Dear Sir or Madam,
This email constitutes a formal complaint concerning your handling of the above-referenced Penalty Notice and your repeated, demonstrably false representations of the legal position relating to Railway Byelaws, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA), DVLA keeper data, and alleged “owner liability”.
Please ensure this complaint is logged and handled under your formal complaints procedure. I require a substantive, point-by-point written response addressing each issue raised below.
As this complaint concerns the misuse of DVLA keeper data, unlawful processing, and misrepresentation of legal liability, it is properly addressed to the Data Protection Officer. If you consider another department to be responsible for complaints handling, this email constitutes formal service of the complaint and must be redirected internally. I do not consent to being forced through web portals or processes requiring unnecessary personal data or mischaracterising this correspondence.
Complaint summary
Your correspondence does not reflect a single error, but a pattern of serious and sustained legal misstatements, escalating from false claims of PoFA keeper liability to an invented concept of “owner liability”. These misstatements materially misrepresent the recipient’s legal position and are plainly capable of coercing payment under false pretences.
This is not a minor disagreement. It is a serious compliance failure.
Specific grounds of complaint
1. False assertion of PoFA keeper liability on railway byelaw land
In your correspondence you stated:“the Parking Charge does comply with the Protection of Freedoms Act (PoFA) 2012 as the initial notification … was sent within 14 days… the registered keeper will remain liable”.
This statement is unequivocally false.
PoFA Schedule 4 can only apply to “relevant land”. Land subject to statutory control by Railway Byelaws is expressly excluded from the definition of relevant land. Where Railway Byelaws apply, PoFA is legally incapable of transferring liability to a registered keeper, regardless of timing, wording, or internal process.
The date of sending is irrelevant. The 14-day provision you cited does not override the statutory exclusion of byelaw land from PoFA. Your assertion reduces PoFA compliance to a crude tick-box exercise (“sent within 14 days = keeper liable”) while ignoring the foundational requirement that PoFA must be capable of applying in law.
It was not.
It cannot.
And at the material time it did not.
Your subsequent demand that I “must” identify the driver within seven days, coupled with the threat that the keeper would “remain liable” if I did not, compounds this misrepresentation. PoFA imposes no obligation on a keeper to name a driver in any circumstances, and on railway byelaw land there is no keeper liability to “remain”.
This conduct materially misstates the law and the recipient’s legal obligations.
2. Misrepresentation of Railway Byelaws enforcement
You assert that a breach of Railway Byelaw 14 has occurred. A byelaws breach is a statutory matter. It is enforceable, if at all, only by prosecution in the magistrates’ court by an entity with standing to prosecute.
It is not enforceable by private invoice, payment “invitation”, or administrative declaration of liability. You are not entitled to replace the statutory enforcement framework with a private demand for payment.
Your repeated demands for payment therefore misrepresent the true legal position.
3. False and unsustainable claims of “owner liability”
Having wrongly asserted keeper liability under PoFA, you later claimed that “the owner of the vehicle is held liable in all circumstances”.
This assertion is legally baseless and evidentially indefensible.
There is no register of vehicle owners available to you. DVLA data identifies only the registered keeper. The V5C explicitly states, in bold print, that it is not proof of ownership. You therefore have no lawful or factual basis to assert that the person you are writing to is the owner of the vehicle.
In many routine scenarios — lease vehicles, hire vehicles, financed vehicles, company cars, fleet arrangements — the owner, registered keeper, and driver are all different parties. Your position ignores this reality entirely.
You cannot impose liability on a person whose alleged status (owner) you cannot even identify, let alone evidence.
4. Conflation of owner, keeper, driver, and hirer
Your correspondence moves interchangeably between “owner”, “keeper”, and “driver/hirer” as if these were interchangeable legal concepts. They are not.
This conflation is misleading and appears calculated to ensure that someone — anyone — feels pressured to pay, regardless of whether you can identify the correct party under the correct legal framework.
