Free Traffic Legal Advice

Hi ALl

Looking for a bit of advice, have received PCN through the door from Viking Solutions for parking on private land at Finkle Street Car Park, Stockton-on-Tees. I actually didn't park up and my partner was on the phone to others that were arriving at close by location (I'm in a band) it turns out I was in the wrong car park so I then left and parked around the corner at the correct parking area for the venue (Georgian Theatre) I was sitting in the private area engine running for all of 11 minutes (as per PCN notice)

I am the vehicle owner

The venue has said it will back me up that I moved from the incorrect area to the correct area.

Should I appeal this PCN and it's £100 charge?

Can't seem to attach the PCN

The image of the PCN is too small to be able to read it. you need a higher resolution image if you want assistance.

So, you have received a Notice to Keeper from Viking Solutions for “unauthorised parking” at Finkle Street Car Park, timed at about eleven minutes between the ANPR entry and exit images. You are the registered keeper. The driver did not actually park: they pulled into the wrong car park, remained in the vehicle with the engine running while on the phone to other band members, realised this was the wrong car park for the Georgian Theatre, and then left and parked around the corner in the correct car park. The venue is willing to confirm that you moved the vehicle from the Finkle Street site to the proper car park for the gig.

Viking are relying on the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA) to pursue you as Keeper. Under PoFA, the operator must identify a “period of parking” during which the vehicle was parked on relevant land. ANPR camera images and timestamps do not, by themselves, prove a period of parking; they only record two moments in time when the vehicle passed the cameras. They do not show what happened in between, they do not prove that the vehicle was stationary for that whole interval, and they do not distinguish between parking and merely stopping, waiting, queuing, or turning around.

In your case the description is of a short stop with the engine running, with no-one leaving the vehicle and no acceptance of any parking terms. On that basis, Viking’s evidence does not prove an actual period of parking and does not establish that any parking contract was formed.

However, the notice is broadly drafted to follow PoFA and was issued within the statutory timescales, so this is not a straightforward “PoFA fail, Keeper not liable” situation. The main lines of argument are that there was no period of parking as PoFA requires and that no contract to park was formed because the vehicle only briefly stopped while the occupants confirmed directions before leaving. In parallel, you should make use of the fact that the Georgian Theatre is willing to assist by asking them to press the landowner or site management to cancel the charge as a matter of discretion and customer relations.

The Keeper should now submit a concise appeal to Viking without revealing who was driving. The appeal should challenge their evidence, point out that the ANPR timestamps do not prove a period of parking, and make it clear that the vehicle was not parked and that no contract was accepted. Suitable wording would be:

I am the registered keeper of vehicle [STE911S] and I dispute your Parking Charge Notice [113521144].

Your notice alleges “unauthorised parking” at Finkle Street Car Park for a period of 11 minutes. The vehicle was not parked. It briefly stopped while the occupants confirmed directions by phone and, on realising this was the wrong car park for the intended venue, the driver immediately left and parked elsewhere. Nobody left the vehicle and the engine remained running throughout.

Your ANPR photographs simply show the vehicle present at two instants in time approximately 11 minutes apart. They do not demonstrate that the vehicle was parked at all, still less that it was parked for a continuous “period of parking” as required by Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. ANPR timestamps evidencing entry and exit do not, by themselves, prove any relevant period of parking or any acceptance of contractual terms.

Any alleged contravention is therefore denied.

In addition, I require you to provide:

1. A copy of the full signage terms in force at the time, and a site plan showing their locations; and
2. Evidence of your authority from the landowner to issue and enforce parking charges at this site.

In the circumstances I require you to cancel this notice. If you refuse, please treat this as a formal complaint and provide me with all the evidence you intend to rely on in any court claim.

You should keep that appeal strictly in the name of the keeper and avoid anything that identifies the driver. Separately, you should ask the Georgian Theatre to contact the landowner or management company to request that the charge be cancelled, explaining that you accidentally entered the wrong car park, did not park, and then moved to the correct car park for their event. It is often much easier for a venue or landowner to secure cancellation than for a motorist to succeed through the operator’s internal process or, later, through the IAS.

If Viking reject the appeal, they will offer the IAS for a supposed secondary appeal. That service is nothing but a kangaroo court that invariably sides with operators, so you should not rely on it to resolve matters, but you may still use it to put your position on record. The important points to preserve for any future dispute are that there is no proven period of parking, no evidence of an accepted parking contract, and contemporaneous support from the venue confirming that you left promptly and parked in the correct car park around the corner.

