Free Traffic Legal Advice

You can safely ignore all debt recovery letters that will soon come your way. Debt collectors are powerless to do anything except to intimidate the low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree into paying out of ignorance and fear.

Come back when you receive your Letter of Claim (LoC) from DCB Legal. If you follow the advice, you will not pay a penny to Elite. We will give you the correct template to defend the eventual claim and is due course, the claim will either be struck out or discontinued.

It would be helpful if you could post a phot of both sides of the Notice to Keeper (NtK) without redacting any dates or times. The actual wording of the alleged contravention is also needed.

Oh dear! What a waste of an appeal. The Notice to Keeper (NtK) is not PoFA compliant which means if the driver is not identified, they cannot hold the Keeper liable.

I have now gone through the Notice to Keeper and all the evidence in detail, and I want to set out clearly where you stand and what will happen next.

First, Elite have made a complete mess of the legal basis they say they are relying on. On the NtK they state that they are relying on Schedule 4 paragraph 8 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. Paragraph 8 only applies where a physical windscreen ticket (a Notice to Driver) was placed on the car and the driver then failed to respond. In your case that never happened. The NtK itself says that the breach was captured by a patrol officer camera device and that the PCN is being served by post. That scenario is governed by paragraph 9, not paragraph 8. So from the outset they have picked the wrong section of PoFA.

Even if there had been a windscreen ticket, which there was not, a valid paragraph 8 NtK must be served in a strict window between day 28 and day 56 after the incident. Your alleged incident was on 9 September 2025 and the NtK is dated 10 September 2025, i.e. the very next day. That alone would make it impossible for the NtK to comply with paragraph 8. In other words, whichever way Elite try to spin it, this notice cannot give them keeper liability under PoFA.

However, that valuable defence point was wasted. In your initial appeals to Elite and to POPLA you unfortunately revealed who was driving. That means that although the NtK is not PoFA compliant and Elite cannot hold you liable as keeper, that line of defence has effectively been thrown away. They will now pursue you as the admitted driver. We cannot undo that. What we can do is make sure the defence focuses on the much stronger points, which are to do with signage, the formation of any contract, and the quality of Elite’s evidence.

A key point that Elite have failed to address is whether a contract was ever formed at all. Their NtK does not state any “period of parking”. It just gives a single time. That is not sufficient to show that the vehicle was actually parked for longer than the minimum 5 minute consideration period. The law and the PPSCoP both recognise that a motorist must be allowed a short period on arrival to find a space, read the signs, decide whether to stay and, if necessary, leave without penalty. Elite have provided no evidence that the car was parked for longer than that basic consideration time. No period of parking means no proof of a breach and therefore no proof that any contract was actually formed and then broken. If there is no evidence of consideration at all, there is, in contract terms, no contract.

On top of that you now have strong factual evidence about the site itself. You have walked the route from the estate entrance to where the car was parked and taken photographs and video. That evidence shows that there is no Elite entrance sign on the approach to the bays you used and no prominent sign anywhere on that route telling a driver that they must “register” or use the JustPark app to obtain the free hour. The only sign at the bay is the tariff board which simply states “Up to 1 hour – Free” in the grid, with no qualification in that grid about any registration requirement.

Elite’s own evidence to POPLA is very shaky. Their hand-drawn site plan shows entrance signs and terms and conditions signs in locations that simply do not exist on the route you actually took. Their photographs of the “signage” were taken in the hotel-side row, not in the street-side row where you parked, and the two areas are separated by a grass median and trees. In short, they have not shown that any relevant sign was visible from your bay, or that the alleged terms were ever properly brought to the driver’s attention. POPLA’s assessor appears to have been misled (unsurprisingly) by that inaccurate plan, but POPLA’s decision is not binding on you or a court, and a judge will be much more interested in your clear, contemporaneous photos and video than in Elite’s sketch.

So, when this eventually reaches court, the defence will say in plain terms:


Because you have this level of evidence, I am confident that if the matter is defended properly it is very unlikely you would not be successful. The usual pattern with Elite is that they will pass the file to DCB Legal, followed by a formal Letter of Claim (LoC). At that point we will send a detailed reply setting out the points above. If they then issue a small claim, we will file a concise, robust defence.

Realistically, once a proper defence is on the record and they can see that you have evidence of the true site layout and the lack of a stated period of parking, one of two things will happen in cases like this: either the claim is struck out by a judge on the papers, or DCB Legal quietly discontinues shortly before they would have to pay the £27 trial fee. In other words, the chances of this going all the way to a contested hearing where you lose and have to pay are at the very lower end of slim to zero, provided you follow the advice at each stage and do not miss any deadlines.