, and how this could be improved

• The causes of action giving rise to claims in the County Court

• What future reforms to the County Court should be considered.

Nothing will change if people don't seize this one-off Inquiry opportunity, and the good thing is, the Government is already actively finalising regulating the parking industry so change can happen in 2024 to the court process and the pre-action protocol, as part of the Framework already slotting into place.

The Justice Committee are not necessarily expecting submissions about parking cases though - parking cases would not have been on their radar when they opened this Inquiry, all they know is that there are horrific delays in the County courts - which is why we need to send them responses that tells them EXACTLY which industry is causing it.

The more evidence of parking claims wasting court time, the better.  In your own words please.

Also you may like to answer one of their questions telling the Committee that the court letters are in legalese and are impossible to decipher for a victim Defendant of a parking firm. Tell them:

You thought YOU (Defendant) had to pay the hearing fee and so did two others online within a day of your post about it.  This suggests the court Directions are just not clear and fair enough to consumers.

You didn't even know that you could have sent in evidence because that bit was buried in small print and wasn't transparent & obvious.

"This inquiry is currently accepting evidence

The committee wants to hear your views. We welcome submissions from anyone with answers to the questions in the call for evidence.

You have until Wednesday 17 January 2024  to make a submission to the committee."

Mirandoch

Thank you, Coupon! Thanks to all of you. I genuinely could not have gone this far without you.

Anyway, I've learnt my lesson. Never put anything off I can do today otherwise I will never do it. So I decided to write my reply to the Justice Committee straight away. But before submitting it, I'd like to run it past you first if that's okay.

Evidence for the Justice Committee

I am writing to give the inquiry details of my experience of being taken to court by a private parking company, Parking Control Management (UK) Ltd. The reason I am doing this is because I believe that the case was entirely frivolous and a waste of stretched court resources and time.

It began about 6 years ago when I received a parking ticket in the residential car park for the block of flats I live in. I was parked in my own space allocated to me by the housing management, but the permit had slipped down the dashboard and was partially out of sight. I have lived in this location since 2015 and have had the same car the whole time, so it could hardly have been an unfamiliar sight to the parking company employee who operated there.

I appealed the first ticket, which got rejected. Over the next 2-3 years, I got a couple more tickets for failure to display a valid permit. Knowing from experience that an appeal would be rejected, I ignored those tickets. I also ignored the numerous letters from various debt collection agencies, thinking that they were just trying to scare me into paying and nothing would come from it.

This changed in 2021 when I received a letter from Gladstones Solicitors declaring that court proceedings were imminent. That was the point I sought help from an online forum dedicated to contesting private parking tickets, as I was now out of my depth and did not know what to do next. They were very helpful and walked me through each step of the way. I don’t think I could have done it on my own.

But they could not prevent the private parking firm from actually taking me to court and last autumn I received a date for the hearing: 4th January 2024. A few weeks prior to this I had received an email from Gladstones Solicitors informing me that the Claimant would not be attending the hearing. They also sent me a copy of the Claimant’s Witness Statement, which they said had been filed with the court.

When I actually went to court yesterday, not only was there no legal representative present, there was also no Witness Statement. The judge told us (my mum was with me) that he would be striking out the case, since there was no case. Nobody had turned up; nobody had sent any evidence. The entire hearing lasted about 5 minutes, if that. While I was hugely relieved at the outcome, I was also angry at the sheer amount of time wasted on this frivolous, unnecessary case. There is a huge backlog of court cases and in some cases victims of serious crime are waiting years before their case is heard. Meanwhile, my pathetic parking charge is heard within a year.

This was my first experience with the law and I hope to never have a second experience.

One more thing I’d like to mention: the court letters. I found them to be full of legalese and hard for a layperson not familiar with legal terms to understand. For example, I thought I had to pay the court fee of £27 instead of the Claimant. I understand my error now, but in the letter that was not made clear.

I also did not know I could send in evidence because that bit was buried in small print too. Luckily on the day I had a sympathetic judge who was able to tell me what evidence to bring next time, in the unlikely event of the Claimant reopening the case. The fault was partly mine as well for not reading the letters carefully enough or doing my due research. But the letters were genuinely hard to understand and off-putting to anyone not trained in the law.

Coupon-mad

That's great! Please submit it.

I would just remove this (because crimes are not heard in small claims / county court, so it's muddling up different types of court cases):

 There is a huge backlog of court cases and in some cases victims of serious crime are waiting years before their case is heard. Meanwhile, my pathetic parking charge is heard within a year.

and add pics of your claim form and the first couple of pages of the hearing order that confused you, embedded in a Word Doc which is the only format the Inquiry accepts (or make your whole submission one Word Doc with pics of your documents at the end). You could highlight the wording that was confusing.

and please add this at the end:

The reason an individual Defendant's own account of a typical 'waste of time' parking case should be taken more seriously than submissions steered by Claimant court-usergroups (that are dominated by bulk litigators for whom litigation is the aim) is that parking claims represent over a quarter of the 1.5 million small claims last year.

This was proved by figures supplied to the DLUHC by the MoJ in 2023 to inform the draft Parking Code Impact Assessment (the top five litigator claim numbers are on page 61 here, one of which is almost certainly Gladstones):

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64b6666a0ea2cb001315e47b/Draft_IA_-_Private_Parking_Code_of_Practice_.pdf

The only reason two of the columns show fewer claims this year than last is because they are parking firms with in-house litigation teams who have started to outsource cases to DCB Legal, who are undoubtedly the bulk 'consumer CCJ threat' litigator shown in column B, because they only started 4 years before and are now whamming in 100k boilerplate claims per annum.  Gladstones are in one of the other columns, along with BW Legal (despite the anonymised image, the bulk litigators are notoriously prolific and known).

This is a national disgrace, happening under the MoJ's nose, and 90% result in auto CCJs which is what bulk litigators with their own bailiff arms want. Gladstones now have a bailiff arm called Empira and DCB Legal of course have DCB Ltd, so the MCOL system is an automatic easy route to aggressive enforcement (worse than was ever seen from clampers).  Regardless of the merits of the parking charges and fake damages, good people are getting CCJs to old addresses behind their backs.

Private parking firms and their bulk litigators are the main cause of delays as far as small claims are concerned.

The MoJ must now be informed to liaise again with the DLUHC to urgently separate parking cases with a new pre-action protocol, requiring use of the Single Appeals Service as the only ADR, instead of inflated debt demands and bulk litigators who do not see court as a last resort, but an easy way to make a lot of money due to the numbers.

Which will only get worse in 2024 if the MoJ increase legal fee FRC levels for small claims in April which they appear to intend 'due to inflation'.  Claimants are being enabled and rewarded; even this rogue industry that the Government is trying to curb.  It makes no sense and some joined up thinking is needed to rescue 'PCN scam' victims from this credit-wrecking horror.  Going to court filled you with fear but you did it.  Most of the half a million or so private PCN court claim victims per annum are not that lucky.