Free Traffic Legal Advice

URGENT

Dear Sirs,

CIVIL ENFORCEMENT LIMITED (THE ‘CLAIMANT’)  V [your full name] CLAIM REFERENCE H3GM80Q8

On 24th October 2024, I received the attached letter dated 13th October 2024 from yourselves. This came as a tremendous shock as it is the first and only communication I have received from your company or any organisation representing you in relation to this claim. 

I made immediate enquiries of the CNBC from which I was able to establish that:

1. the claim relates to an alleged parking event in March 2019;
2. the claim form was sent to an old address at which I no longer reside; and
3. if I had been given the opportunity to do so, I would have successfully defended the claim.

I did not receive any pre-claim correspondence, not even a letter of claim as required by the PAP. Nor did I receive the claim form or any particulars of claim and was thus deprived of the ability to defend the claim. Your company is well aware that people move home from time to time. You also know that I did not respond to any communications sent to me at my old address.

This situation is explicitly dealt with in the Civil Procedure Rules which provide at CPR 6.9(3):

(3) Where a claimant has reason to believe that the address of the defendant ... is an address at which the defendant no longer resides or carries on business, the claimant must take reasonable steps to ascertain the address of the defendant’s current residence or place of business (‘current address’).

As your company is a member of the British Parking Association (the ‘BPA’) and is bound by the BPA’s Code of Practice which gives voice to CPR 6.9(3) in the following terms:

24.1c Before serving a Letter Before Claim and prior to the issue of proceedings, Operators must, if no responses have been received to the NtD/NtK/reminder letters, take reasonable endeavours to ensure that the contact details for the person you are writing to are correct.

If your company had taken the actions required by the Civil Procedure Rules and the Code of Practice, my current address would have been found easily, which is obviously what you did before sending your letter dated 13th October 2024. If those actions had been performed at the correct time rather than after judgment, I would not have been deprived of the ability to defend the claim.

By reason of Civil Enforcement's breach of the Civil Procedure Rules, which amounts to an abuse of the process of the Court, the claim form was never properly served and the judgment must be set aside at your expense and the claim dismissed because it is now too late for the particulars of claim to be re-served.

In view of the foregoing, I invite Civil Enforcement Ltd to join with me in an application to set aside the judgment and dismiss the claim, with Civil Enforcement Ltd paying the court fee and no order as to costs.

Please respond to the above offer as soon as possible so that, if the offer is acceptable to you, we can work together to right the wrong that Civil Enforcement has done to me.

To give you a reasonable time to take instructions and for us to agree a suite of documents for the Court, I am willing to defer making a unilateral application to set aside the judgment until 4 pm on Wednesday 13th November 2024. If a joint application has not been made by that time, I intend to instruct a solicitor to apply to the Court unilaterally for an order setting the judgment aside, striking out the particulars of claim, dismissing the claim and awarding costs against Civil Enforcement Ltd on a full indemnity basis.

Pease respond by immediate return.

Yours faithfully,