You aim for the top of the Sainsbury’s management food chain. Never, ever try and and rely on a phone call. It’s not worth the paper it isn’t written on. You make a formal complaint by email to the CEO and let them delegate it to one of their minions who can do something about it.
However, if Plan A does not bear fruit, you will never pay a penny to ECP if you follow the advice you receive here. Do not do nothing, as that is the cheap way out for ECP. You first appeal to ECP and when that is rejected, you appeal to POPLA, which will cost ECP £30.
When POPLA reject the appeal, you can then safely ignore all useless debt recovery letters. Debt collectors are powerless to actually do anything except to try and persuade the low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to pay up out of ignorance and fear.
Eventually, you (your father as the Keeper) will receive a Letter of Claim (LoC) issued by DCB Legal. In due course, they will issue a county court claim which is easily defended using our template defence. After many months, I can tell you with greater than 99.9% certainty, they will discontinue before they are required to pay the £27 trial fee, if the claim is not struck out first.
Just do a search of the forum for ECP.
Here is the appeal that should be submitted in your father’s name. There is no legal obligation on the
known keeper (the recipient of the Notice to Keeper (NtK)) to reveal the identity of the
unknown driver and no inference or assumptions can be made.
The NtK is not compliant with all the requirements of PoFA which means that if the
unknown driver is not identified, they cannot transfer liability for the charge from the
unknown driver to the
known keeper.
Use the following as your appeal. No need to embellish or remove anything from it:
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. ECP 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. ECP have no hope at POPLA, so you are urged to save us both a complete waste of time and cancel the PCN.
Come back when that is rejected, if Sainsbury’s haven’t cancelled it first. You can also get your local media interested as besides losing you and your family members as customers, they really don’t like negative publicity where their customers are invoiced by an unregulated private parking firm for £100 for simply being a customer. Point out that their managers are confused about who is the Monkey and who is the Organ Grinder in their contractual relationship with ECP.
