MCOL defence missing

Euroshiteparks

My wife parked in a euro car park back in 2022 and was unable to pay due to a broken pay and display machine. They shortly afterwards sent a parking charge demand to our address and we have ignored all their letters since, including when they started coming from DCBL. 

We received a court claim via CNBC for the unpaid parking charge, with claim form dated 24th June 2025. We followed advice on this forum, and submitted AOS via MCOL on 26th June. A defence was then emailed as a .pdf attachment using the template to claimresponses.cnbc@justice.gov.uk on 2nd July. We received an auto reply confirming receipt immediately. 

However, on MCOL there is no indication of them having logged the defence. The last item in the claim history is ‘your acknowledgement of service was received on 27/06/2025’. Given the defence was submitted 12 days ago I’d have thought it would now be updated? 

Any thoughts on how to proceed?

Gr1pr

You would think so,  but neither you nor I have any idea what the backlog is, so keep checking daily 

Your email auto response is proof of receipt,  but not proof of it being logged,  hence why you keep checking until it says its logged 

In a perfect world,  it would be logged within a couple of business days  ( they dont work weekends and the system was down for weekend maintenance a couple of days ago 

Euroshiteparks

Thanks. What happens if it is not logged and the 28 days to submit a defence expires? As we are not too far from that now. Would we automatically lose, and then have to appeal on the basis we did in fact submit a defence but they lost it etc etc?

Gr1pr

Hopefully a bar would be put in place on the claim,  to stop judgment 

Your auto email response is your proof of submission, in which case you would complain about it to Claim Responses using the same email address,  attaching your defence and your proof of receipt auto email response  and title it URGENT,  UNPROCESSED DOCUMENTS ref ABC123456DE , replacing the latter with your bespoke claim reference number 

ChirpyChicken

Log the defence straight on to the portal using the new template (you will see the difference)
Remove any "< from the text and it works

Le_Kirk

But what about the reported issue of the defence box not taking all the text?

Coupon-mad

Le_Kirk said:

But what about the reported issue of the defence box not taking all the text?

I've answered this in the Template Defence thread. It is literally no big deal to overcome and I don't understand why a mountain has been made of a molehill. If it doesn't fit, we tell people to lose a line or two until it does. Newbies can cope!

Obviously it never needs the heading DEFENCE but I had to put that at the top, to stop people asking which post was the defence...

Euroshiteparks

We tried submitting the defence on MCOL, however we now have the comment on MCOL ‘A bar has been put in place on this claim. You cannot respond to the claim at this time’. 

Is this normal? It is still not showing as having logged the defence, and is now 26 days since the claim was issued. 

Gr1pr

I did mention that aspect earlier,  a bar is to stop the claimant requesting judgment,  especially if the CNBC are way behind,  but if you want clarification you would have to phone them after 08.30 tomorrow,  early morning if you dont want a long wait 

Coupon-mad

Euroshiteparks said:

We tried submitting the defence on MCOL, however we now have the comment on MCOL ‘A bar has been put in place on this claim. You cannot respond to the claim at this time’. 

Is this normal? It is still not showing as having logged the defence, and is now 26 days since the claim was issued. 

The only reason a bar is on the case is because a defendant emailed a defence already and that has been noticed but not yet processed. In other words the emailed defence is in.

Euroshiteparks

Thanks for the reassurance. In the end we did get a letter dated 19th July saying they had the defence, and the claimant had 28 days to respond. This has now elapsed and there is no update to MCOL. Is there anything left to do?