This was the reply I received from the letter I sent in... Do they use Chat GPT by any chance 

Clearly they are idiots because they obviously have no idea about contract law. Their signage only applies to “authorised” vehicles. Drivers of unauthorised vehicles can only be sued for trespass and that can only be down by the landowner, which they clearly are not.

Even if they were able to sue for trespass, which they can’t, the driver, even if they could identify them, could only be sued for a nominal sum that covered actual loss, which there was none.

Submit the following as your IAS appeal, for what it’s worth:

Parking Charge Reference: 113521144
Vehicle Registration: STE911S
Location: Finkle Street Car Park, Stockton-on-Tees

I am the registered keeper of the vehicle. I appeal to the IAS on the following grounds.

1. No contract can exist with an unauthorised vehicle – forbidding signage

The operator’s own rejection letter confirms the wording of the signs. At the entrance there is a sign stating:

“No General Public Parking” and “Authorised Vehicles & Permit Holders Only”.

They further state that the terms signage inside the car park begins:

“Parking only for valid permit holders or vehicles pre-authorised by Viking Solutions UK Ltd.”

The operator’s case is therefore based entirely upon the proposition that this land is reserved for permit holders and vehicles pre-authorised and placed on a whitelist supplied by the landowner. The operator accepts that there are “no physical/paper permits” and that all authorised vehicles are those pre-registered on an electronic whitelist. The driver of any vehicle that is not on that whitelist is, by definition, not offered parking at all.

As a matter of basic contract law, there must be an offer capable of acceptance. A sign which states that parking is only for “Authorised Vehicles & Permit Holders Only” and that “parking [is] only for valid permit holders or vehicles pre-authorised” is not a contractual offer to unauthorised motorists. It is a prohibition. It communicates that the land is not available for use by the general public and that unauthorised drivers are not permitted to park there at all.

Where a sign merely forbids parking to a class of motorist, there is no contractual licence offered to that class and there can be no contract for them to breach. It follows that there can be no contractual parking charge. At most, the presence of an unauthorised vehicle might amount to a civil trespass against the landowner.

The operator’s rejection letter demonstrates that they have misunderstood contract law. They contend that, after some self-defined “consideration period” of five minutes, the displayed contractual terms apply even to an unauthorised vehicle whose driver is not offered parking in the first place. That is wrong. A party cannot unilaterally impose a contractual obligation on someone merely by declaring that a prohibition will be treated as a contract after a given number of minutes. There still has to be a clear offer capable of acceptance by the person against whom the obligation is asserted. There is none here.

Because the signage is prohibitory in nature and does not extend any contractual licence to non-whitelisted vehicles, there is no possible contractual basis for the £100 charge demanded from the keeper. On this point alone, the appeal should be allowed.

2. The operator cannot lawfully pursue a claim in trespass and, even if it could, only nominal losses are recoverable

Once it is accepted that the signage is forbidding and that no contractual licence is offered to unauthorised vehicles, the only potential cause of action left is trespass. Any such claim would belong solely to the landowner or someone with exclusive possession of the land. The operator is not the landowner and does not claim to have exclusive possession.

The rejection letter merely asserts, in general terms, that the operator has “an active contract in place with the landowner”. They have produced no contract, and in any event a standard parking management agreement permitting an agent to issue parking charge notices does not amount to an assignment of the landowner’s cause of action in trespass. It is trite law that a contractual licence to manage parking does not, without more, confer standing to sue for damages for trespass in the agent’s own name.

Even if the operator could somehow establish locus standi to bring a trespass claim, the measure of damages in trespass is the actual loss suffered by the landholder, or in appropriate cases a modest sum representing the value of the wrongful use. In a small, largely empty car park and for a brief stay, that loss would be zero or nominal. There is no evidence of any loss whatsoever, let alone £100. The demand made in this case is a penal sum bearing no relation to any genuine pre-estimate of loss in trespass and is therefore irrecoverable as a matter of law.

The operator’s own documentation shows that they are not advancing a claim in trespass at all. The Notice to Keeper and subsequent correspondence present the £100 sum as a contractual parking charge due upon breach of alleged terms. They cannot simultaneously argue that the driver was not offered parking and yet that a contractual charge is payable. The claim is fundamentally misconceived.

3. No proven “period of parking” and no acceptance of any alleged terms

The operator relies on ANPR images which record the vehicle passing an entrance camera at 18:49 and an exit camera at 19:01. These timestamps merely show that the vehicle was on site for at most 12 minutes. ANPR systems placed at the boundary of a site do not record what happens in between those two instants; they do not and cannot evidence a statutory “period of parking” within the meaning of Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.

