Free Traffic Legal Advice

(4)The notice must be given by—

(a)handing it to the keeper, or leaving it at a current address for service for the keeper, within the relevant period; or

(b)sending it by post to a current address for service for the keeper so that it is delivered to that address within the relevant period.

(5)The relevant period for the purposes of sub-paragraph (4) is the period of 14 days beginning with the day after that on which the specified period of parking ended.

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. TPS 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. TPS have no hope at POPLA, so you are urged to save us both a complete waste of time and cancel the PCN.

Dear Sirs,

Re: PCN [ref] / Vehicle [VRM]

I acknowledge receipt of your latest effort at correspondence. It is difficult to decide whether it is more notable for its legal incoherence or for the level of intellectual malnourishment it betrays.

Let me assist you with some basics which, as an Approved Operator, you ought to have mastered long ago:

1. Late Notice to Keeper – no keeper liability
You elected to issue a Notice to Keeper. That NtK was served outside the “relevant period” prescribed by Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. As such, you are barred in law from holding the registered keeper liable. PoFA is a strict statutory gateway; “near enough” or “substantial compliance” is legally meaningless.

2. No presumption that the keeper was the driver
In the absence of full PoFA compliance or an admission as to who was driving, your cause of action (if any) lies only against the unknown driver. There is no legal presumption that the keeper was the driver, and your attempt to conjure one up from thin air merely demonstrates that whoever drafted your letter has not bothered to read either the statute or the relevant case law.

3. No duty to name the driver
You have no power whatsoever to compel disclosure of driver details. This is a private civil matter, not a criminal investigation. Your request for the driver’s identity is therefore declined. I can do no better than to refer you to the reply given in Arkell v Pressdram [1971].

For the avoidance of doubt:

• There will be no admission as to the identity of the driver.
• You cannot rely on PoFA to pursue the keeper.
• Any suggestion to the contrary is legally wrong and frankly embarrassing but not surprising for a BPA operator.

As a member of the British Parking Association, you are required – when rejecting an appeal and maintaining a charge – to provide a POPLA verification code. You will therefore now either:

a) confirm that this charge is cancelled; or
b) issue a properly formatted rejection letter with a POPLA code.

If you are genuinely reckless enough to imagine, in whatever passes for your legal reasoning, that you can sue the keeper on the basis of this defective NtK, I will positively relish the opportunity to expose your incompetence in front of a judge. In that event, you can expect a fully pleaded defence, a counter-attack on your misuse of PoFA, and an application for my costs on the basis of your unreasonable conduct.

Any further generic demands that ignore the points above will be treated as junk mail and filed accordingly.

Yours faithfully,

[Name]
Registered Keeper

POPLA Verification Code: [enter code]
Parking Charge Notice: [PCN reference]
Vehicle Registration: [VRM]
Operator: Total Parking Solutions (TPS)

I am the registered keeper of the vehicle. I am appealing this Parking Charge Notice on a single, determinative ground.

The assessor must first consider whether the operator has issued the Notice to Keeper (NtK) correctly so that it can rely on Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA) to hold the keeper liable.

To do so, the assessor must consider the “relevant period” for delivery of a postal NtK. Paragraph 9(4) of Schedule 4 requires that the notice “must be given” to the keeper within the “relevant period”. Paragraph 9(5) defines the relevant period as 14 days beginning with the day after the specified period of parking ended. Paragraph 9(6) explains that a notice sent by post is “given” when it is delivered.

In this case, the operator alleges that the vehicle was parked at Bristol Royal Infirmary on 30/09/2025. The NtK itself states a “Date of Notice” of 17/10/2025. On the same document, TPS states that “this notice is considered served on the second working day after the above-mentioned issue date”.

The assessor must therefore consider when this NtK can be regarded as “given” for the purposes of PoFA. The issue date is Friday 17/10/2025. The first working day after that date is Monday 20/10/2025 and the second working day is Tuesday 21/10/2025. Even using the operator’s own wording, the NtK is therefore “considered served” on 21/10/2025.

The relevant period under PoFA runs for 14 days beginning with the day after the parking event, that is from 01/10/2025 up to and including 14/10/2025. The NtK is deemed delivered on 21/10/2025, which is 21 days after the event and 7 days beyond the end of the relevant period.

The assessor must therefore find that TPS has not complied with paragraph 9(4) of Schedule 4 because the NtK was not “given” within the 14-day relevant period. PoFA is a strict statutory regime; failure to meet this mandatory timing requirement means that TPS cannot transfer liability from the driver to the keeper.

The assessor must then consider whether the operator has proved that the keeper was the driver. In private parking matters there is no legal obligation on a registered keeper to identify the driver or to assist the operator in that regard. The burden of proof rests entirely on the operator if it wishes to pursue the keeper on the basis that the keeper was driving. In this case TPS has provided no evidence that the keeper was the driver.

In summary, as the Notice to Keeper does not fully comply with ALL the requirements of PoFA 2012, the operator is unable to hold the keeper of the vehicle liable for the charge. Partial or even substantial compliance is not sufficient. There is no admission as to who was driving and no inference or assumptions can be drawn. TPS 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. The NtK can only hold the driver liable.

For these reasons, I respectfully request that the assessor allows this appeal and directs that this Parking Charge Notice be cancelled.