Free Traffic Legal Advice

It appears you may have made the basic mistake of admitting to being "the driver". Has there been any correspondence between you and the parking company, we need to see it all.

Have you received an actual N1SDT Claim Form with the Particulars of Claim (PoC) issued by HMCTS (CNBC)? If so, who is representing UKCPS? What is the date of issue of the claim?

In contract law terms, that red sentence in the sign about restaurant staff and customers is not, by itself, capable of forming a contract with you.

The wording simply says that vehicles belonging to restaurant staff and customers are not permitted to park in the car park. That is a prohibition, not an offer. It identifies a category of people and tells them they may not park. For a contract to exist there has to be an offer which a driver can accept, usually by parking and remaining on site in accordance with the terms. If a group is told they are not permitted to park at all, there is nothing for them to accept, so there can be no contract to pay a charge for parking. That is the reasoning behind the “forbidding sign” cases, which treat this sort of wording as, at most, a warning against trespass, not an offer of paid parking.

UKCPS will point to the bottom part of the sign about a parking charge of £100 for breach of any term and argue that by entering you accept that risk. Your counter is that, reading the sign as a whole, the only positive offer is to the allowed class (patients, and possibly anyone else expressly mentioned in the blue bullet points). The red line about restaurant customers and staff is purely negative. It does not say that restaurant customers may park on payment of £100; it says they are not permitted to park. If the intention was to offer restaurant customers a paid licence, the sign would say so in clear terms.

You then have an additional argument about the meaning of the phrase “vehicles belonging to [restaurant] staff and customers”. A normal reader would take that to mean vehicles owned or driven by those people, not any vehicle in which a restaurant customer might be a passenger. On your facts, you were the driver and did not enter the restaurant; only your passenger did. Even on UKCPS’s own wording they need to show that the vehicle belonged to, or was being driven by, a member of staff or a customer, and they cannot do that. Under section 69 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, any ambiguity in consumer-facing terms or notices must be interpreted in the way most favourable to the consumer. If there is a genuine doubt whether the phrase covers “driver is a customer” or merely “driver or owner is a customer”, the court must adopt the interpretation that helps you, not them.

You then have your other limbs of defence, which fit together logically with this:

First, the sign is prohibitive overall in relation to you. For restaurant customers it does not offer parking at a price; it simply bans them. That supports the argument that there is no contract at all between UKCPS and someone in your position. At most, the landowner might have a trespass claim, but that would be for a small sum (pennies) in damages, not a contractual £100.

Second, the consideration-period issue. The PPSCoP requires that drivers are allowed a period of time (minimum 5 minutes) on arrival to locate, read and consider the terms before any charge is triggered. You were on site for about two minutes and thirty-seven seconds from entry to exit. That is obviously within any reasonable reading-and-decision period, particularly in a small car park at night. As the PPSCoP itself points to five minutes as the point at which “acceptance by parking” can normally be inferred, it is very difficult for UKCPS to say that you had already entered a binding contract well before that point. The Supreme Court in ParkingEye v Beavis treated compliance with the parking trade association Code of Practice as an important touchstone for the fairness and enforceability of charges. If UKCPS are ticketing drivers well inside the consideration period they themselves are supposed to allow, they are not acting in line with that approach.

Third, Jopson v Homeguard helps you both on the question of contract and on whether any “parking” occurred at all. The judge in that case recognised that short stops for loading, unloading or similar brief activity are not “parking” in the sense used in private parking contracts, and that merely stopping for a short period, with the engine running or not, is a different category of conduct. What you did – a very brief stop to allow a passenger to collect a pre-ordered item, engine running, no leaving of the vehicle by the driver – fits comfortably within that description. It allows you to argue that there was no “parking event” for any of the terms to bite on, even if the sign were otherwise capable of forming a contract.

