Mistyped VRM Defence.
You will need to substitute in your correct VRM details along with the mistyped VRM.
1. That firstly I wish to apologise to the Court for the internet based defence which I submitted in the first instance - I now recognise that this was a mistake but would respectfully point out that I am a Litigant in Person with little legal experience in these matters and the pressure of the situation lead to into a serious error of judgement.
2. I therefore thank the Judge for giving me this additional opportunity to submit my defence and will therefore set out the facts of the case from the information which is known to me.
3. I deny the Claim in its entirety and no debt is owned by myself to the Claimant.
4. That I believe that the Claimant has simply pressed ahead with this claim without adequately reviewing the precise facts in the case.
5. That the Parking Charge Notice (PCN), issued by the Claimant, should actually have been cancelled at the earliest opportunity but the Claimant failed to cancel the PCN due to multiple basic procedural errors.
6. That I acknowledge that I was both the driver of the vehicle and the registered keeper at the material time.
7. That I acknowledge that I inadvertently entered an incorrect Vehicle Registration Mark (VRM) into the parking operator / Claimant's system when registering my vehicle at the location.
8. That my mistyped VRM consisted of just one mistyped character - My vehicle VRM is AB68 CDE and I inadvertently typed BB68 CDE.
9. That my payment was still processed against the incorrect VRM and, as such, the Claimant has not suffered any financial loss.
10. That the payment against the incorrect VRM was never refunded by the Claimant and therefore they remain in possession of the parking payment.
11. That I believe that the mistyped VRM should have been spotted by the Claimant before the Claimant issued the PCN - the parking operator is required by their Code of Practice (CoP) to manually double check the details of each contravention before requesting DVLA keeper details / issuing the PCN.
12. That, as well as keeping records relating to correctly matched VRMs and payments, the operator is also required to maintain a list of payments which have no matching vehicle details (relating to vehicles entering and leaving the site) - this record is known as the orphaned payment record (OPR).
13. That in a case of suspected non-payment, the operator is required to examine the OPR in order to establish whether a closely related VRM has been wrongly entered by a driver - this examination also acts as a check against possible ANPR errors where the cameras misrepresent characters from recorded VRMs - the operator will already know the time at which the driver entered the site from their ANPR data - therefore a search for the orphaned payment is extremely simple as you would only be looking for an orphaned payment in the 10 minutes or so after the entry time of that particular vehicle.
14. That in this instance, this check was not carried out and, as a result, the correct VRM was not reconciled against my payment and the Claimant applied to the DVLA for my keeper details.
15. That an examination of the Claimant's own payment logs clearly shows my payment allocated against a VRM which has one letter mistyped verses the VRM which they are supposedly searching for.
16. That under the Claimant's own Code of Practice, this simple mistake is known as a 'minor keying error'.
17. That under the Claimant's own Code of Practice, "Parking charges must not be pursued in relation to vehicles where evidence is provided that they are identified as h) where the driver has paid the tariff but made a minor keying error when registering their vehicle"
18. That on receiving the postal PCN I immediately appealed to the operator - in my appeal I clearly stated that I had paid the relevant sum and I provided additional evidence relating to the exact time of my payment as provided by my banking app.
19. That the parking operator replied saying that they could not find a payment matching my VRM - the wording of their reply appeared to demonstrate the fact that they were not prepared to look for any variation in VRM and that it was purely my exact VRM which was being searched for - there was absolutely no mention of them also searching the OPR in order to establish the presence of a mistyped VRM - the operator is required to check for both major and minor mistyped VRM in an attempt to match orphaned payments with genuine car park users.
20. That had the parking operator acted correctly, and according to their own Code of Practice, this matter would have been corrected without the need for any Court action.
21. That in order to access keeper records through the DVLA the Claimant is required to agree to abide by their Code of Practice.
22. That in this instance it is demonstrable that the Claimant has accessed the DVLA record for my vehicle but has then ignored the strict requirements of the Code pertaining to mistyped VRMs.
23. That I therefore put the Claimant to STRICT PROOF to provide the Court with a detailed analysis of why the processes set out in the Code of Practice are not relevant to this claim. The analysis should include details of how the incorrect VRM was overlooked (when they were clearly sat there in plain sight) in the lead up to the request for my keeper details from the DVLA.
24. Based on the above the claim is refuted in its entirety and I believe that the Court should determine that I owe £0.
We can put a little more meat on the bones for the Witness Statement.
Have you received the Claimant's WS yet?
