Free Traffic Legal Advice

Please read the “Read this first” thread and the post a picture of the PCN. Was this a windscreen Notice to Driver (NtD) or a postal Notice to Keeper (NtK)?

When you appealed, did you identify the driver?

What a pity you hadn’t come here first before appealing and blowing away opportunity to get rid of this PCN. Unfortunately, your appeal was futile and it sounds as though you were trying to appeal to the good nature of someone at John Lewis or anywhere that has some semblance of customer service.

A PPC is not interested in any mitigation. You are dealing with ex-clamper thugs and scammers. They hope you are low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree and you were ripe for the picking.

Your appeal gave away the strongest defence you had, which was not identifying the driver. They had no idea who the driver was until you told them. Only the driver is liable for any alleged breach of contract.

If you’d waited until they requested the Keepers DVLA data and then sent a Notice to Keeper (NtK), you only had to decline to identify the driver and they would not have been able to pursue you as the Keeper because their NtD was not compliant with all the requirements of PoFA.

Declining to identify the driver is not deceitful or lying. You have no legal obligation to identify the driver to an unregulated private parking company. They are not an “authority” of any kind that can demand that you do. Also, they are not allowed to infer or presume you must have been the driver just because you happen to also be the Keeper and there is plenty of persuasive case law to back that up.

Not that any appeal would have succeeded anyway. They are IPC members and together with their (not) Independent Appeals Service, are an incestuous cabal of scamming vermin.

Unfortunately, you admitted liability for the breach of their terms of contract, no matter how de minimis you may think it is. Your choice of whether to fight it or not is a decision you will have to make.

If you decide to fight it, you will have to wait and see if/when they decide whether to pursue you all the way to the ultimate dispute resolution service, the small claims track in the county court. They may never go that far or even if they do, depending on which bottom-dwelling firm of roboclaim solicitors they use, they may discontinue before any hearing if they see you are prepared to fight them all the way.

What defence you may have, will depend on things such as whether the signage was sufficient to form a contract between you and them. Little things such as whether the £100 charge was “adequately” brought to your attention. Do they have a valid contract flowing from the landowner to issue PCNs in their own name, to name a few possible defence items.

For the future, please pass on your new found knowledge to all your family and friends to never, ever identify the driver if they ever receive a PCN from a private parking company.

Have you tried Plan A? Find out who the landowner is. Does the car park belong to a company or business at the location? Someone has contracted UKP and you would need to find out who that is and ask them to get the PCN cancelled.

As for an IAS appeal where the driver has admitted liability, I don’t think there is really any appeal that has a remote chance of succeeding. They will not consider mitigation. They are only going to consider points of law and breaches of the IPC Code of Practice (CoP).

The PCN is an invoice issued because you agreed a contract ‘by conduct’ that if you breached any of the terms on their signs, you would be liable to pay them £100. It does not matter whether you read the signs, as long as they were there, they were prominent and conspicuous, they fully complied with the IPC CoP and any other legal requirements.

If you could show that there is any breach of the legal or CoP requirements that meant no contract could have been formed, you may have a chance, not with the IAS, but at court if this ever escalates to a county court claim. However, you have admitted in the initial appeal that you knew about the overstay and the mitigation you mentioned is irrelevant to the ‘contractual terms’ agreed on.

As I mentioned, you have zero chance that the IAS is going to uphold any appeal, even if you could somehow evidence that no contract was formed. That would have to wait and see if UKP decided to try and sue you for the alleged debt.

They may never do so. Even if they do, they may never actually go all the way to a hearing as these companies often only use the claim process as a last resort to try and pressure the defendant into giving up and paying.

They have six years in which to file a claim.

If you are intent on trying an IAS appeal, then have a look at the IPC CoP and try and find anything they may have breached that you can use to base your appeal on. Also have a look at the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (CRA) for anything that you can use.

The IPC Code of Practice v9

Consumer Rights Act 2015

What about Plan A? That costs nothing and in many cases gets the PCN cancelled.

However, whilst IANAL, had I been one, and you came to me at the stage you did here, I would have advised you try Plan A and if that failed, pay the mugs discount fee before it is lost as you probably have less than 50% chance of winning this if it ever went to court.

Maybe others here have a different view?

Hopefully lesson learnt and useful for the future.