Gladstones Solicitors - Reply to Letter before Claim or email Gladstones?

rosiedriscl

Hi everyone,

Apologies if this has been covered before but I have been struggling to piece information together over multiple forums, I have avoided posting any dates/identifying information and trying my best to follow the newbies thread haha. I am a tenant in a building of flats in London owned and managed by a management company. The car park below the building is managed by CPM, and is a private underground car park in which you can only enter with your keys/fob to the building. Each car has a specific parking bay allocated to their flat when the flat is purchased.

Upon moving into the building a paper permit was issued, which flew out the window when driving. The driver had used the permit enquiries feature on CPM multiple times to reach out and request a permit, made multiple phone calls, had the landlord reach out to try obtain one - all to no avail. This continued for around 2 weeks in which CPM had issued 3 parking tickets for parking without a permit (The driver is in central London so there was no other safe place to park my car, and assumed if given a ticket, the tenancy agreement would be enough to show they could park there). An appeal was submitted with the tenancy agreement, explaining that none of the permit enquiries had ever been answered, and that bay parked in is allocated to and owned by the landlord. The appeals were rejected, and have since been passed onto Gladstones.

The first time I was made aware of this was in March when I received a text message to say 'Due: £x. Further to our letter we are here to work with you.'. I had not received a letter at this point, so I called Gladstones to request a copy. The man at Gladstones was extremely rude and aggressive, stating that he was not permitted to send me any copy of the letter either to my address or via email, and that I must have received it and lost it. He stated that the letter had been sent in January, so I had no opportunity to appeal now either, but could send any information I had to enquiries@gladstones. I then reached out to my building management company, who stated that I should have been on an exemption list given to CPM and never given any fines for parking in my space in the first place, and they offered to reach out to CPM to ask them to quash the charges. My building manager reached out to CPM mid-March to insist they cancel the charges, and explain the situation, but has not heard back from them since.

This week I called Gladstones again as I had no idea how to move forward without seeing the letter they had sent, and fortunately got through to someone willing to help this time. They emailed me a copy of the original letter sent by Gladstones, and told me to submit any information from the building manager to enquiries@gladstones.

On the Gladstones website I have the option to 'Reply to Letter Before Claim', I am wondering which is best to do in this case, email Gladstones with the situation at hand and hope that they quash the claim (if they are even able to do that??) or follow the thread for how to reply to a letter before claim, or both??

Any help would be really appreciated, thanks so much for reading!

Coupon-mad

Using the website is fine; obviously using the LBC response in the NEWBIES thread.

Please, please don't copy & paste it here.

You aren't "hoping that they quash the claim"! Bring it on.

Le_Kirk

What is all this "reaching out"?

rosiedriscl

Le_Kirk said:

What is all this "reaching out"?

both called and emailed in both cases i've stated 'reached out'

Coupon-mad

fortunately got through to someone willing to help this time. They emailed me a copy of the original letter sent by Gladstones, and told me to submit any information from the building manager to enquiries@gladstones.

There's no-one at any parking roboclaim firm that is really known to be helping consumers.

They are there purely to extract money from you.  Stop phoning a roboclaim solicitor thinking they might have a customer service ethic.  You want the court claim, as that's the only way to win. They won't back off and you won't be paying.

Send them the response in the NEWBIES thread then report them to HMRC like everyone else in other same stage Gladstones threads. Read a few to gain confidence!

rosiedriscl

Coupon-mad said:

fortunately got through to someone willing to help this time. They emailed me a copy of the original letter sent by Gladstones, and told me to submit any information from the building manager to enquiries@gladstones.

There's no-one at any parking roboclaim firm that is really known to be helping consumers.

They are there purely to extract money from you.  Stop phoning a roboclaim solicitor thinking they might have a customer service ethic.  You want the court claim, as that's the only way to win. They won't back off and you won't be paying.

Send them the response in the NEWBIES thread then report them to HMRC like everyone else in other same stage Gladstones threads. Read a few to gain confidence!

thanks so much, i'll head down the official route in that case! i guess it was wishful thinking that they would help