Parking Apps - Can you claim a keying error?

Le_Kirk

Your witness statement will be due at the same time as the claimant.  What will you be writing?  The WS is in support of and backs up your defence so it matters not what others have written unless they submitted the same or similar defence as you.

mczero

Le_Kirk said:

Your witness statement will be due at the same time as the claimant.  What will you be writing?  The WS is in support of and backs up your defence so it matters not what others have written unless they submitted the same or similar defence as you.

Hi, thanks for your message, really helpful.

I must admit I was a bit surprised that the Notice of Allocation to the Small Claims Track doesn’t explicitly require the defendant to submit a witness statement. I’ve gone through it carefully, and under the “Case Management” section, it only states that the claimant must serve a witness statement no later than 14 days before the preliminary hearing. There’s no mention of any obligation on the defendant’s part, which I find odd. I may raise this point for clarification.

That said, I did submit my defence online via MCOL (though I had to trim it down due to the character limit). In essence, my position is that I paid via Ringo, but due to a keying issue, the payment wasn’t correctly attributed to the parking operator. This is despite me having used and paid for that same car park many times before without issue.

The crux of it is that they’re happy to accept my money through Ringo, but unwilling to show any flexibility when a minor keying error occurs. The Code of Practice does mention such errors, but it doesn’t seem to reflect the realities of modern app-based payments.

Thanks again for your help, it’s much appreciated.

Coupon-mad

It's BW Legal for Napier. Odd that you haven't been asked for a WS before the prelim hearing but - importantly as a matter of fact & law - remember that their only POC allegation is 'failure to display' (not failure to pay).

Really push the fact that the claim is improperly pleaded because app users are not required to display anything. And the C can't change horses now to talk about failure to PAY, not without a formal application to re-plead the POC.