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First post here so please be gentle if I've messed anything up
Upon entering the hospital site, the driver dropped their partner off for their appointment, entered the car park, found a space, parked up, and waited for their partner to re-emerge. Today, the document attached was received.
Ironically, this was a follow up appointment to a private hospital for a knee replacement op (cost £13k) so I am somewhat miffed that they're trying to shaft the registered keeper for £100 for 15 minutes parking.
Any of you good people able to help me out?
Page 1:
https://ibb.co/XPjcNrb
Page 2:
https://ibb.co/YFN0fcNn
Thanks in advance. -
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DO NOT, EVER, redact the dates, times or the location on the NtK if you want advice!
Plan A... what have the hospital management said (in writing) when you complained about an extra invoice from a third party, unregulated private parking firm on top of the already expensive bill? If it is also an NHS Trust location, what have PALS said about getting it cancelled?
As their Notice to Keeper (NtK) is not fully compliant with all the requirements of PoFA 2012, the driver MUST NOT be identified. They have no idea who the driver is as long as the Keeper doesn't not blab it to them, inadvertently or otherwise.
Show us the front of the NtK without any dates, times or locations redacted. -
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Apologies, revised documents
HERE
I am currently waiting on the hospital's response.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, I do appreciate it.
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Good luck with the argument that the NTK is not compliant, it'll have to go all the way to court before that argument can be made.
Signage on the entrance looks pretty clear in GSV, patients only, register in reception. Did the driver do that? Looks like a private hospital as well, so probably no PALs. Assuming the driver didn't register how is the private parking company supposed to know the driver is a patient (or at least driving a patient). The hospital will have contracted the private parking company to ensure there is parking for patients, it's not a paid for car park like NHS ones so there's no incentive to go through the hassle of contracting with a private parking company if there is no need.
If you want this go away quickly you'll need to appeal on the basis the driver was a legitimate user but failed to comply with the terms, i.e. forgot to register. Proof of the appointment would help. If you're lucky it might get cancelled or the keeper might be offered a reduce rate, depends on what the hospital has agreed with the contractor. You can try appealing on the grounds the NTK isn't POFA complaint but Parkingeye will definitely not agree with you and it's unlikely POPLA will either. So if you are happy with receiving months of increasing threatening letters and then probably having to engage with the start of a court process (It will probably be discontinued before the court hearing if you file a defence) then appeal on that technical basis, if they reject your appeal based on the fact the driver was there legitimately you're no worse off if they reject the appeal. -
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The point is that the odds of this going all the way to a hearing in court over an alleged debt, is very low. If Parkingeye think that they are on shaky ground with an appellant who is not low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree, they will likely farm it out to DCB Legal to deal with and that is a guaranteed strike out or discontinuation as long as it is even rudimentary defended.
The simple fact is that the NtK is NOT fully compliant with all the requirements of PoFA. Irrespective of whether the operator or POPLA agree, it is a valid argument if it ever went to a hearing (very unlikely).
So, once you exhaust all the other options of Plans A, B (initial appeal) and C (POPLA), Plan D will become the route to getting this dealt with, once and for all. -
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The simple fact is that the NtK is NOT fully compliant with all the requirements of PoFA. Irrespective of whether the operator or POPLA agree, it is a valid argument if it ever went to a hearing (very unlikely).
Thank you for your input, I'm definitely not going to roll over and play ball over this.
Please forgive my naivety; if the NtK is defective insofar as it doesn't fully comply with all the requirements of PoFA, how/why would POPLA reject it when it comes before them?
I fully get ParkingEye pursuing this regardless; that's how they make their money, after all.
But POPLA must have some sort of guidelines that they adhere to when adjudicating?
Or am I misunderstanding their raison d'être? -
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Because it's b789s personal opinion that it's not fully compliant, even some of the other experienced posters disagree in so much as they are not sure b789s interpretation is correct. B789 tends to give people the impression they have a rock solid defence and it may have some merit but it will need to go to court for your parking charge to be reviewed on that basis.
