Free Traffic Legal Advice

Subject: Parking Charge Notice [ref] – Misrepresentation of Keeper Liability / Breach of KADOE Contract

Dear MET Parking Services,

Thank you for your letter dated 29/10/2025. Your request for a McDonald’s receipt is irrelevant, as before any alleged contravention can be pursued, you must first establish that the registered keeper was the driver. You cannot.

Your continued assertion that the registered keeper may be pursued under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA) is entirely without legal basis. The site in question, McDonald’s Gatwick, is located within the statutory boundary of Gatwick Airport and is subject to the Gatwick Airport Byelaws. Land subject to statutory control is not “relevant land” for the purposes of PoFA Schedule 4. Consequently, you cannot transfer liability from the driver to the keeper, and your suggestion that you can do so is false and misleading.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Private Parking Single Code of Practice (Version 1.1, 17 February 2025) at section 8.1.1(d) expressly prohibits an operator from stating or implying that the keeper is liable under PoFA where such liability cannot apply. Your letter of 29/10/2025 and the NtK itself, constitute a clear breach of that requirement and of your DVLA KADOE contract, which mandates full compliance with the Code.

Accordingly, you are now formally notified that this breach will be reported to the DVLA’s Data Sharing Investigations Team for misuse of my keeper data. A full copy of your NtK and letter will be provided as evidence.

You are required to either:

• Cancel this charge immediately; or
• Issue a POPLA verification code without delay.

Any further attempt to pursue the keeper on the basis of PoFA liability will be retained as further evidence of non-compliance and will be submitted to both the DVLA and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Yours faithfully,

[Name]
Registered Keeper

Response to the operators evidence:

This “relevant land” argument from MET is not just wrong, it is hopelessly, embarrassingly wrong, and POPLA needs to see it for exactly what it is: a bare assertion with no evidence, flatly contradicting both the statutory wording and the maps I provided as evidence.

MET’s entire case on keeper liability rests on chanting “private land” as though that magic phrase somehow overrides the airport boundary and rewrites Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. It does not. PoFA does not care who owns the freehold or who holds the lease. PoFA cares where the land is and whether the parking there is subject to statutory control. If the land sits within an airport byelaws boundary, that is the end of the matter: it is not relevant land, and keeper liability cannot arise.

In this case, two official maps have been provided which clearly mark McDonald’s Gatwick within the Gatwick Airport boundary. Those maps are objective evidence. MET, by contrast, have provided no boundary plan, no cartographic evidence, no statement from Gatwick Airport Limited, nothing at all that could sensibly be called proof. They simply point at the byelaws and say “these do not impose a penalty for vehicles parking within McDonald’s” and then announce, as if by magic, that the land must therefore be relevant.

That is not how Schedule 4 works. Paragraph 3 excludes land “on which the parking of a vehicle is subject to statutory control”. It does not say “only if there is a clause specifically naming this exact car park and setting out a bespoke penalty regime”.

The existence of airport byelaws governing conduct and parking within the boundary is what brings the land within statutory control; the maps show McDonald’s within that boundary. MET’s attempt to read PoFA as requiring a personalised “McDonald’s clause” in the byelaws is a fiction of their own making.

Worse, MET are not just mistaken, they are asserting keeper liability where the statute does not allow it. That is precisely the rogue behaviour addressed by the Private Parking Single Code of Practice section 8.1.1(d), which states that an operator MUST NOT “state the keeper is liable under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 where they cannot be held liable”. That is exactly what MET are doing here: trying to dress airport land up as relevant land and hoping no one notices the difference.

I put MET to strict proof that this location lies outside the Gatwick Airport byelaws boundary. “Proof” in this context means an authoritative boundary plan or formal documentation from Gatwick Airport, not yet more wishful thinking and repetition of “private land”. Unless and until MET can produce such proof, the only rational conclusion available is that McDonald’s Gatwick is within the byelaws boundary, the land is under statutory control, and so it is not relevant land for PoFA purposes. In that situation, keeper liability is legally impossible. Once that threshold point is reached, every other issue MET raises about signs, buttons, validation and alleged driver conduct becomes irrelevant to this appeal.

Faced with the wording of Schedule 4, the Code of Practice and the mapping evidence, any conclusion that the land is “relevant” would require ignoring the statute, disregarding the objective plans and instead accepting an unsubstantiated narrative from a mendacious operator with a clear financial interest in pretending that airport land is something it is not. That would not be a defensible application of the law or the facts.