Free Traffic Legal Advice

The Council can't jump straight to bailiff enforcement. First they have to register the charge with the traffic Enforcement Centre of Northampton County Court. Doing so adds a further £9 to the charge. Then they send you by post an Order for Recovery (of unpaid penalty charge). This gives you 21 days to pay or you can submit a Statutory Declaration.

Fail to pay, as is the case here, and the Council will apply for a warrant to enforce the charge and then instructs a bailiff. The bailiff has to send you a Notice of enforcement and they add a charge of £75. The notice should give you 7 clear days to pay up and that's where your at.

The bill is now £1116 and will rise a further £235 if the bailiff visits on or after the 9th.

Or is there something you're not telling us?

The only way to attempt to stop the bailiff is to submit a Statutory Declaration form PE3 and an application to submit an SD out of time (ie late). One for each PCN. And the forms need to be witnessed, FOC at any convenient County Court. Phone and check hours first. However you need to have a good reason as to why you are late.

I strongly advise you to contact Bailiff Advice Online PDQ and get professional advice as to how best to complete the OOT applications.

Get the forms submitted and bailiff enforcement will be frozen until the TEC makes a decision. That buys you several weeks.

08:00am to 17:00pm. Best try in the morning, I doubt if you'll get through in the evening.

Make sure you contact the genuine Bailiff Advice Online and not one of the copycats that come up on a Google search.

Ask the TEC when the debts were first registered and when were the warrants granted and were the addresses ever changed. The fact that you now have the bailiff Notices of Enforcement suggests that warrants might be fairly recent. In which case there's a long delay in progression from Charge Certs to Bailiff.

Your big issue is what to put on the application to file an SD out of time, form PE2. BAO are the experts at that.

One hard to explain issue is that the missing PCNs and OfRs were supposedly sent around 8-9 months apart.

You paid two other PCNs from last March. Check their reference numbers. Do the Charge Certs and NoEs match either of the paid PCNs? And were they also the same address as now?

Are all four NoEs for £279?

The most common reason why notices go AWOL is because people forget or otherwise fail to update the Registered Keeper details with the DVLA, so all the notices go to an out of date address. Or people fail to update the lease or hire company with a change of address.

Just to be clear. You need two forms for each PCN.
One of the forms is the Statutory Declaration itself, form PE3.
The second is an application to file a statutory declaration out of time, form PE2. Out of time means late, beyond the normally allowed timeframe. This needs to be very well worded or Enfield will object and the TEC will refuse to revoke the Orders for Recovery and the Charge Certs.

Don't just assume that addresses must be correct. Dig out the V5c for the car and check.
Phone BAO if you don't get a response via email. Make sure you point BAO to your thread on here.

Did you call the Traffic Enforcement Centre? What did they say.

Do you mean that you've already sent the completed PE2 & PE3 forms to the TEC? If so what did you put on the PE2 form in the "reasons" box? Did you get advice from BAO?

Enfield can and likely will oppose your OOT applications, so it's important that the reasons for being late are optimised.

Also be aware that you don't have to go to a solicitor. The forms can be witnessed at any convenient County Court. The County Courts have court officers appointed for this purpose and there is no fee. Phone and check opening hours first. A solicitor or a magistrate will charge a fee.

If you submit properly completed forms to the TEC before 16.00pm on a working day then the TEC will/should inform Enfield Council that SDs & OOTs have been submitted, on the same day. Else the next working day. Enfield will have to freeze the bailiff enforcement immediately pending a decision by the TEC which may take several weeks. I don't know what the current turnaround is.

Also please confirm that you are the registered keeper of the car?

If the TEC refuse your OOT applications then you will have to submit an N244 application for review by a district judge. This costs, for each PCN, £255 for a hearing in person or £108 for decision based on the papers. And is non-refundable unless you qualify for fee remission, so unemployed and similar.

If the judge refuses your application then you still have to pay the bailiff, so it's a gamble.

Eight discrete pieces of post lost by Royal Mail, lacks credibility. What would you say to the judge to explain what has happened?

Hopefully you won't get to the N244 stage. What did BAO advise you to put on the PE2 form?

How did you manage to miss this advice and create an awful mess for yourself.

You can check the outstanding penalty amount from anywhere in the world. Once it goes up to £204 you know a Order for Recovery has been issued. At that point you have 21 days to email the statutory declaration to the traffic enforcement centre, so one or two weeks abroad are not an issue as long as you deal with it promptly when you get back.

Have you mention which council this is?

Well, that went well didn't it 

Just had the bailiff knocking on my door.

So, the enforcement notice only gave me only one week to pay before sending the bailiff round, I submitted the Statutory Declarations on the 1st of Feb, but I was advised by the TEC that they require 10 working days to process, so nothing got sent to the council to put a hold on the enforcement.

The date was the 9th of February, which was Friday, bailiff knocked at my door at 08:00 today, Monday the 12th.

I was told by the bailiff that if I made the payment now and my appeal was sucessful I would be able to claim my money back, not sure if that's true or not, but I did make the payment of £1,300 so lets hope that it is the case.

Otherwise, just have to take it on the chin but that's a lot of money to pay for what should really have been only £260 for the four original tickets.