Free Traffic Legal Advice

First things first... If you can find the word “fine” anywhere in all the correspondence you have received, I will pay it for you. You need to get it out of your mind that you have been “fined”. It is nothing of the sort. You received a speculative invoice from an unregulated private parking company for an alleged breach of contract with the driver.

It is too late to appeal now and would have been an exercise in futility anyway. You are now in a limbo period waiting to see if/when CPM issue a Letter of Claim LoC or an actual N1SDT county court claim. If/when they do, that is a good thing as it is the ultimate dispute resolution service and it is when they make their mistakes.

In the meantime, you will have to weather some useless debt collector letters with the fake added £60-£70 fees. We do not need to see any DRA letters and you can safely ignore those. They are simply designed to get low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree to capitulate and pay into their scam. Ignore all debt collector letters and reminders.

Come back if/when you receive a Letter of Claim (LoC) which gives you 30 days to pay. Anything that pretends to be a letter of claim but only gives you 14 days to pay is fake and simply more useless debt collector rubbish.

As an aside for future reference - private parking charges generally give you 28 days to respond. If you're going to be out of the country for a period of that long (or longer), you would be wise to ensure there is some sort of procedure in place for you to receive and respond to mail, such as someone opening it for you and sending you the contents, for example.

Had this been a Notice of Intended Prosecution from the police rather than a parking charge, not responding within the designated timeframe could have caused you to commit a criminal offence, causing all sorts of potential headache.