It is a fake Penalty Notice. You should report APCOA to Action Fraud. Real Penalty Notices can ONLY be addressed through statutory enforcement mechanisms.
As stated above, what you have received is a civil contractual offer for APCOA not to prosecute you in the magistrates court for a criminal matter. There is no way that a criminal matter and a civil matter can be conflated.
As it is a civil contractual offer from APCOA, they have acted unlawfully by using the language in their fake Penalty Notice with threats of criminal prosecution.
The normal way that these used to easily be dealt with was by appealing only as the Keeper. Because the location of the alleged contravention is not relevant land for the purposes of PoFA, they cannot hold the Keeper liable. Only the
unknown (to APCOA) driver can be liable.
As the Keeper and the driver are separate legal entities and there is no legal obligation on the known Keeper to identify the unknown driver to an unregulated private parking company, the burden of proof that the Keeper was also the driver is on APCOA. However, they are not allowed to infer or presume that the Keeper was also the driver and the only way they could know the identity of the driver is if the Keeper blabs it to them, inadvertently or otherwise.
So, as long as the notice is appealed as the Keeper and the Keeper only refers to the driver in the third person, they have nowhere to go with this.
If it were a real Penalty Notice, it would time out anyway after 6 months. However, even if you did nothing and ignored all the reminders and debt collector letters, nothing would ever happen. APCOA cannot litigate an alleged Penalty Notice in the civil (county court) and they cannot prosecute it in the magistrates court because they are not the authority that applies the byelaws and, even if they were able to and they won, they wouldn't see a penny as any penalty goes into the public purse.
For now you have a few choices:
1. Appeal, gets rejected, appeal to POPLA, may or more likely will, will not be accepted, go through the months of useless debt collector letters and it eventually stops.
2. Same as #1 above but just leave out the appeals. Same result.
3. Confront APCOA about their fake Penalty Notice and also report the to Action Fraud.
What do you prefer to do? At the end of the day, no one receiving advice from us here pays a penny to APCOA.
They rely on you being low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to pay into the scam out of ignorance and fear.
Just in case you prefer option #1, here is the wording of the appeal you should use:
I am the registered keeper. APCOA has issued what purports to be a Penalty Notice, but it is impossible for this to be a real statutory penalty. This is a fake penalty and amounts to an unlawful attempt to mislead the recipient into believing that a private company has powers it does not possess. The matter will be reported to Action Fraud for misrepresentation and potential fraudulent demand.
As APCOA will be well aware, Penalty Notices under Railway Byelaws can only be enforced through statutory mechanisms, specifically by laying information before a magistrates’ court. They cannot be enforced through private debt collection or county court action, nor can a private parking company attempt to extract payment by conflating a civil contractual offer with a statutory penalty under criminal law.
If the landowner (Network Rail or the Train Operating Company) intended to enforce Railway Byelaws, that would be within their statutory remit, but that is not what APCOA is doing here. Instead, APCOA has issued a demand for payment designed purely for its own commercial gain while fraudulently misleading the recipient into believing they are liable for a statutory penalty. This is not only a serious misrepresentation of authority, but also an abuse of process.
The registered keeper cannot be presumed or inferred to have been the driver, nor pursued under a fabricated interpretation of agency law. There is no lawful basis for this demand, and APCOA is urged to cancel it immediately. Otherwise, I will escalate this complaint to the relevant authorities, including the British Parking Association, Trading Standards, and Action Fraud.
