Free Traffic Legal Advice

Was there not a response to the FoI request already? I thought this was mentioned in the post on 10 June?

Okay. So in short, the £100 fee will have to be paid, then?

Okay.

I must confess to be being a little confused then. I thought you just said that escalating the complaint will not help with my case.

What advice am I following that will result in our not paying a penny?

I worry I might have got multiple lines of advice mixed up.

Up to this point, I believe I have followed all of the guidance so far. Is it now just a case of waiting for the FoI response?

In the meantime, I will search the forum for instructions on the ICA complaint.

No appeals submitted yet, neither to PCS nor IPC. Thus far, this has not been advised, and my general understanding was that this should be avoided? If that is not correct, then I'm mistaken.

That said, I'm not sure what grounds an appeal would be made on. You might recall when I began this post it was in the context of a lost PCN. There has never really been a claim that the parking charge was not valid, but for the possibility that the company was operating improperly.

The person who received the notice was parked in a bay that PCS asserts they should not have.

What would the appeal claim? Something about the actual parking event, or a claim about non-compliance of the PCN itself?

Brief summary of events up to this point:

1. PCN attached to windscreen - 7 May
2. PCN lost. This thread started.
3. PCN found. Questions raised about the status of PCS.
4. NtK received in mail - 9 June
5. Enquiries submitted to IPC, BPA and DVLA.
6. DVLA confirmed status of PCS - 23 June
7. IPC website observed to have added PCS to AOS list.

Only correspondence sent to IPC thus far was a request to the general inbox with no reference to this case. No correspondence has been sent to PCS as of yet.

Thank you. I shall do that and report back.

For my own understanding only, why can they not pursue the keeper. In their correspondence (both the initial PCN and the NtK, if I recall correctly) they explicitly claim that they can and will do just that. Is this claim purely erroneous?

The NTK has a section explaining appeals, in which it states that the appeals period was 28 days from the issuance of the NTD, and that since that period has lapsed, there is no longer any recourse to appeal.

This seems to make no sense, since the NTK exists to pursue the Keeper in the event that the driver does nor respond and cannot be identified. How is it valid to issue the Keeper with a charge, which they may well be completely unaware of prior to the receipt of the NTK, and give them no recourse to appeal?

In any case, visiting the website and entering the reference number returns the following:

Unfortunately you are unable to appeal this charge. At the time that the charge was incurred, a Notice to Driver may have been affixed to the vehicle or sent through the post. This offered the driver the ability to appeal within 28 days from its imposition. You also as the registered keeper or the driver of the vehicle had the right to appeal within the 28 day period from the point of issue of the Notice to Keeper. Since we have received no further correspondence from you, payment is required within 14 days. If you consider there to be exceptional circumstances as to why you should be allowed to appeal outside of this period then you should send your reasons to us, in writing, at 2 Wellington Place, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS1 4AP.

This says that there was (past tense) an opportunity to appeal within 28 days of the point of issue of the NTK. The date on the NTK is 9 June. As such, only 20 days have passed.

Should this be escalated directly to the IAS? Or should an appeal be sent to the mail address above?

Certainly, I am not expecting any appeals to be successful. I just want to be sure that the proper steps are taken so that we can be successful down the line. Do you suggest that submitting the appeals is not necessary, even for the sake of showing at a later stage that all avenues were exhausted? Do you suggest that it is sufficient to just wait until PCS makes contact again?



As for the PPSCoP requirement for a 28-day appeals window, shouldn't this apply to the NTK separately from the NTD. After all, the word receipt implies a recipient, and it is reasonable to assume that a notice to DRIVER and a notice to KEEPER are notices to two separate recipients (as is relevant to the VCS v Edward case linked above).