5. Misuse of DVLA keeper data/absence of reasonable cause
You obtained my DVLA keeper data and used it to pursue payment based on false assertions of PoFA compliance, keeper liability, and later “owner liability”.
Given that:• PoFA does not apply,
• no keeper liability exists,
• no civil owner liability exists, and
• you are not pursuing a prosecution,
your continued processing of my keeper data raises serious questions as to whether you ever had, or continue to have, reasonable cause to obtain or use it.
What I require from youA. Written confirmation that this Penalty Notice is cancelled and that no further enforcement action will be taken.
B. Written confirmation that my personal data will cease to be processed for this matter and will be erased where required by data protection law.
C. A clear, reasoned explanation of how and why your staff were instructed to assert PoFA compliance, keeper liability, and “owner liability”, including the legal basis relied upon.
D. Confirmation of the complaint reference number and a copy of your internal complaints procedure.
Next steps
If this complaint is not resolved in full, I will escalate the matter without further notice to:• the British Parking Association,
• the DVLA (for misuse of keeper data and lack of reasonable cause), and
• the Information Commissioner’s Office (for unlawful processing and misleading representations tied to that processing).
Your correspondence to date is being retained as evidence. Any failure to address each issue substantively will itself form part of the escalation.
I expect a full and reasoned response, not boilerplate.
Yours faithfully,
[Full name]
[Address]
[Vehicle registration]
[Penalty Notice reference]
[Email]
Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for your latest email. It is, if nothing else, a fascinating demonstration of how confidently a legal position can be asserted while being entirely untethered from reality.
You now claim that “the owner of the vehicle is held liable in all circumstances” for a Railway Byelaws Penalty Notice, while also assuring me that you have “no cause of action” against the driver or hirer. This is not some subtle or technical error. It is a wholesale failure to understand the very framework you are invoking.
If this matter truly concerns an alleged breach of Railway Byelaw 14, then it concerns a statutory offence. Statutory offences are not enforced by emails, payment invitations, or your internal declarations of who you have decided is “liable this week”. They are enforced, if at all, by prosecution in the magistrates’ court, brought by a party with standing to prosecute. You are not such a party, and you do not acquire enforcement powers simply by repeating the word “liable” often enough.
Your attempt to rescue this position by invoking “the owner” is particularly inept.
There is no register of vehicle owners available to you. The only data you ever obtain is DVLA registered keeper data. That data does not establish ownership. The V5C itself spells this out for the benefit of anyone who bothers to read it, stating in bold print that it is not proof of ownership. One would have hoped this was familiar territory for a company claiming expertise in parking enforcement, but apparently not.
So even before we get to law, you face a basic factual problem: you have no idea who the owner is. In the real world, the owner, the registered keeper, and the driver are very often three different parties — lease vehicles, hire vehicles, financed vehicles, company cars, fleet arrangements, and family registrations being entirely routine examples. Your assertion that “the owner is liable in all circumstances” therefore manages to be legally wrong, evidentially unsupported, and practically nonsensical all at once.
It becomes more farcical when you suggest that I should “seek redress from the hirer under my contract”. That language is not the language of a prosecutor enforcing a statutory offence. It is the language of a private billing dispute, hastily stitched together in the hope that someone, somewhere, will simply pay to make you go away. That hope is not a legal framework.
To assist you, since you appear to be struggling:
• PoFA does not apply on railway byelaw land.
• There is no keeper liability.
• There is no such thing as freestanding civil “owner liability” that you can invent by email.
• There is no lawful mechanism for you to enforce an alleged byelaws offence as a private debt.
If you genuinely believe an offence occurred, your only lawful option is to pursue a properly authorised prosecution in the magistrates’ court against an identifiable defendant and prove your case to the required evidential standard - beyond. reasonable doubt. Everything else you are doing is noise.
I do not accept liability as keeper, hirer, alleged owner, or any other label you wish to experiment with next. I will not be naming any driver, providing ownership documents, or engaging further with arguments that appear to have been assembled without even a passing acquaintance with the law.
