Free Traffic Legal Advice

Dear Sirs,

Your Letter Before Claim contains insufficient detail of the claim and fails to provide copies of evidence your client places reliance upon and thus is in complete contravention of the Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims.

As a firm of supposed solicitors, one would expect you to be capable of crafting a letter that aligns with paragraphs 3.1(a)–(d), 5.1 and 5.2 of the Protocol, and paragraphs 6(a) and 6(c) of the Practice Direction. These provisions do not exist for decoration—they exist to facilitate informed discussion and proportionate resolution. You might wish to reacquaint yourselves with them.

The Civil Procedure Rules 1998, Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols (Part 3), stipulate that prior to proceedings, parties should have exchanged sufficient information to understand each other’s position. Part 6 helpfully clarifies that this includes disclosure of key documents relevant to the issues in dispute.

Your template letter mentions a “contract”, yet fails to provide one. This would appear to undermine the only foundation upon which your client’s claim allegedly rests. It’s difficult to engage in meaningful pre-litigation dialogue when your side declines to furnish the very document it purports to enforce.

I confirm that, once I am in receipt of a Letter Before Claim that complies with the requirements of para 3.1 (a) of the Pre-Action Protocol, I shall then seek advice and submit a formal response within 30 days, as required by the Protocol. Thus, I require your client to comply with its obligations by sending me the following information/documents:

1. A copy of the original Notice to Keeper (NtK) that confirms any PoFA 2012 liability
2. A copy of the contract (or contracts) you allege exists between your client and the driver, in the form of an actual photograph of the sign you contend was at the location on the material date, not a generic stock image
3. The exact wording of the clause (or clauses) of the terms and conditions of the contract(s) which is (are) relied upon that you allege to have been breached
4. The written agreement between your client and the landowner, establishing authority to enforce
5. A breakdown of the charges claimed, identifying whether the principal sum is claimed as consideration or damages, and whether the £70 “debt recovery” fee includes VAT

I am clearly entitled to this information under paragraphs 6(a) and 6(c) of the Practice Direction. I also need it in order to comply with my own obligations under paragraph 6(b).

If your client does not provide me with this information then I put you on notice that I will be relying on the cases of Webb Resolutions Ltd v Waller Needham & Green [2012] EWHC 3529 (Ch), Daejan Investments Limited v The Park West Club Limited (Part 20) Buxton Associates [2003] EWHC 2872, Charles Church Developments Ltd v Stent Foundations Limited & Peter Dann Limited [2007] EWHC 855 in asking the court to impose sanctions on your client and to order a stay of the proceedings, pursuant to paragraphs 13, 15(b) and (c) and 16 of the Practice Direction, as referred to in paragraph 7.2 of the Protocol.

Until your client has complied with its obligations and provided this information, I am unable to respond properly to the alleged claim and to consider my position in relation to it, and it is entirely premature (and a waste of costs and court time) for your client to issue proceedings. Should your client do so, then I will seek an immediate stay pursuant to paragraph 15(b) of the Practice Direction and an order that this information is provided.

Your letter pays lip service to the Protocol but ignores its substance. This undermines the very pre-litigation process it purports to follow.

Yours faithfully,

Dear Ms Grundle

Re: VCS22897672 – Your letter dated 19 December 2025

Thank you for your further letter. I do not accept your analysis of the law or the facts. My complaints to the CMA and CILEx Regulation are proceeding and your latest response will be added to them.

You continue to assert that a binding contract arises from “No stopping” signs and that any stop for any reason other than a “genuine emergency” is a breach. That misunderstands basic contract principles.

A contract requires an offer that confers some permission or benefit which the consumer can accept, together with consideration. “No stopping – £100 charge” is not an offer of any facility at all. It is a prohibition reinforced by a threat of a penalty. There is no licence to stop, no service provided, and no bargain to be accepted. What your client has drafted is at best a bare “you must not stop” rule dressed up as a contract in order to extract a penalty from motorists who inevitably have to stop on a live approach road from time to time.

Moreover, the term your client relies on is impossible and unlawful in its absolute form. A vehicle must be able to stop when compelled by traffic or road conditions, or by mechanical issues. The law requires drivers to drive safely, not to press on through a stall or into the path of an oncoming bus in order to satisfy a private company’s “no stopping” policy. Any term which purports to make a motorist financially liable for complying with road safety obligations, or for an involuntary stall, is void for impossibility and is plainly unfair under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. No fair contract term can require a driver to ignore the Highway Code or basic mechanical reality.

