Station Hill Car Park, Chippenham (postcode SN15 3QQ) is not a railway station car park on railway land. It is therefore treated as ordinary private land rather than land under railway byelaws. In practical terms, it is “relevant land” for the purposes of Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.
In this case, however, you have already identified yourself as the driver. That means the usual “keeper liability” arguments under PoFA (i.e. whether the notice is fully PoFA-compliant so liability can be transferred from an unknown driver to the keeper) is neutralised, because the operator no longer needs to rely on PoFA to pursue the driver.
This is still why the location matters. “A train station car park” is not enough, because many car parks next to stations are not actually part of the railway estate. Some are railway land (byelaws apply and the operator’s powers, wording, and enforcement route are fundamentally different), while others are separate private sites (a contractual parking charge model). Until the exact site is identified, we cannot reliably determine which legal framework applies.
Location also matters for authority and standing. Even where the driver has been identified, a private parking operator can only enforce charges if it is authorised by the landholder (or someone with sufficient proprietary interest) to manage parking and to issue and enforce parking charges in its own name. That varies by site and sometimes by different areas of the same wider complex. Without the precise location, we cannot sensibly assess whether Napier’s contract covers the relevant land, whether it had authority to issue charges there, and whether it has standing to sue.