Parkingeye will consider the PCN fully POFA compliant, the wording change b789 thinks is required in minimal, POPLA won't get into the fine detail of legal arguments as to whether or not the wording is exactly right. If they think the PCN has been correctly issued (for example to someone who breached the car park Ts and Cs by not registering at reception and the PCN has been issued in the correct time frame, which it appears it has and no other grounds of appeal have been made such as missing or poor signage) they will conclude the PCN has been correctly issued and reject the appeal.
He is right, it is unlikely to get court but before it finally fizzles out you will get loads of letters which you can generally ignore. At some point though you will probably get a letter of claim which you cant ignore. You will need to engage with the court system, file a defence amongst other things, attend a mediation session and then usually it gets dropped or it might not. Parkingeye are known to take a lot of people to court and they win.
If you decide to challenge this the forum will help guide you but you need to be prepared to put the work it. The appeal grounds b789 has given are not a sure fire at getting this resolved quickly. He's relying on you fighting this all the way and entering a proper defence when it gets to the court stage. If you don't file a defence or muck it up (you will get help here to avoid doing that) it probably will end up in court with a judgement against the keeper.
You still haven't explained why you think the PCN shouldn't have been issued,its not fair or I don't like private parking companies isn't a valid reason. -
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It’s not “my personal opinion” in the sense @ixxy is suggesting. It is a straightforward reading of Schedule 4, and it happens to be shared by one of the longest-serving District Judges in England. He and I went through the actual wording of 9(2)(e)(i) and the ParkingEye template together; his view was clear – if Parliament requires the notice to invite the keeper to pay and the notice does not actually contain such an invitation, then it does not comply with PoFA. If that point were argued in front of him, he would find non-compliance as a matter of fact.
Whether ParkingEye “consider” their paperwork compliant, whether POPLA can be bothered to grapple with the detail, or whether @ixxy personally dislikes the argument is legally irrelevant. Compliance with a statutory gateway is not decided by the parking industry or by a trade-body appeals service; it is decided by judges applying the statute. The fact that this particular defect hasn’t yet been ventilated in a reported judgment doesn’t somehow make it invalid – every “leading case” started life as someone insisting that the words Parliament actually used mean what they say.
I am also very careful about what I promise people. I have never told anyone that any single point is a magic wand or a guaranteed win. What I do say is that a PoFA defect which prevents keeper liability is a strong defence point if the keeper has not identified the driver. That remains true whether or not POPLA chooses to engage with it, and regardless of how inconvenient that is for ParkingEye’s business model or for commentators who would rather wave it away as “just b789’s opinion”. -
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Thank you again.
So my appeal letter (if the hospital aren't prepared to call their hounds off) should look like what?
My first stab would be
To whom it may concern,
I acknowledge receipt of your invoice.
The Notice to Keeper is defective as it fails to comply with the requirements of Schedule 4, paragraph 9(2)(e)(i) of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. As the registered keeper, I will not be naming the driver.
Any further correspondence of a speculative or threatening nature will be treated as harassment. Should you choose to pursue this matter via legal channels, please be aware that I will defend the claim robustly and will require strict proof of your assertions.
Regards, or otherwise
As an aside, if I were a private company issuing invoices then I'd make damned sure they were bombproof. Are ParkingEye relying on people *and* POPLA rolling over in the face of appeals?
This is my first exposure to this kind of thing and it would appear to me that the entire industry needs an overhaul? -
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POPLA is not a court, not a tribunal and not some stand-alone public body. “POPLA” is just the brand name that Trust Alliance Group uses for the parking product line delivered by its subsidiary Flexible Resolution Services Limited (company no. 14000839). The BPA – i.e. the private parking trade association – contracts and funds FRS to run POPLA “on behalf of” its member operators. Independent?
POPLA 'assessors' are not judges, they are not barristers, and in the vast majority of cases they have no meaningful legal training at all. They’re low-level box-ticking staff in a private company that’s paid by the very industry it’s supposedly “regulating”. Independent?