That is exactly what happened here. The vehicle stalled because the wrong gear was selected. I then had to remain stationary briefly because of an approaching bus. That is not a “voluntary stop”, it is a combination of mechanical difficulty and traffic conditions – precisely the situation in which a driver is obliged to remain where they are until it is safe to move off. Your attempt to recast this as some kind of deliberate, chargeable pause only highlights how penal your client’s model is.

Your heavy reliance on county court decisions such as Ward and Crutchley does not assist you. Those are fact-specific, non-binding decisions. In any event, they do not give your client carte blanche to impose contractual liability on every motorist who momentarily stops in a live traffic situation, nor do they override the Consumer Rights Act. A District Judge will decide this case on its own facts and on current law, not on carefully selected quotes from other people’s hearings.

More fundamentally, as a regulated litigation firm you are not entitled to hide behind your client’s business model. You are not mere message-carriers. You owe duties to the court and obligations of professional judgment. You know, or ought to know, that a term which purports to outlaw all stopping on a live airport roundabout, regardless of safety or mechanical necessity, is at serious risk of being held void and/or unfair. You also know, or ought to know, that additional “debt recovery” uplifts are routinely disallowed as unrecoverable double recovery even where a parking contract does exist. Your role should be to advise your client against pursuing hopeless or abusive litigation, not to encourage it.

Instead, you have chosen to adopt and repeat your client’s most extreme positions. You assert, without qualification, that the extra £70 is both lawful and recoverable and that the Private Parking Single Code of Practice “expressly permits” such uplifts. You then go on to tell me that I have been “accurately informed” of the legal position and that there is no misrepresentation or omission. In other words, you seek to bless your client’s position with the authority of a regulated law firm and to use that status to pressurise a consumer into paying a charge which you know is strongly contested and legally doubtful.

That is exactly the kind of conduct which is likely to be viewed as a misleading and aggressive commercial practice under the DMCC. You are presenting a highly contentious and one-sided legal view as if it were objective fact; you are telling me that a plainly penal and arguably impossible term is reasonable and enforceable; and you are doing so in the context of debt demands couched in urgent and insistent language. It is not enough simply to say “we wholly reject your DMCC allegations” and then repeat the same assertions. The Act is concerned with the effect of your communications on consumers, not with your own opinion of your conduct.

I also note that your latest letter accepts that there is a fundamental disagreement as to “the legal basis, enforceability, or fairness of the charge” and concludes that “the appropriate course is for the matter to be determined by the court”. On that at least we can agree. There is no point in further correspondence while you persist in treating an impossible “no stopping” term as a watertight contract and a brief involuntary stall as a lucrative breach.

For the avoidance of doubt, my position remains:

1. No contract was formed because the “no stopping” signage is purely prohibitive and offers no licence or consideration.
2. Even if a contract could somehow be implied, the term relied on is impossible to perform in normal traffic conditions and is unfair under the Consumer Rights Act, and is therefore not binding.
3. The additional £70 “debt recovery fee” is not lawfully recoverable and your repeated assertion that it is due is misleading.
4. Your own correspondence will be relied upon as evidence of misleading and aggressive commercial practices under the DMCC, and of a failure to exercise the professional judgment expected of a regulated litigation firm and officers of the court.

In light of this, I invite you one last time to do what you should have done at the outset: advise your client that their “no stopping” contract at Bristol Airport is fundamentally flawed, that pursuing motorists over brief, unavoidable stops is vexatious, and that any claim based on these facts is at serious risk of being dismissed with an adverse costs order for unreasonable conduct.

If, despite that, your client insists on litigating, they should issue a properly particularised claim. Any such claim will be fully defended and I will place your entire file of correspondence, including your reliance on an impossible and unfair contract term and your insistence that the £70 uplift is recoverable, before the court in support of a costs application for unreasonable behaviour.

If your client does not intend to issue proceedings, then the proper course is for you to close your file and make no further contact. Please confirm, within 14 days, whether you intend to (a) close your file and take no further action, or (b) continue to act in a debt-collection and pre-action capacity. Any further demands or attempts to re-state the same position will simply be treated as additional evidence for the regulators and, if necessary, the court.

Yours sincerely

Patrick Moore