Free Traffic Legal Advice

Whenever someone comes to us mentioning multiple letters not arriving the first thing I strongly recommend doing is getting out your car's physical V5C document, and checking the address is correct.

Debt collectors can and should be ignored - they have no interest in any conversation that does not involve you making payment. You should keep your eye out for a Letter of Claim - if you receive such a letter, return here for advice.

Was the address correct on the V5C at the time of the alleged contravention?

Either way, you are dealing with (not so) Smart Parking who recently jumped ship for the BPA to the IPC, so no amount of appealing would work.

Any appeal must received by the operator within 28 days from the date of "receipt" of the Notice, not the date of "issue". Even though they say that it is supposed to be within 28 days of "issue", their Code of Practice says "receipt". Not that this would help you much at this stage anyway.

If you follow the advice, you won't be paying a penny to (not so) Smart. Without knowing the date of the alleged contravention and the date they issued the Notice to Keeper (NtK), it is now advised that you do the following...

Ignore all useless debt recovery letters. Never, ever, EVER enter into communication with a powerless debt collector. All they can do is try to persuade the low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to pay up out of ignorance and fear. You can safely ignore anything from a debt collector.

When you eventually receive a Letter of Claim (LoC), which is the case of (not so) Smart is likely to be from their preferred bulk litigator of choice, DCB Legal, let us know an we will provide a suitable response. IN due course you will receive an N1SDT Claim Form from the CNBC. Show it to us only redacting your personal info, the claim number and the MCOL password. Leave ALL dates showing, especially the issue date.

We will provide advice on how to respond and what deadlines you have ti submit a defence. We will provide a template defence and then you go through the process until eventually the claim is either struck out or discontinued.

The only relevant dates are the date of the alleged contravention and the date the Notice to Keeper was issued. No other date has any relevance as far as we are concerned. As you have never seen the NtK, you do not know the date it was issued.

In most, but not necessarily all, (not so) Smart Parking PCNs, they fail to comply with the deadlines for serving the notice within the "relevant period". In those cases, they cannot hold the Keeper liable, only the unknown (to them) driver. As long as the Keeper does not blab the drivers identity, they could never succeed in holding the Keeper liable should it ever get as far as an actual hearing (about a 0.1% chance of that happening).

They have up to 6 years from the date of the parking event to raise a claim, but they rarely take all of that time (and realistically have no decent reason to take so long). If I were to guess, I'd say within the next year would be fairly likely.

No, we can’t see it, but if you posted it here we would be able to!

The notice to keeper has to sent so that it arrives within 14 days if the liability is to be transferred from the driver to the registered keeper.

If the driver is not identified, the liability can not be transferred.

If the driver is identified, the driver can be pursued for six years.

It’s too late to appeal, the IPC/IAS would not uphold your appeal anyway (it only upholds 4% of appeals, which are the egregiously obvious ones), so you need to wait, ignoring everything from Debt Recovery Plus until you receive a formal Letter of Claim, for which we can advise in due course. See Reply #3 above.

Apologies an update here. We are actually moving house next week so given we are waiting on the LoC im worried we will miss it.

I planned to pay for our mail to be forwarded to the new address, but given it can take years for the LoC to arrive i don't want to have to pay for forwarded mail for several years. It £90 a year for forwarded mail so after 2 years it would exceed the fine.

Is there a way to check if a letter of complaint has been sent via any other way other than post or a way around this. The only thing I can think of is asking the new resident to keep an eye out for it but then would hate him to miss it and end up with a CCJ

Thanks again

A Data Rectification Notice to (not so) Smart Parking's DPO instructing them to update their records with your new address for service and to erase your old address, is all that is needed. The highlighted words are there for a reason, so use them.