Free Traffic Legal Advice

So you have 2 options:  pay; or wait for the court case and defend it.  This forum generally supports the latter option....  Worst case is you lose the court case and have to pay - and as long as you do this within 30 days it will not affect your credit record.  With assistance from here, it is most likely the case will be discontinued before the hearing.  You may well have made it harder with your appeals as it seems likely you have identified the driver - this probably doesn't matter as they will most likely use template application to the court that will be unclear about whether they are claiming against you as driver or keeper.  If / when you get a letter of claim come back and post it up and advice should follow.

What did McDonalds say when you complained to/brought the issue up with them?

I have not brought the issue up with mc donalds, do you think I should do this? to try and get them to cancel it from their side?

Absolutely. It costs nothing to try.

The rest

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Smart’s PCN is deemed to have been delivered 24/2, which is more than 14 days after the parking event, and thus the provisions of PoFA 2012 can not be used to transfer liability from the driver to the registered keeper, provided the driver has not been identified.

Thank you for the advise! I do not think I have directly stated I was the driver so I will get back to Smart Parking with the above, I have also contacted mc donalds and awaiting their response! Thanks again all much appreciated!

OP, there is nothing for you to do now. Trying to contact (not so) Smart parking would be even dumber than they are.

The appeal was wasted because you did not point out to the assessor that the PCN was no PoFA complaint and there was therefore no Keeper liability. As long as you did not identify the driver will statements such as "I did this or that", instead of "the driver did this or that", this would have been a successful appeal at POPLA.

Too late now. Come back when you receive a Letter of Claim (LoC). We do not need to see or know about useless debt recovery letters which you can safely ignore. 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.

This is easily winnable  when defending in a court claim, which will never actually reach a hearing as it will be struck out or discontinued before the claimant has to pay the £27 trial fee.