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That response from UKCPM is their standard rejection template — it clearly has not engaged with a single substantive point of your appeal. Annex F refers to the Appeals Charter within the Private Parking Single Code of Practice (PPSCoP) Version 1.1, which lists specific scenarios where an operator should cancel a charge as a matter of goodwill, such as minor keying errors, paid sessions with small mistakes, valid Blue Badges, or brief stops covered by grace or consideration periods.

UKCPM saying your case does not fall under Annex F does not relieve them of their obligations under PoFA or the law. Their reliance on Annex F indicates they are too intellectually malnourished to understand your appeal, which was not a request for discretionary cancellation but a challenge based on keeper liability and the statutory status of the land.

Just appeal to the IAS as the Keeper with the following single point appeal. If the IAS adjudicator is a real solicitor, they will be able to read it and understand it:

Quote

The Appellant is and was at all material times the registered keeper of the vehicle. The Appellant has not identified the driver and declines to do so. The sole ground of this appeal is that, as a matter of law, no liability can arise against the keeper because the site is not “relevant land” for the purposes of Schedule 4 to the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (“PoFA 2012”), such that the Respondent cannot invoke the statutory keeper liability provisions.

Crystal Palace Park is owned by the Greater London Authority and is managed and controlled pursuant to statutory powers conferred by the London Parks and Open Spaces Act 1967, as confirmed by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government Provisional Order Confirmation (Greater London Parks and Open Spaces) Act 1967, and is further regulated by specific Crystal Palace Park Byelaws made under, inter alia, the Public Health Acts Amendment Act 1907 and the Local Government Act 1972. In consequence, parking and use of vehicles within the park is subject to a statutory regime and is not merely a matter of private contract on ordinary private land.

Paragraph 3(1)(c) of Schedule 4 PoFA 2012 provides in clear and mandatory terms that “relevant land” does not include land “on which parking is subject to statutory control.” The statutory framework governing Crystal Palace Park and the byelaws made thereunder constitute precisely such statutory control. It follows that this location is excluded from the definition of “relevant land” for the purposes of PoFA 2012. That exclusion is absolute and is not capable of being waived or circumvented by any wording on signage or in a notice to keeper, nor by any purported contract between the Respondent and its client.

The legal consequence of the land not being “relevant land” is that the entire statutory mechanism in Schedule 4 PoFA 2012 for transferring liability from the unknown driver to the registered keeper is simply inapplicable. Even if, quod non, the notice to keeper were otherwise fully compliant with each and every prescriptive requirement of Schedule 4, no keeper liability can arise where the land fails to meet the threshold definition in paragraph 3. In such circumstances the Respondent is confined, as a matter of law, to pursuing only the driver in person under ordinary principles of contract or tort. The Respondent has no entitlement to fix liability upon the keeper by reliance on PoFA 2012.

In those circumstances, the Respondent can only ever have a claim, if at all, against the driver. There is no freestanding common-law or contractual route by which a private parking company can impose liability on a keeper in the teeth of Parliament’s decision to restrict keeper liability to relevant land only.

Further, and independently of the “relevant land” bar, the Appellant relies upon the reasoning in the persuasive County Court appeal decision of Vehicle Control Services Ltd v Ian Mark Edward (2023). In that case, the appeal court held in terms that the mere fact a defendant is the registered keeper has no evidential effect in creating any inference, rebuttable or otherwise, that the keeper was driving on the material occasion. There is, therefore, no evidential presumption for a keeper to “rebut”, and no adverse inference may properly be drawn from a keeper’s refusal to engage with speculative questions about who was driving. The lower court in that case was found to have erred precisely because it treated keeper status as giving rise to an inference of driving and then drew an adverse inference from the defendant’s silence. The appeal court rejected that approach.

The appellate judge in Edward further explained that this analysis is consistent with the underlying purpose of PoFA 2012. Parliament introduced Schedule 4 because, prior to its enactment, liability could not be fixed upon a keeper merely by identifying them through DVLA data and waiting to see whether they put forward a positive defence. If such an evidential shortcut had existed, PoFA 2012 would have been unnecessary; parking companies could simply have sued keepers and relied on silence or a lack of detailed explanation to succeed. The court in Edward recognised that to proceed in that way would be to impose a de facto duty on a registered keeper to identify the driver or to put forward a positive case in order to avoid personal liability, and held that no such duty existed before PoFA and none can be implied where PoFA does not apply.

The reasoning in Edward also accords with a broader and important principle: absent an express statutory obligation, an individual enjoys a general freedom not to provide information against themselves or others. In the context of private parking enforcement on non-relevant land, there is no statutory duty upon a keeper to name the driver. The Appellant is fully entitled to decline to do so. The Respondent cannot invite the IAS to circumvent that freedom by asserting that, “on the balance of probability”, the keeper was probably the driver. As explained in Edward, the supposed probability analysis is misconceived: from the bare fact of keeper status alone, one simply cannot say, even on balance of probabilities, that the keeper must have been the driver. There are countless commonplace scenarios where the registered keeper is not the only, nor even the usual, driver of the vehicle, including corporate ownership, fleet vehicles, employer-provided vehicles, and households where one person is the registered keeper but multiple family members routinely drive both or all vehicles.

It follows from Edward that there is no lawful evidential shortcut, no presumption, and no legitimate inference that the keeper was “likely” driving which could be deployed to fill the gap left by the inapplicability of PoFA 2012. On non-relevant land, a parking operator who wishes to sue must prove driver liability in the ordinary way. They cannot simply point to DVLA keeper data, invite the IAS to treat that as prima facie evidence of driving, and then complain that the keeper has not “rebutted” the suggestion. That is precisely the approach rejected on appeal in Edward.

In this case, the Appellant has not identified the driver and is under no duty to do so. The land is not relevant land, so PoFA 2012 cannot be relied upon to impose keeper liability. There is no evidential presumption of driver identity arising from keeper status and no proper basis to invite the IAS, or indeed any tribunal, to apply a “balance of probabilities” shortcut in the face of the Edward reasoning. Accordingly, the Respondent has no lawful basis to pursue the Appellant as keeper. The only legally correct outcome is that this appeal be allowed on that single dispositive ground.

The PCN picture is too low resolution to be readable, by me anyway.