Free Traffic Legal Advice

No Parking Event / Failure to Establish a Period of Parking


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Consideration Period and Rejection of Contract

I'm not sure your appeal benefits from the inclusion of the headings. As an example, the fact that the total time on site was less than 3 minutes reinforces the point that the consideration period was not exceeded, as that period includes the time driving in and out of the site. I think these are essentially different elements of the same point.

I was not the driver at the material time.

You have wisely not told us who was driving, but a word of caution, you must only include this line if it is true. For hopefully obvious reasons, lying in a written appeal would be an incredibly bad idea.

The phone number supplied is theirs so not likely to be a scam.

Sounds a lot like an entirely unrelated scam. BPO Collections are a real company from what I can see, but as I noted I've never seen them come up collecitng for a parking company - this is likely a con artist posing as BPO.

The original sign picture is on my old phone but this is the exact same sign I found online.

Do you no longer have it? The reason I ask is that one of the points of your defence could be that the signage on the site indicated a maximum stay of 3 hours, which the driver did not exceed. Your evidence of this would be your picture taken at the time showing this. An image with an uncertain date obtained off the internet is obviously less compelling as evidence.

There's a good chance this will be discontinued either way, but where you would appear to have a strong defence on the facts we'd ideally lead with those.

Your inclination is correct. It's unlikely to be worth their while trying to pursue you via the Scottish courts, so I'd be very surprised if they tried.

I was in Portugal for 3 months so by the time I got home the letters had escalated.

As a more general piece of advice, if you're likely to be out of the country for such extended periods in the future it may be sensible to ensure there is some sort of process in place to make sure your mail is checked. If this had been a speeding offence, for example, rather than a private parking charge, you'd potentially be facing prosecution for failing to provide the driver's details.

Since the car park does not require payment, (a) there can be no commercial justification, and (b) can there even be a contract to enforce?

I think (a) would be hard to argue on the basis of the car park being free. The car park in ParkingEye vs Beavis was free (from memory), and it was that case in which the Supreme Court ruled on the commercial justification issue in the first place. In a retail park car park, I think it would be easy for the operator to argue there is a commercial justification in ensuring people don't park in a way that takes up 2 bays, as this reduces the number of bays available for genuine customers who might wish to spend money at the retail park. However, in this case I agree there's an argument to be made around commercial justification, although I think the angle to go at it from is that the end space the OP's car was straddling was unusable anyway, so the driver didn't reduce the capacity of the car park by parking in that manner (which would generally be the commercial justification for enforcing against cars that straddle bays).

On (b), there generally doesn't need to be money changing hands for a contract to be formed, as long as there is some 'consideration'.

It's hard to advise on a response to a letter we haven't seen.

They have up to 6 years from the date of the parking event to raise a claim, but there's no good reason for them to take that long and it's relatively rare for them to take that long. It is usually within a year to 18 months at the latest. If you move house whilst this is ongoing remember to write to the parking company and inform them of your new address for service.

I wouldn't upload either of those, as I'm not sure the contents of either are relevant to your appeal. Your appeal is on the grounds that, following a windscreen ticket, Elite have failed to issue a Notice to Keeper. If Elite want to provide a copy of that windscreen ticket they can do.