Excel Parking PCN (Iceland, Harrow)

We've received a PCN Hirer Notification for one of our leased cars

Use the template appeal version in the 'company/lease cars' section of the NEWBIES thread*, the appeal created by Edna Basher especially for companies re leased vehicles. He knows what he is talking about and his company have had umpteen fake PCNs and seen them all off.

Would we put the Fleet Manager as the named person at the bottom of the appeal?

You might want to send a pm to Edna Basher, for advice. He's very friendly, knowledgeable and a regular poster. I think he would say just put the COMPANY name at the bottom.


*it's near the end of the first post of the sticky, in the company cars section.

Hi HobbityLife

Excel and its ugly sister company Vehicle Control Services (VCS) are particularly nasty companies and there is usually no easy way to get their charges cancelled.

In this case your best bet is to first complain to the management at Iceland to see if you can get them to instruct Excel to cancel - after all, the driver paid for parking and was "guilty" only of mistyping the vehicle registration number at the pay terminal - or maybe just like at many other Excel car parks, the terminal was faulty.

With regard to Excel, we choose not to use their silly "myparkingcharge" website and instead communicate by letter and / or by email (which they don't like). Also, we refer to the matter as a "dispute" rather than an "appeal" - I really dislike the word "appeal" because it gives private parking companies credibility which they do not deserve.

We usually sign off our letters without an employee name - just "Fleet Management Department" and the company name. If you'd like to show them a little more contempt, you could always sign off as "Speculative Invoice Management Department" instead.

C-M is a little generous in saying the we see off all private PCNs. That used to be the case when POPLA was a truly professional service and before the AJH Films case came along to give the IAS an excuse to side with the parking company in company hire car cases. The IAS is now a waste of time even for companies and the Ombudsman Services "POPLA Team" seem to be on a mission to throw as many obstacles in the way of company "appellants" as they can think of.

We now have about half a dozen outstanding old Excel / VCS PCNs for which all we've been able to do is a) respond with an initial letter of dispute and b) kick them into the long grass unless / until they send a Letter before Claim. So far Excel / VCS haven't had the courage to chance their arm with a claim. To paraphrase Kevin Keegan, we'd love it, just love it if they did.

Read Lamilad's court battles with Excel.

Documented in his threads on here and on pepipoo (someone malicious is believed to have shown Excel his pepipoo thread, to try to engineer a loss in court for a forum poster!). They failed. Lamilad won, more than once.

The transcripts are hosted by the Parking Prankster in his case law pages.

Only follow case law links on the Prankster's website, not any dodgy other links - really disappointing. But his Blogs he writes himself are great, as are the case law pages.