CPP is ParkingEye. Please show us the back of the Notice to Keeper (NtK) you received. Whilst it won't matter if you've already nabbed the drivers identity, it is worth knowing whether they are relying on PoFA to hold the Keeper liable.
No "Grace" period exists if there was no parking session. You are probably confusing it with the "consideration period", which must be a minimum of 5 minutes.
You will have to try a POPLA appeal but I doubt that will be successful either. That doesn't really matter because an unsuccessful POPLA decision is not binding and you should not pay up. If POPLA is unsuccessful, then you have a very high chance of this progressing to a county court claim. That is a good thing.
Apart from the useless debt recovery letters that you will receive, which can be safely ignored as a debt collector is powerless to do anything except to try and persuade the low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to pay up out of ignorance and fear. A claim will be easily defended and the most likely outcome will be that it is struck out or discontinued.
If you follow the advice we give here, the odds of this ever getting as far as hearing are about 1% and the odds of winning at a hearing are much greater than 50%. So, if POPLA is unsuccessful, are you prepared to fight this?
Here is an outline for what you need to put in your PIOPLA appeal:
The total time the vehicle was on site was six minutes. The driver did not park or leave the site to attend any premises. They stopped only because their disabled child was in distress and needed immediate attention. While stopped, the driver briefly left the vehicle to look at the signage and attempted to pay for parking using the operator’s app, but could not do so due to a lack of mobile phone signal. Once the child had recovered and it became clear that payment was not possible, the driver left the site. The vehicle was never parked in the usual sense, and no parking service was used.
This was not a case of overstaying or parking without payment. It was a short stop with a genuine attempt to comply with the terms. The driver actively tried to initiate a parking session but could not complete the process due to circumstances outside their control. No contract was accepted, no payment was made, and the driver chose to leave rather than remain without authorisation. A parking charge under these circumstances is not valid or enforceable.
The Code of Practice requires operators to allow a minimum consideration period of five minutes to enable drivers to read the signs and decide whether to stay. The driver remained on site for six minutes in total. The one-minute difference is negligible and well within any reasonable margin of error, especially where the driver was still in the process of attempting to comply and left when that proved impossible.
In the initial appeal to the operator, the driver explained that they were stopping to assist a child passenger with a disability and provided a copy of the Blue Badge to support this. The operator was therefore fully aware of the relevant circumstances at that point but failed to take them into account. This amounts to a failure to consider the operator’s obligations under the Equality Act 2010, which requires reasonable adjustments to be made when dealing with individuals who are affected by disability. Once made aware of the disability, the operator had a duty to apply discretion or take appropriate steps in line with that legal obligation. They failed to do so.
Furthermore, the use of ANPR to time the vehicle’s presence cannot determine the actual time the vehicle may have been stationary, nor does it show how long the driver spent reading the signage and deciding whether to accept the terms. The ANPR system records only entry and exit, not the point at which a parking event, if any, occurred. In this case, the total time on site is entirely consistent with someone seeking out and reading the terms, attempting to comply, and leaving without parking. The use of a six-minute ANPR timestamp to issue a charge in these circumstances amounts to an aggressive and vexatious attempt to demand payment where there is no reasonable cause. This is a classic example of a de minimis non-parking event being mischaracterised in order to extract money unfairly.
The charge should be cancelled.