If you continue to repeat these demonstrably false assertions, I will simply retain your correspondence as evidence of your ongoing misrepresentation of the legal position.
Yours faithfully,
[Name]
I am reporting Saba Park Services UK Ltd for what appears to be a misleading and aggressive practice in relation to Penalty Notices on railway land, which I believe may breach the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC).
I am an individual who provides free, informal advice to motorists who receive private Parking Charge Notices and Penalty Notices. Through this I see patterns of behaviour across operators. Saba is a clear example of a wider issue: private firms issuing Penalty Notices under Railway Byelaws, but then trying to recover them as if they were civil parking debts enforceable against the registered keeper under Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA), even though PoFA does not apply on railway byelaw land.
In the case I am reporting, Saba issued a Penalty Notice for an alleged breach of Railway Byelaw 14 at a railway station car park on 9 October 2025. The land is subject to railway byelaws and is therefore not “relevant land” for PoFA. There is no statutory mechanism to transfer liability from an unknown driver to the keeper.
The registered keeper appealed on that basis. In a written response dated 26 November 2025, Saba:
- claimed that the “Parking Charge does comply with PoFA 2012” because it was sent within 14 days;
- stated that “the registered keeper will remain liable for this matter” if no appeal is received from the driver within 28 days; and
- demanded that, because the keeper had allegedly “marked” they were not the driver, they must provide “the driver’s full name and serviceable address within seven (7) days”, or make the driver write in and “confirm that they were the driver on the day”.
In my experience this is not a one-off mistake but standard boilerplate wording that Saba is applying to byelaw cases.
This conduct misrepresents the legal position and, in my view, meets the tests for a misleading and aggressive commercial practice:
1. It asserts PoFA compliance and automatic keeper liability in a situation where PoFA cannot apply.
2. It tells the keeper that they “will remain liable” when in law no such keeper liability exists on this type of land.
3. It strongly implies that the keeper has a legal obligation to identify the driver within seven days, which is untrue.
4. The overall impression is that there is an inevitable civil debt enforceable against the keeper, without explaining that an alleged Byelaw 14 offence can only properly be pursued in the magistrates’ court, within a six-month time limit, and that there is no separate PoFA keeper-liability route.
A typical motorist, unfamiliar with the distinction between PoFA “relevant land” and railway byelaw land, would be very likely to be misled into paying or disclosing third-party personal data on the basis of these false legal claims.
I am concerned that Saba, and another railway parking contractor, APCOA, are systematically converting alleged criminal byelaw offences into quasi-civil debts backed by misleading statements about PoFA and keeper liability. I am able to supply copies of the Penalty Notice and correspondence to support this report.
Subject: Your misuse of PoFA on railway land and impending CMA complaint
Dear Sir/Madam,
Your email perfectly illustrates why I made it crystal clear in my original appeal that this is railway byelaw land and therefore not “relevant land” for the purposes of Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. Yet you have blithely asserted that your Penalty/“Parking Charge” Notice “does comply with PoFA” and that the registered keeper “will remain liable”. That is simply wrong in law. PoFA cannot create keeper liability on land subject to statutory control by railway byelaws, however many times you type the words “PoFA 2012”.
The fact you have a 'sent date' within 14 days is irrelevant. On byelaw land, your only lawful route is a byelaw prosecution in the magistrates’ court under the Single Justice Procedure within six months of the alleged offence. There is no parallel civil keeper-liability regime you can conjure into existence by misquoting PoFA and hoping the keeper does not know any better.
Equally absurd is your attempt to manufacture an obligation for me to identify the driver or to get the driver to appeal. PoFA imposes no such duty on a keeper in any circumstances, and the Railway Byelaws certainly don’t. Your demand that I “must” hand over the driver’s name and address within seven days, coupled with the threat that the keeper will remain liable if I do not, is a textbook misleading statement about my legal position and alleged obligations.
