Were you customers of the Green Man Pub? If so, have you asked the pub management to call of their contracted parking operator and cancel the speculative invoice issued?
Personally, I would dare them to try and take this to court. However, that would never happen because even though they will issue a county court claim, as long as its is defended, they will discontinue before they have to pay the £27 trial fee.
If Plan A doesn't work (get the pub to cancel it), then you will have to go through the long process of waiting for a claim to be issued, defend it and eventually, in about 9-12+ months, it will all be over.
No one here who follows the advice pays a penny to ECP.
Yes, you can try and argue the 30 second over is a breach of contract but there is no evidence that the permit was purchased at 12:53:59 and expired at 14:53:59 which means an ANPR image of the vehicle leaving the car park at 14:53:30 is still within the permit period.
You can appeal and then submit a POPLA appeal after the initial appeal is rejected and you may be able to persuade a POPLA assessor, if you're lucky enough to get one ion the very few who are not morons to agree that this de minimis. However, even if POPLA decide not to bite the hand that feeds them, you are not bound by their decision.
You will then have to ignore all the useless debt recovery letters that will come demanding £170. Debt collectors are powerless to do anything except to try and persuade the low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to pay up out of ignorance and fear.
Eventually you would receive a Letter of Claim (LoC) from DCB Legal, their bulk litigator of choice. We would advise on how to respond and then you would receive an N1SDT Clim Form and again, we would advise on how to defend. Just do a search of the forum for any other DCB Legal case, and there are plenty of ECP ones, to understand that you will never pay a penny to them.
For now, try Plan A and then you can send the following appeal, only as the Keeper. They have no idea who the driver is unless you blab it to them. 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.
