Free Traffic Legal Advice

Your family member doesn't need to be involved in any way, nobody is currently trying to hold them responsible.

You will appeal as the keeper. You will not name the driver at any point. The NtK is not PoFA compliant so they cannot transfer liability to you.

You can use the below by b789 as your initial appeal (I have modified the parking operator and removed a POPLA reference). It will likely be rejected. You will then decide whether to bother appealing through the IAS - most don't as it's a scam and they reject 96% of appeals. You will then do nothing until you receive court papers, then you'll come back here. The team here will support you in your defence and you will almost certainly win.

Use the following as your appeal. No need to embellish or remove anything from it:

Quote

I am the keeper of the vehicle and I dispute your 'parking charge'. I deny any liability or contractual agreement and I will be making a complaint about your predatory conduct to your client landowner.

As your Notice to Keeper (NtK) does not fully comply with ALL the requirements of PoFA 2012, you are unable to hold the keeper of the vehicle liable for the charge. Partial or even substantial compliance is not sufficient. There will be no admission as to who was driving and no inference or assumptions can be drawn. HX Car Park Management has relied on contract law allegations of breach against the driver only.

The registered keeper cannot be presumed or inferred to have been the driver, nor pursued under some twisted interpretation of the law of agency. Your NtK can only hold the driver liable. You are urged to save us both a complete waste of time and cancel the PCN.

The above is all correct. Their Notice to Keeper (NtK) is not fully compliant with all the requirements of PoFA and therefore the Keeper cannot be liable for the charge. They have no idea of the drivers identity unless you give it away, inadvertently or otherwise. There is no legal obligation on the known Keeper (you) to identify the unknown driver (either you or someone else) to an unregulated private parking company.

In order to be able to transfer liability from the unknown driver to the known keeper, they must comply fully with all the requirements of PoFA, in both their NtK and their signage. As stated, they have not complied with POFA Paragraph 9(2)(a) in their notice which requires them to state the period of parking. This has been established in persuasive appellate case law that a period of parking cannot simply be stated as "the period prior to XX:XX". It must be a definitive period, not necessarily the whole period. As there has to be a consideration period of at least 5 minutes according to the ATA Code of Practice, then the period recored should be at least that long. In this case, It is not!

In the appeal provided, you can add that you are the Keeper and you can confirm that you also were not the driver. The only issue is that they re going to reject any appeal (no money in it for them if they don't) and they are members of the IPC which means that their secondary appeals service, the IAS, is just a kangaroo court set up to only protect their members interests and not those of the appellant.

What I can assure you of, is that if this is eventually escalated to a county court claim, you will to be paying a penny to HX. Any claim is very easily defended and the most likely outcome will be either a strike out or a discontinuation. Even in the remote chance it ever did make it all the way to a hearing before a district judge, you would win anyway.

These ex-clamper thugs abuse the system and their M.O. is to hope that you are low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree who will eventually capitulate and pay up out of ignorance and fear. We know how to deal with them and anyone following our advice will not pay a penny to these rogue operators.