Bristol Airport VCS - Stopping to Drop Off Charge Notice - Pedestrian Crossing

Im_tired_of_this

Update. 

Following a private conversation with @bargepole (and in line with his message above) I'm going to submit a supplementary witness statement, by the 8th Feb, to support my counterclaim for the hearing on the 22nd Feb. This will include a copy of the Judgement in case G2QZ60G1, VEHICLE CONTROL SERVICES LTD and ROBERT FERGUSON, to help substantiate the amount claimed for the breach of the data protection regulations. 

I will pay the counterclaim fee of £59 before the 10th, and hope to see VCS in court on the 22nd.

Im_tired_of_this

Update:

Supplementary Witness statement emailed to both the court and the claimant on Tuesday 7th February.
Made one error in the supplementary statement, that has been corrected today and emailed to both the court and the claimant again, and that was to miss my Statement of Truth page from the bundle!  !!!!!!! 

I'll prepare a redacted version in the next few days and will link to it here. 

Hearing fee of £59 paid for my counterclaim today, in person. Couldn't get through to them on the phone. While there, I spoke to the clerk about the missing statement of truth in the supplementary bundle, and he said to send in a replacement as soon as possible and it would be up to the judge to decide if it is important. The clerk seemed genuinely surprised that the claimant had not responded to the counterclaim. 

Coupon-mad

Take with you to the hearing, in addition to printed copies of all submissions and exhibits, the letter you got from the CCBC acknowledging your counterclaim and stating it had been sent to the Claimant.  The first letter you got from the CCBC after defending.

And receipts for the filing & hearing fees.

I say this because I suspect the C's rep might try to tell the Judge they "never knew there was a counterclaim and were not sent a copy"... we know they were, but be ready to quash their shenanigans.

Also take printed out proof of emailing (to the local court and Claimant's solicitor) the new bundle with the statement of truth in it AND the first email that went in time.

Again, expect games to be played:

"Judge, we only got the first WS" or

"Judge, we didn't receive a WS at all".

Im_tired_of_this

Thanks @Coupon-mad

That's a really helpful checklist. 

Im_tired_of_this

Evening all. 

My counterclaim hearing is on Wednesday 22nd February at 11:30am. 

I sat down earlier to work through my preparations and to make sure I had all the printouts I needed for the hearing, when I checked my personal email to discover an email that arrived at 5:27pm (Monday 20th) from the (now) defendant (formerly claimant) addressed to the court with me copied in and with the subject line: EXTREMELY URGENT FOR HRAING ON 22/02/2023. This was from a paralegal who it would appear was in a bit of a panic when emailing it, sufficient not to notice or check the error in the spelling of 'hearing' in the subject line and whom I shan't embarrass by naming. 

In it was a bundle that offered up a basic defence of the counterclaim of a breach of the data protection act, saying that they had probable cause because I was in breach of the terms of entering the 'development'. No specifics, nothing referencing my arguments, nothing I'm worried about facing. 

The more annoying claim in the bundle is that my original counterclaim was defended, and they include a statement alleging to be from the 8th November 2022 and signed by a legal executive, whom I'd happily name, but probably shouldn't. You might recall from the messages earlier in this thread that I received nothing in response to my original counterclaim when submitting my original defence on the 23rd of October 2022. 

Fortunately, to counter this, on the 24th January, on the deadline day for court bundle submissions for the hearing this week, I wrote to the court after the deadline had passed and asked the court if they had received any paperwork from the claimant. The court confirmed on the 1st February (email copies printed out for Wednesday) that they "can confirm that the Claimant has not filed any documents with the Court". 

The defence itself is identical to the one submitted today in the EXTREMELY URGENT bundle. So again, I'm not worried about facing it if the judge decides to allow either of them to be used. 

So apart from that little diversion of this evening's prep, I think I'm ready to go. 

I do find myself wondering about whether I get given the option by the judge to let their evidence be presented. Given how weak it is, maybe it would be better to beat them while they attempt to defend themselves, or better to deny them to opportunity to use it. Any thoughts?

Coupon-mad

Deny them the opportunity.  That should mean their rep is not even allowed to speak.

This rubbish was served ONE DAY before your counterclaim hearing (5.30pm not counting as part of the working day today).

There is 'late' and there is wholly unreasonably late...and what looks like an attempt to mislead the court that the counterclaim was defended in November when it patently wasn't...

You should ask the Judge to consider an uplift in your counterclaim (an increase in damages awarded for continued data abuse) to signal the extreme disapproval of the court.  Even worse that this is a legally represented Claimant.

