Free Traffic Legal Advice

If you follow the advice, you won't be paying a penny to ECP. However the process is prolonged and will take around nine months to a year before the case is eventually discontinued or struck out.

Don't try and overthink this, but no initial appeal will ever be accepted. A secondary appeal to POPLA is also unlikely to be successful in this scenario, but you never know. If you can lead the assessors by the nose to the conclusion that the signs are indeed rubbish, you may have a slight chance. The Notice to Keeper (NtK) you will have received is not fully compliant with all the requirements of PoFA 2012 to be able to hold the Keeper liable but most POPLA assessors do not have the legal competence to understand that.

This will eventually lead to a load of useless debt recovery letters. Debt collector letters can be safely ignored as all they can do is try and persuade the low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to pay up out of ignorance and fear. Eventually, a Letter of Claim (LoC) and then an N1SDT Claim Firm will arrive and once defended, with our advice, the claim will, in due course, either be struck out or discontinued.

So, do you want to fight this or not? If you do, here is the advice on what to do for the initial complaint:

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.

You can put War & Peace in there. It will not alter the outcome. Don't try and overthink this.

You also run the risk of blabbing the identity of the driver which is to be avoided at all costs. Just follow the advice as provided. This is tried and trusted way to handle this.

Its just i read over the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 and they seem to have hit all the boxes. other than holding onto the letter too long. issued 27/6 arrived at my door 7/7.

Deemed delivered two working days after issue date, Tuesday 1 July. If that’s greater than 14 days after the event - you haven’t shown us the PCN, I don’t think - then that’s another failure to detail later.

The dates potentially do. Seeing the PCN would help.

What did I just advise about overthinking this? ECP almost never fail PoFA except paragraph (9)(2)(e)(i), which most POPLA assessors are too intellectually malnourished to understand why.

The date the NtK physically "arrived at your door" matters not one iota. The ONLY governing factor for the "relevant period" is the date it is deemed "given", which is two working days after it is issued. If you look at the dates. on your NtK, the date of the alleged contravention was Saturday 21st June and the issue date is Friday 27th June. Therefore the deemed "given" date is Tuesday 1st July. By my calculation that is 10 days after the date of the specified period of parking and therefore, within the relevant period.

There is too much text for the appeal page... I just removed the end part to make it fit.

[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.]

Just do a search of the forum for other ECP cases. There are hundreds of them. You can now appeal to POPLA but that too is unlikely to be successful.

As this is ECP, if you follow the advice, you won't be paying a penny to them. Eventually, after you ignore all the useless debt recovery letters, you will receive a Letter of Claim and eventually an actual claim. As long as the claim is defended with our advice, it will finally be discontinued.

The whole process is going to take about 9 months to a year, so you have to be in it for the long run. However, the process is well known and documented. They hope you are low hanging fruit on the gullible tree who will eventually pay up out of ignorance and fear.