You can see it in the decisions: they work off crib sheets and templates, cutting and pasting stock paragraphs, often without even bothering to properly address the actual points put to them. Nuanced arguments about the precise wording of Schedule 4, or the difference between keeper liability and driver liability, often simply sail straight over their heads. If the notice “looks about right” to them and the operator says it’s compliant, they rubber-stamp it. That’s the level we’re dealing with.
So yes, I’m perfectly happy to say that, in general, POPLA assessors are legal lightweights – glorified form-fillers – whose “reasoning” carries no more authority than the template on their screen. They are not arbiters of what PoFA means. The person who actually decides that is a District Judge, in a court, applying the statute properly. POPLA’s view is worth precisely nothing once it gets to that stage. Why do you think that an unsuccessful POPLA decision is not binding on the appellant?
As for your initial appeal (Plan B), I wouldn't even bother putting much effort into that. It is almost unheard of for any initial appeal to any private parking operator being successful. Where is the money in that for them?
AS Parkingeye are a BPA operator, you at least get the opportunity to make a secondary appeal (Plan C) to POPLA, for what it's worth. If, as it is unlikely to be successful (but you never know) you then move on to Plan D where it is likely to go to litigation after the useless debt recovery stage. It is at this stage that you have the best chance of seeing this off. Even if a claim is issued, even if it progressed all the way to a hearing, you get to argue your side of the story in front of the only truly impartial arbiter, a District Judge who will decide whether a debt is owed for an alleged breach of contract by the driver.
For your Plan B appeal I would just use:QuoteI 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. Parkingeye 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. Parkingeye have no hope at POPLA, so you are urged to save us both a complete waste of time and cancel the PCN. -
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Thank you again, I really do appreciate your help. I have quite a large subscriber base on my YouTube channel and will definitely make sure to direct them to this site should they need motoring legal assistance.
I only raised the issue of harassment initially to highlight that, if they persisted, they would be exposing themselves to a completely different set of legal problems far beyond the relatively minor matter of parking offences.
It seems, however, from your precis of their business model that they'd remain indifferent
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Just to be clear, getting a Parking Charge Notice (PCN), reminder letters or even debt collector letters is not harassment. That is simply the standard sequence these companies use when they think money is owed.
Harassment in law is a very high threshold. You need a course of conduct that is genuinely oppressive, unreasonable and targeted, to the point where it would cause a reasonable person serious alarm or distress. A routine chain of automated letters about a disputed parking charge almost never comes close to meeting that test.
That’s why threatening a parking company with a harassment claim is not realistic. It is extremely unlikely to succeed, and it can undermine your credibility if the matter ever reached a court.
It is always better to concentrate on the substantive arguments that actually matter – PoFA compliance, signage, landowner authority, byelaws and so on – rather than trying to turn ordinary correspondence into something the law would never recognise as harassment.I have quite a large subscriber base on my YouTube channel and will definitely make sure to direct them to this site should they need motoring legal assistance.
Consider that these unregulated private parking firms issue over 40,000 PCNs every single day of the year, you can be sure that your subscriber base will likely have quite a few prospective future visitors for us here. -
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So some closure on this, I received an email today from a PA at Practice Plus Group explaining the situation there (apparently they had to employ ParkingEye due to commuters from the adjacent business park abusing the parking facilities) and requesting details of my appointment.
Within ten minutes of providing that information I received an email telling me the charge had been cancelled.
So route 1 is definitely contacting the landowner and asking them to call their hounds off.
Thank you for your time with this, I am due to retire in the new year and will have plenty of free time on my hands.....I might start swatting up on something specialist like private parking regs so that I can give something back to this forum.
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I think most of us are retired and use up spare time by advising here. You are welcome to assist. We are not even dealing with the tip of the iceberg. These unregulated private firms issue over 40,000 PCNs every single day of the year.
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Thank you for your time with this, I am due to retire in the new year and will have plenty of free time on my hands.....I might start swatting up on something specialist like private parking regs so that I can give something back to this forum.
I am sure that your time and input will be most welcome. There are only relatively few posters providing help here, not least @b789 of course. The rest of us try and do what we can. -
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