You reckon i should just pay the £100 and count my losses? Im just a bit upset that a condition i had which affects my cognitive decision making means nothing to those b****ds and the fact that they are effectively 'above the law' as they stated to me when i rang them and they said they don't have to adhere to Road Traffic laws as its private land.
Im getting a little angsty purely because if they send court letters and im out of the country with my family the whole of October and CCJ's stay on record for so long too.
Absolutely not! No one is telling you to pay. You don't run the risk of a CCJ either even if you were unfortunate enough to lose, should it ever get that far. As already stated, P4 are not litigious. It is doubtful they will ever proceed all the way to a court claim.
Even they did, there is whole process to be followed before they can. They need to send you a Letter of Claim which gives you at least 30 days to respond before they can issue a claim. If you wanted to, you could extend that mandatory 30 days by another mandatory 30 days by responding to their LoC with notice that you are seeking debt advice and require an additional 30 days to do so and you would just send that on day 29 or day 30 after the LoC was sent.
Once that has been done, they can issue a claim at any time after the 30 or 60 days. Once a claim is issued, it is "deemed" served 5 days after the "issue date". You would have another 14 days to acknowledge the claim (AoS). Once you have done the AoS, you would then have 28 days (plus any weekend or bank holidays if the 28th day falls on one of those) from the "deemed" date of service to submit your defence which is provided as a template with minimal tweaking required.
After the defence is submitted and the claimant has responded, you would wait for the CNBC to send out a Directions Questionnaire (DQ) where you would indicate any dates in the next 6 months that you would be unavailable to attend a hearing after which another lengthy period of time, the claim would be allocated to a county court local to you and then another period of time before the local county court would allocate a date for a hearing.
Normal timescale from rejection of final appeal to actually getting to court (if ever) is around 9-12 months minimum. So, even if you are away for a whole month in October, you have time to prepare for one, Justin case, even if it means a family member checking your post once a week while you are away and you would have had to have received an LoC around the beginning of September to be in danger of missing a claim form. You would only need to submit a debt advice response just before you go away to put that one to bed.
However, all the above is academic as you'd be the first victim to be taken to court by P4 for your sins. Unlikely but forwarned is forearmed.
You have not only calmed me, but my wife as well as she's been on edge about this too whereas i want to stand by what i believe in.
Thank you so much b789. I owe you