And if the Judge thinks this supposed defence to the counterclaim looks like it was created at the same time as this appallingly late WS then perhaps the Claimant's Director (or whoever the WITNESS is) should be hauled to a hearing to explain - under oath if the court sees fit - when exactly they 'signed' both submissions and why they should not face a possible referral for contempt of court...

Be CAREFUL not to directly accuse or use words like fraud or forgery.  Do not venture into criminal offence accusations (it can backfire).

Simply invite the Judge to take a forensic approach to this week's sudden submissions, and sanction the Claimant accordingly.

They are still the Claimant.

You are a 'Part 20 Counterclaimant'.

Push for an uplift and ALL your costs.

Im_tired_of_this

That's brilliant, thank you @Coupon-mad. 

Im_tired_of_this

Just come out of court. 

I won.

VCS judged to have breached the DPA on the grounds that seeking my keeper's details for stopping at a pedestrian crossing was not legitimate.

More later.

Boat_to_Bolivia

Brilliant. Well done

Im_tired_of_this

Some more points at this stage - I'll keep updating with further posts as I get time and I remember things. 

My counterclaim for breach of the Data Protection Act, was based on a flow-down of VCS's ability and legitimacy to request keeper's details from the DVLA. These are the steps down:

1. No contract existed because the signs at the airport do not constitute and offer that is accepted by driving on the airport's roads. 

• Despite my efforts to restate this during the hearing and emphasise that it precedes all other issues, the judge thought that VCS had a legitimate contractual position to protect the use of the private roads at the airport. I appreciate that to judge on this issue in my favour would deligitimise all of VCS's activity policing use of the roads (as opposed to just the car parks) and maybe I didn't do enough to demonstrate that that is the situation, if my evidence on VCS's contract with Bristol Airport and the byelaws that are in place are all, in fact, correct.

2. The airport byelaws present information that seems clear to me means that a private enforcement company cannot control the use of the main roads through the airport because the Traffic Regulations (i.e. the main Road Traffic Act) are in place to manage such control.

• Again despite my efforts to emphasise this point, it was bundled up into the previous one about VCS's legitimate interests to control the use of the land. 

So, as the judge was working through these points in this order, I had the feeling I had lost. However, he had spent a great deal of time in the hearing itself clarifying with the Solicitor's Agent representing VCS whether he agreed that pursuing someone who had stopped at a pedestrian crossing was not a legitimate reason to approach the DVLA for keeper's details regardless of the perceived reasons for that stop. 

3. Following the rules of the road and stopping at a pedestrian crossing is not a legitimate reason for a parking controller to ask for the keeper's details for my car. 

• To which the judge wholeheartedly agreed. He came up with a few examples of other situations where this would also be self-evidently nonsense - largely drawn from the Jopson judge's examples of what isn't parking - such as a queue of traffic, and how an over-zealous employee at VCS would clearly be creating PCN's that defy common-sense (my precis) if they were to be issued for these events. At this point I offered the judge some real-life examples of over-zealous VCS employees doing just such a thing, from this wonderful archive on MSE, but he said he wasn't interested in anything other than my case, so I didn't get the chance to talk about queue's for car parks to stop signs on the road; should probably have been in my evidence bundle, in retrospect. 

So, I won. 

It is definitely a narrow victory, though, as I'd have much rather won on the broader contract issues, but one victory at a time. 

Oh, and the points in my posts earlier this week, and in response to @Coupon-mad, VCS's original defence of my counterclaim was emailed to the court on the November date referenced in their statement, so that was allowed, despite my complaints that I hadn't seen it until this week, and they could provide no evidence that they even tried to send it to me. I did, however, say earlier in the hearing that I wasn't bothered by what it had said. However, their whole bundle emailed on Monday was not admitted, and the Solicitor's Agent was made to squirm for a while when being asked to account for that fact.

The judgement awarded me half of my original £500 claim, a I had made two original counterclaims right at the very beginning of the process - distress and breach of the data protection act - of which I acknowledged at the beginning of the hearing I was only pursuing one. So the judge seems to have simply split it 50-50. I got basic travel and hearing fee costs also. The judge didn't think VCS's conduct was sufficiently unreasonable to hit them with any of my litigant-in-person fees.

I thought the judge was very fair with both of us, particularly me as a litigant-in-person, and didn't seem remotely bothered by any perceived inconsistencies in paperwork from me over the submissions I had made.

The hearing lasted 90 minutes.

I'll share the judgement when it is on public record.

More later.