Not sure why Saba are referring to the "Hirer". Are you the Keeper or the Hirer? Which station was this alleged contravention at as I need to now which TOC to submit a formal complaint to about Saba's unlawful activity.
Saba are trying to blur three different ideas (“owner”, “keeper” and “driver/hirer”) because it helps them pressure the recipient into paying. In a railway byelaws matter, that conflation is exactly what breaks their position.
Start with what a “byelaws penalty” actually is. Railway Byelaws are a statutory scheme. If Saba are alleging a breach of Byelaw 14, they are alleging a statutory offence. Statutory offences are not enforced by sending a payment demand and then treating non-payment as a civil debt. The only lawful enforcement route is prosecution in the magistrates’ court within the applicable time limit, brought by an entity with standing to prosecute (in practice the Train Operating Company or another properly authorised prosecutor). A private parking contractor like Saba does not get to convert an alleged offence into a pay-us invoice enforceable against whoever they choose.
That leads to the key point: “liability” in criminal/byelaws land is not the same thing as “liability” for a civil parking charge. In a civil parking charge model, an operator tries to show a contract with the driver, and then (only where PoFA applies on relevant land) sometimes transfers liability to the registered keeper. None of that applies to a railway byelaws allegation. There is no PoFA transfer. There is no county court “debt” claim for a byelaws offence. There is only prosecution, and prosecution requires a specific defendant.
Now look at “owner”. Even if the byelaws mention the owner in some contexts, that does not hand Saba a magic power to invoice “the owner” and demand payment to Saba. If the allegation is genuinely a byelaw offence, any sanction is imposed by a court on conviction, not by Saba by email. Saba cannot simply declare “the owner is liable” and then treat that declaration as a standalone cause of action. The court would still need a named defendant, and the prosecutor would need to prove the necessary elements to the criminal standard. An email assertion that “you remain liable” proves nothing.
This is compounded by a basic evidential problem that Saba never address. There is no register of vehicle owners that they can consult. The only data source available to them is DVLA registered keeper data. That data identifies a registered keeper for vehicle administration purposes only; it does not identify ownership. The V5C itself states, in bold terms, that it is not proof of ownership. Accordingly, even if Saba are writing to the person named on the V5C, that provides no evidence at all that the recipient is the legal owner of the vehicle.
Crucially, “owner” is not the same as “registered keeper”. In a hire or lease situation the “owner” is commonly the finance or lease company, the “keeper” might be the hirer or fleet manager, and the “driver” is the person using it that day. Those can be three completely different parties. Saba’s statement that they have “no cause of action against the driver or hirer” but that “the owner is held liable in all circumstances” is therefore internally incoherent. If they genuinely mean “owner”, they are often writing to the wrong party. And even if they were writing to the actual owner, they still cannot enforce a byelaws allegation by private invoice, nor can they compel a keeper to provide proof of purchase or ownership to assist them.
Finally, when Saba say they are “not updating to the driver/hirer” and that the recipient must seek redress from the hirer under a contract, they are effectively admitting what they are doing: treating this as a private billing dispute, not a prosecution. That is exactly the problem for them. If they stick with “byelaws offence”, they must prosecute, and they cannot use PoFA keeper liability or an invented concept of “owner liability” to make it into a civil debt. If they switch to “civil contract charge”, then it is not a byelaws penalty at all, and the only potentially liable party is the driver (subject to the usual contractual and signage issues), not some rotating cast of “owner/keeper/hirer” chosen for convenience.
So, in plain terms: the “owner” cannot be made liable by Saba’s say-so. Keeper and hirer are irrelevant to a byelaws offence unless a properly authorised prosecutor brings a magistrates’ case against a specific person and proves what the law requires. Saba are not the prosecutor, and they cannot enforce an alleged byelaws offence as a private debt. The only party who could ever be directly responsible for the alleged parking conduct itself is the person who parked or was in charge of the vehicle at the time (the driver/operator), and even then liability only arises in the way the law permits: through prosecution, not through a contractor’s payment demand.
I advise you to respond to that legally embarrassing statement from the morons at Saba with the following:
Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for your latest email. It is, if nothing else, a fascinating demonstration of how confidently a legal position can be asserted while being entirely untethered from reality.
You now claim that “the owner of the vehicle is held liable in all circumstances” for a Railway Byelaws Penalty Notice, while also assuring me that you have “no cause of action” against the driver or hirer. This is not some subtle or technical error. It is a wholesale failure to understand the very framework you are invoking.
If this matter truly concerns an alleged breach of Railway Byelaw 14, then it concerns a statutory offence. Statutory offences are not enforced by emails, payment invitations, or your internal declarations of who you have decided is “liable this week”. They are enforced, if at all, by prosecution in the magistrates’ court, brought by a party with standing to prosecute. You are not such a party, and you do not acquire enforcement powers simply by repeating the word “liable” often enough.
Your attempt to rescue this position by invoking “the owner” is particularly inept.
There is no register of vehicle owners available to you. The only data you ever obtain is DVLA registered keeper data. That data does not establish ownership. The V5C itself spells this out for the benefit of anyone who bothers to read it, stating in bold print that it is not proof of ownership. One would have hoped this was familiar territory for a company claiming expertise in parking enforcement, but apparently not.
So even before we get to law, you face a basic factual problem: you have no idea who the owner is. In the real world, the owner, the registered keeper, and the driver are very often three different parties — lease vehicles, hire vehicles, financed vehicles, company cars, fleet arrangements, and family registrations being entirely routine examples. Your assertion that “the owner is liable in all circumstances” therefore manages to be legally wrong, evidentially unsupported, and practically nonsensical all at once.
It becomes more farcical when you suggest that I should “seek redress from the hirer under my contract”. That language is not the language of a prosecutor enforcing a statutory offence. It is the language of a private billing dispute, hastily stitched together in the hope that someone, somewhere, will simply pay to make you go away. That hope is not a legal framework.
To assist you, since you appear to be struggling:
• PoFA does not apply on railway byelaw land.
• There is no keeper liability.
• There is no such thing as freestanding civil “owner liability” that you can invent by email.
• There is no lawful mechanism for you to enforce an alleged byelaws offence as a private debt.
If you genuinely believe an offence occurred, your only lawful option is to pursue a properly authorised prosecution in the magistrates’ court against an identifiable defendant and prove your case to the required evidential standard - beyond. reasonable doubt. Everything else you are doing is noise.
I do not accept liability as keeper, hirer, alleged owner, or any other label you wish to experiment with next. I will not be naming any driver, providing ownership documents, or engaging further with arguments that appear to have been assembled without even a passing acquaintance with the law.
If you continue to repeat these demonstrably false assertions, I will simply retain your correspondence as evidence of your ongoing misrepresentation of the legal position.
Yours faithfully,
[Name]
