Civil Enforcement Court Proceedings help

Dogtanian1894

Hey all,

My partner received a letter from the court yesterday, Civil Enforcement claiming an unpaid PCN.

I'll try and keep the history as brief as I can but I think the details are important.

In July 2023 my partner received a PCN from Creative Car Parks. There is a car park just down the road from us she used without realising it was monitored. She was learning to drive and used the car park to turn around and stopped for few minutes before continuing.

In my infinite wisdom I advised her to just ignore it as it will go away on its own, as this was the advice I was given many years ago and it did work. As you all know, this is no longer the case, but it took nearly 12 months of letters from Civil Enforcement and DCBL for me to finally admit my plan wasn't working.
So, I visited this forum and discovered the newbies thread on this board. After reading I concluded we were probably at the letter before action stage of the proceedings, so we waited for one to arrive.
When it eventually did arrive, we drafted an email detailing our reasons for disputing the PCN and sent it off.

A few weeks later, we'd not heard from them via email, a second Letter Before Claim arrived through the door. Upon inspection, we realised it had different PCN number and a different incident date. We then went back over all the letters we'd got and found the PCN letter for this second alleged incident (no idea how we managed to miss this but we did).
This time they claimed she parked there from 22/1/25 at 19:30, overnight until 23/1/25 at 17:02.
There are a number of issues with this claim though,

1, She absolutely did not park there on that date. (We have a drive so there would be no reason for her to park overnight)
2, There was no photographic evidence on the PCN letter, unlike the original one we received that had a clear photograph of the car on the land.
3, This is the most important one! The car park was no longer managed by Creative Car Parks. When we emailed them with our dispute of the original PCN we spoke to the land owner who told us he couldn't get the PCN revoked as he had cancelled his contract with Creative Car Parks in July 2024.

At this point I probably should have come and posted here, but didn't, instead we sent a second email to CE disputing this second PCN. We said we believe the PCN had somehow been generated in error and we told them we had spoken to the land owner who confirmed that at the time of the alleged incident he had no contract with CCP. We also asked that if they think the PCN is genuine that they please send proof of the incident as there was none on the PCN. Finally we asked them to confirm in writing if the PCN was not genuine and the matter is closed.

Nearly done, I promise :)

While we waited for the response to that email, we got a letter back responding to our email about the first PCN. They rejected our dispute and advised we had 14 days to pay or they'll continue with the court proceedings, (Side note - there was no 10 digit verification code, which I believe they should have provided?).
At this point my partner had had enough and wanted to just pay it and be done with them, so we did just that.

We then completely forgot about the fact we were waiting for a response to our email about the second claim. Until yesterday, when the court papers dropped through the letter box.
We checked back over any and all correspondence from CE and at no point did we receive a reply to that email. It appears they have skipped that step and jumped straight to the court claim.

This is where we need help, how do we fix this? We firmly believe there was no incident and that the PCN was generated in error, but its now in the court system. It felt bad enough paying them once, I don't want to have to pay them again!

If I've missed any key details needed, let me know, also I have copies of some of the letters (we through some out when we paid the original PCN) so if you need to see them I can upload.

Gr1pr

Just Post a redacted picture of the claim form below after hiding the following

Name and address

VRM details

Claim form reference number

Password

Dogtanian1894

Here you go :)

Coupon-mad

Who is the Defendant? You? Your partner?

Did she pay this one off or pay the other one off? Double check which PCN ref she gave up and paid.

You are wrong about the most important point. It sounds like they DID have a landowner contract when the PCN was issued.

The winning point is that this is an ANPR flaw 'double dip' charge which has been issued in error across a 24 hour period, counting two separate visits as it they were one long stay.

This is data abuse. They had no reasonable cause to get the keeper's DVLA data for this case.