Finally, the appeal rejection letter itself contains a factual error: it asserts that you entered the restaurant, when in fact only your passenger did. That undermines the reliability of their case review and shows that they did not properly check who did what in the video before deciding to pursue you. It neatly illustrates the danger of their broad interpretation of “restaurant customers’ vehicles” and supports your argument about the true meaning of the wording.

Putting it all together:

1. The sentence about restaurant staff and customers is prohibitive and does not offer parking to you at any price, so it cannot, taken on its own, create a contract for a £100 charge.
2. Even if the court treats the sign as contractual overall, UKCPS must prove that your vehicle actually came within the prohibited class as defined by their own wording, which they cannot do given that you were the driver and did not enter the restaurant.
3. You were on site for less than three minutes, which is well within any fair consideration period, so there is a strong argument that no contract had been formed by conduct at all.
4. On the authority of Jopson, what occurred was a brief stop for loading/collection rather than parking, which again takes you outside the scope of any parking terms.

On that basis, you have a coherent and legally supportable defence to present at a small-claims hearing, with several independent points all pointing to the same conclusion: no contract to pay UKCPS £100 ever came into existence, and even if it had, it was not breached by what you actually did.

Show us the Claim Form.

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Jeez!!!! Why have you redacted there details of the claimants legal representative? Just as you have unnecessarily redacted the name of the restaurant, you must NEVER EVER redact the name of the legal representative if you want proper advice!!!

Never mind the fact that we can tell just from the PoC that their utterly incompetent bulk litigator of choice is Moorside Legal. Just stop redacting unnecessarily. Also, tell us the name and position of the person who has signed the N1SDT Statement of Truth (SoT) on the back, if it is anyone other than Rebecca Horton-Grainger or Thomas Oliver Clough.

The PoC do not comply with CPR 16.4(1)(a) and without even needing (at this stage) to go into detail about the alleged contravention, your defence needs to be very simple. If the claim is not struck out on the basis of the basic defence, you can always go into further detail if the morons at Moorside actually are stupid enough to pay the trial fee and submit a hearsay Witness Statement by one of their wannabe "legal helpers".

With an issue date of 26th November, you have until 4pm on Monday 15th December to submit your defence. If you submit an Acknowledgement of Service (AoS) before then, you would then have until 4pm on Monday 29th December to submit your defence.

You only need to submit an AoS if you need extra time to prepare your defence. If you want to submit an AoS then follow the instructions in this linked PDF:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xvqu3bask5m0zir/money-claim-online-How-to-Acknowledge.pdf?dl=0

Until very recently, we never advised using the MCOL to submit a defence. However, due to recent systemic failures within the CNBC, we feel that it is safer to now submit a short defence using MCOL as it is instantly submitted and entered into the "system". Whilst it will deny the use of some formatting or inclusion of transcripts etc. these can always be included with the Witness Statement (WS) later, if it ever progresses that far.

You will need to copy and paste it into the defence text box on MCOL. It has been checked to make sure that it will fit into the 122 lines limit.

1. The Defendant denies the claim in its entirety. The Defendant asserts that there is no liability to the Claimant and that no debt is owed. The claim is without merit and does not adequately disclose any comprehensible cause of action.

2. There is a lack of precise detail in the Particulars of Claim (PoC) in respect of the factual and legal allegations made against the Defendant such that the PoC do not comply with CPR 16.4(1)(a).

3. The Defendant is unable to plead properly to the PoC because:

(a) The contract referred to is not detailed or attached to the PoC in accordance with PD 16, para 7.3(1);

(b) The PoC do not state the exact wording of the clause (or clauses) of the terms and conditions of the contract (or contracts) which is/are relied on;

(c) The PoC do not adequately set out the reason (or reasons) why the claimant asserts the defendant has breached the contract (or contracts)

(d) The PoC do not state with sufficient particularity exactly where the breach occurred, the exact time when the breach occurred and how long it is alleged that the vehicle was parked before the parking charge was allegedly incurred;

(e) The PoC do not state precisely how the sum claimed is calculated, including the basis for any statutory interest, damages, or other charges;

(f) The PoC do not state what proportion of the claim is the parking charge and what proportion is damages;

(g) The PoC do not provide clarity on whether the Defendant is sued as the driver or the keeper of the vehicle, as the claimant cannot plead alternative causes of action without specificity.