You then compound this by claiming that I have “marked” that I was not the driver. My appeal did no such thing. It simply identified me as the keeper and correctly pointed out your lack of any lawful keeper-liability route. If your “appeals” staff or in-house “legal” team are incapable of understanding the difference, you may wish to consider investing in competent legal counsel, or at the very least some basic training on PoFA, railway byelaws, and the concept of relevant land. At present, your grasp of the law appears to begin and end with copying boilerplate PoFA wording into emails where it plainly cannot apply.
Your mendacious assertions about keeper liability, my supposed obligation to identify the driver, and the inevitability of the keeper “remaining liable” are not just embarrassing; they are likely to amount to unfair and misleading commercial practices. I will therefore be reporting this matter to the Competition and Markets Authority for suspected breaches of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act in relation to:
* misrepresenting the legal position on liability and consumer obligations;
* implying a statutory or contractual liability that does not exist; and
* using misleading, aggressive wording to pressure a consumer into making payment or disclosing third-party data.
I will also be bringing your conduct and this correspondence to the attention of the DVLA, your Accredited Trade Association, and the relevant Train Operating Company, as I do not consent to my keeper data being used to underpin a fictitious “PoFA liability” that is legally impossible on this site.
For the avoidance of doubt, I will not be naming the driver, I do not accept any keeper liability, and I am fully aware of the legal framework you are attempting – unsuccessfully – to misapply. Any further repetition of these false assertions about PoFA and keeper liability will simply be added to my evidence bundle for the regulators.
Yours faithfully,
[Name]
I am the Keeper. This location is subject to Railway Byelaws and is not “relevant land” for PoFA 2012; you cannot transfer liability to the keeper. POPLA is not competent for Byelaws matters and is not a TOC approved Independent Appeals Body (IAB).
If you believe an offence occurred, lay an information before the magistrates under the Single Justice Procedure within six months. Otherwise, erase my data when no longer necessary for this purpose.
As to any further demands, I refer you to the response given in Arkell v Pressdram (1971).
You appeal on day 27 after the date of the alleged contravention
I am the Registered Keeper. My details are:Full name: [ ]
Postal address: [ ]
This location is subject to Railway Byelaws and is not “relevant land” for PoFA 2012; you cannot transfer liability to the keeper. POPLA is not competent for Byelaws matters and is not a TOC approved Independent Appeals Body (IAB).
You now have the keeper’s details. You therefore have no “reasonable cause” to obtain them from DVLA. Any DVLA request would be unnecessary and unlawful, contrary to UK GDPR Article 5(1)(c) (data minimisation) and without a valid Article 6 basis. If you believe an offence occurred, lay an information before the magistrates under the Single Justice Procedure within six months. Otherwise, erase my data when no longer necessary for this purpose.
As to any further demands, I refer you to the response given in Arkell v Pressdram (1971).
Do nothing. SABA have 6 months in which to lay information before a magistrate. They won’t, because there is no money in it for them as any “fine” would go to the public purse, not SABA.
However, they will tell you that if you don’t pay it, they will issue a county court claim for the alleged debt. They can’t, because you cannot prosecute a statutory offence in the county court.
It is all part of a giant scam that should be reported to the police (not Action Fraud) as the Penalty Notices are instruments of fraud and an illegal attempt to extort money from you under the false pretence that you are criminally liable.
If they were ever so stupid as to try this on, either in the magistrates court or the county court, they would be spit to strict proof of their standing to issue Penalty Notices.
You cannot prosecute a safely ignore all debt recovery letters. Debt collectors, just like SABA, are powerless to actually do anything in this case beyond making unlawful threats in the hope that you are low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree and are likely to pay up out of ignorance and fear.
Keep us updated on their responses. We don’t need to see any debt recovery letters but any correspondence from SABA themselves must be kept as evidence of their illegal activity, especially if they threaten debt recovery through the county court for a Penalty Notices are.