In this case, the keeper’s initial appeal explained that the driver entered the wrong car park in error, stopped briefly while speaking by phone to other members of a band to confirm the correct location, realised the mistake and then left to park at the correct car park for the venue. The operator accepts that “nobody left the vehicle” and that “the engine remained running throughout”. That is entirely consistent with a short period of stopping and waiting, not with parking in the contractual sense.

The operator’s response attempts to side-step this point by saying that they are “not able to give legal advice” and will not comment on the “period of parking” issue. That is not an answer. The burden of proof in any civil claim lies with the claimant. If they wish to rely on PoFA or on an alleged parking contract, it is for them to show, with cogent evidence, that there was indeed a period during which the vehicle was parked and that the driver accepted contractual terms. Two ANPR timestamps at the site boundary do not discharge that burden, particularly when the admitted facts are that the vehicle was never parked in a bay and never left unattended.

Without a demonstrated period of parking and without evidence that the driver ever saw, read or accepted any contractual terms, the operator cannot establish liability in contract for a parking charge.

4. Unlawful attempt to convert an internal “consideration period” into a source of contractual liability

The operator states that, because the car park is small and has 21 marked spaces, they have chosen to set a “consideration period” of five minutes. They then assert that if a vehicle “remains on the private land for longer than 5 minutes, the displayed terms apply, even if they have not been read”. They further assert that because the ANPR images show the vehicle on site for 11 minutes, “there is no question that the vehicle remained for longer than the given consideration period” and that therefore it was bound by the contractual terms.

This is not how contracts are formed. A private company’s internal policy cannot replace the requirements of offer, acceptance and consideration. The fact that an operator chooses to label the first five minutes as a “consideration period” does not mean that any vehicle present at minute six has, by that mere fact, accepted a contractual offer, especially where the signage in question does not offer parking at all to a driver in that position. The operator’s attempt to elevate its own unilateral five minute rule into a source of contractual liability is legally unsound.

Moreover, the short factual duration in this case is entirely consistent with a driver entering an unfamiliar site, stopping to check directions, realising it is the wrong location and leaving. It is entirely reasonable that this might take around ten minutes in total, particularly in a town centre environment and when the driver never exits the vehicle. There is no evidence that the vehicle was ever parked in a bay, impeded authorised users, or that any contractual licence was offered and accepted.

5. Landowner authority and scope of any contract

The operator relies only on a bare assertion that they have “an active contract in place with the landowner”. They have not produced that contract and have not shown that it confers upon them the right, in their own name, to:

a) offer contractual parking to any class of driver, and
b) pursue and retain parking charges, or
c) bring civil proceedings in respect of alleged trespass.

Given that the operator is attempting to enforce a prohibitory regime which reserves the car park exclusively for vehicles pre-authorised by the landowner, strict proof of landowner authority is essential. It must be clear that the landowner has delegated to the operator both the right to create contractual obligations (if any) and the right to sue for breach or trespass in their own name. In the absence of such evidence, the operator has no locus standi and this appeal must be allowed.

6. Summary

The operator’s case is internally inconsistent and legally flawed.

1. The signage is expressly prohibitory, restricting use of the car park to permit holders and vehicles pre-authorised by the landowner and placed on an electronic whitelist. It makes no contractual offer to unauthorised drivers and therefore cannot found any contractual liability for a parking charge.

2. On the operator’s own description, any liability of an unauthorised driver could only arise, if at all, in trespass. The operator is not the landowner, has not shown any assignment of the right to sue in trespass, and in any event could only recover nominal damages representing actual loss, not the penal sum of £100 now demanded.

3. The ANPR images do not establish any relevant “period of parking” nor any acceptance of contract terms. The admitted facts show a short stop while the occupants confirmed directions, with the vehicle never left unattended and the engine running. That is not contractual parking.

4. The operator’s attempt to rely on an arbitrary five-minute “consideration period” to impose contractual obligations on an unauthorised driver misunderstands the law of contract. Internal timing policies cannot replace the fundamental requirements of offer and acceptance.

5. No evidence has been provided of any landowner contract granting the operator authority to pursue such claims in its own name.

For all of the above reasons, there is no lawful basis on which the operator can hold the registered keeper or the unknown driver liable for a contractual parking charge of £100. I respectfully invite the Independent Appeals Service to uphold this appeal and direct that the Parking Charge Notice be cancelled.