The Defendant should defend and also counterclaim for £300 (costs a £35 fee). A CC must be properly pleaded in law, so check your wording with us after researching Counterclaims here. Search the forum for Simon Clay Counterclaim

Le_Kirk

With an issue date of 21/04/26 and providing you complete(d) the AoS after 26/04/26 and before or on 10/05/26 your defence deadline date is 4.00 p.m. on 26/05/26

Dogtanian1894

@Coupon-mad My partner is the defendant, but she is a teacher and can't post on forums / make calls about this during the day time, so I'm doing it on her behalf. It's also my bone-headed advice that got us in this mess so I'm feeling inclined to help!

The first thing we checked was which one had been paid, and it was definitely the first PCN we received.

We're trying to get hold of the land owner now to see if he can confirm in writing that the contract was not in place on the date in question, hopefully we can.
We do know that the cameras didn't come down immediately, my thinking is they continued to fire out PCNs to people without the contract. But that is pure speculation at this point.

I'll certainly look into the counter claim, but my partner absolutely does not want to go to hearing if she can help it, so I doubt she'll go for it. Unless course she has to go to hearing.

Are we actually locked in to dealing with this via the court now? Or can we still contact CE and ask them to cancel should we managed to obtain written proof the contract with the land owner wasn't in place?

Is there anything we can do or say to them about the fact they never responded to our dispute of the charge?

Thanks :)

Castle

There's a PCN reference still showing on the claim form in two places.

Gr1pr

She should deal with the live court claim, regardless of anything else, with you acting as her assistant

There is nothing to stop her complaining about it to CEL if she has proof of payment or of cancellation etc, but her number one priority is to defend the claim as the defendant, regardless of who was driving, the clock is ticking

The rest is water under the bridge and is dealt with at a later stage, her WS stage in several months time, not now

If it gets to the end of the 2nd half, its a Penalty shootout

Coupon-mad

The counterclaim doesn't force it to a hearing. It is likely to see CEL offer her money and gives her great leverage at Mediation phone call stage - and you can take the call on her behalf. You would be asking for, say, £150 (half the CounterClaim, as a concession) plus the £35 CC fee, and the PCN cancelled and claim discontinued early. Scam over.

They would be stuck.

I would DEFINITELY do a CC for a double dip case because it is unarguable for them. Data abuse. The remedy is a financial settlement they pay to her.

Dogtanian1894

Hey all,

Apologies for the radio silence, we've been scrabbling round hoping to find some silver bullet evidence. But we've not been successful unfortunately. The landlord got back to us and confirmed it was July 2025 the contract ended not 2024. So CE had every right to still be monitoring the car park as Coupon-mad suspected.

We also tried to get CCTV footage from my partners work, but they don't keep footage that long.

So we can offer no concrete proof that the car wasn't parked there. Which means we are solely relying on the double dip defence and / or the fact they can't prove who was driving, which I have to be honest makes me nervous as neither of us have anything even approaching experience of dealing with things like this.

My partners boss (the head teacher of the school she works at) has offered to write a letter stating that she was in work on the day of the incident and the car is her only mode of transport therefore it couldn't have been in the car park. Personally I think that's a little flimsy and we're not sure if that would hurt or hinder things, as that would be an admission of who was driving right?

Is there a forum post you can link me to where the defence would have been the same or similar ours?

I'm going to get started editing the template defence now and will post it here so you can check it over of that's ok?

Coupon-mad

It's not flimsy at all. Double dipping is well known and often reported. Here's a Which? news update this week:

https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/the-truth-about-car-park-cameras-azvqY6Q0qgVx?utm_medium=email&utm_source=engagingnetworks&utm_campaign=supporters&utm_content=Parking+cameras+270426+A++P

This is the Claimant's case to prove (not your burden) and you don't need a letter or evidence at defence stage.

If the D doesn't want to counterclaim, just use the Template Defence with Chan & Akande (linked twice in that thread) and add a line at the end of para 2 saying that the times given in the POC show this was two visits in 24 hours, an ANPR system flaw known as a 'double dip' thus the Claimant had no reasonable cause to obtain the keeper's data at all and has breached the DVLA KADOE rules as well as UKGDPR and the DPA 2018.