4. The Defendant submits that courts have previously struck out similar claims of their own initiative for failure to adequately comply with CPR 16.4(1)(a), particularly where the Particulars of Claim failed to specify the contractual terms relied upon or explain the alleged breach with sufficient clarity. The Defendant refers specifically to the persuasive appellate cases:

- Civil Enforcement Ltd v Chan (2023), Luton County Court, HHJ Murch, ref: E7GM9W44

- CPMS Ltd v Akande (2024), Manchester County Court, HHJ Evans, ref: K0DP5J30

In both cases, the claim was struck out due to materially similar failures to comply with CPR 16.4(1)(a).

5. The Defendant invites the Court to strike out this claim of its own initiative. The Defendant relies on the judicial reasoning set out in Chan and Akande, as well as other County Court cases involving identical failures to adequately comply with CPR 16.4. In those cases, the court further observed that, given the modest sum claimed, requiring further case management steps would be disproportionate and contrary to the overriding objective. Accordingly, the judge struck out the claim outright rather than permitting an amendment. The Defendant proposes that the following Order be made:

Draft Order:

Of the Court's own initiative and upon reading the particulars of claim and the defence.

AND the court being of the view that the particulars of claim do not comply with CPR 16.4(1)(a) because: (a) they do not set out the exact wording of the clause (or clauses) of the terms and conditions of the contract (or contracts) which is (or are) relied on; and (b) they do not adequately set out the reason (or reasons) why the claimant asserts that the defendant was in breach of contract.

AND the claimant could have complied with CPR 16.4(1)(a) had it served separate detailed particulars of claim, as it could have done pursuant to PD 7C, para 5.2, but chose not to do so.

AND upon the Court determining, having regard to the overriding objective (CPR 1.1), that it would be disproportionate to direct further pleadings or to allot any further share of the Court’s resources to this claim (for example by ordering further particulars of claim and a further defence, with consequent case management).

ORDER:

1. The claim is struck out.
2. Permission to either party to apply to set aside, vary or stay this order by application on notice, which must be filed at this Court not more than 7 days after service of this order, failing which no such application may be made.

Yes, it is too late to change your defence and it is a real pity you did not rely on their total failure to comply with CPR 16.4(1)(a) which usually gets their claims struck out at allocation.

Please show us the exact wording of your defence if you want further advice.

That should be enough. However, if you are a "law grad", why didn't you brush up on the Court Procedure Rules (CPRs) and file a defence covering all the "hooks" you'll need for your Witness Statement. The defence should be in the third person ("The Defendant did this or that", not "I did this or that"). Your WS will be in the first person.

If the incompetents at Moorside Legal submit a WS, you can guarantee that it will be a hearsay statement from some junior wannabe with no direct knowledge of the facts. They will not send anyone to the trial so there can be no cross examination and you remind the judge about that.

The odds to this ever reaching a hearing are slim to none. However, never underestimate the utter incompetence of the intellectually malnourished employees of this firm, trying to progress it all the way.

You won't know until the claim is processed to your local county court and it has survived the procedural judge there letting the claim stand as is. Once they have passed that hurdle and assuming the claim is not struck out there and then, you will next have to wait and see if they pay the £27 trial fee or just discontinue. If they do push on, then you will have to see their WS before you submit your own, even if that even means submitting it a bit late.

If it ever does reach a hearing in front of a judge, they are highly unlikely to send anyone, not even a local advocate for hire, which means that you will have the judge to yourself and can highlight their non-existent case and highlight their procedural failure as a preliminary matter, inviting strike out/dismissal there and then.