Car Parking Penalty – Barrack Room lawyer wanted

Driving back from the BDS Downhill at Fort William a couple of weeks ago. By midnight approaching the Scottish border i noticed I was noticing i was missing bits and realised I was in danger of nodding off so pulled up in Gretna Services Southbound. I went into services to get coffee and have a rest only to find all the units closed and no seating so took a coffee back to the car and sat listening to music. Next thing I was waking up it was daylight about 5am so feeling better drove off for the remaining 3 hour drive to North Wales.

Whilst I know these places have some parking restrictions I never thought with the need to rest they applied at night the car park had only 7 or 8 cars with plenty of parking spaces. I’ve now had a letter from a company Parking Eye demanding £100 which will be reduced to £60 if I pay before the 3 June. The notice did not come until the after the 26th May enquiring who the driver was to me as the registered owner. However on the 25th I was on a flight to Germany until the 30th May when I then flew back to the UK and onto Fort William for the MTB World Cup so did not see the letter until my return home on the 6th June.

There is an appeal process listed but if they run this I guess unless there was an unaccounted parking ticket or the fact I had been hospitalised whilst in the carpark I doubt they let anything go as they are simply a money sucking company who just need people to suck money out of in return for plonking a few cameras on another companies car park.

Clearly had I left before the two hours I would not have been charged however I would have probably died on the way home ignoring highway advice signage and wit hon other option to stop whilst on the motorway. The signage was not visible or readable fro the car at night and so I was genuinely unaware the charge applied outside of busy hours. Nor was I give na warning or advice to pay the standard charge. £12’50

If anyone has fought off one of these demands I’d be interested to know if it was painless or is it better to cough up

I can’t add anything except I used to stop at Gretna services, I shan’t now in case I too drop off.

People are going to disagree with me and say my advice is outdated, but I’ve had a lot of luck (like, 100% success) with completely ignoring the private charge notices. I’ve had a few over the past few years. My entirely unverifiable theory is that if they are never actually sure that they have served any sort of communication on you, it isn’t worth the dosh/effort to get all legal on your (as far as they are concerned quite possibly non existent) ass, and are instead happy to just keep taking the easy money from scared rule abiding masses.

Of course, their odds change dramatically if they get a whiff that you exist, so ignore, ignore, ignore.

Go to the pepipoo forums. They know more about parking ticket regulations than anyone on here does. If you follow their advice I suspect you won’t have to pay anything.

There’s something about if it’s in Scotland then you don’t have to inform who the driver is.
What I’m not sure about is if you live outwith Scotland but the charge was applied in Scotland.
I’m sure someone will come along shortly with a definitive answer.

You could follow v8ninety’s advice, but if you do eventually get court papers then you cannot now ignore them, and the fact you’ve ignored communication up till then won’t help any defence you might then pursue.

I’m not normally particularly sympathetic to the usual parking fine avoidance claim as most of the time the person with the fine knew what they were doing but this seems really crap. Do the right thing and grab some shut eye when you feel you need it and get clobbered for sleeping too long. It’s not like you set up camp there!

Do NOT ignore parking eye stuff..
Go to pepipoo to read up on what to do. It’s work to challenge this and I think being in Scotland is a bit different as they can’t hold the keeper liable, and your not obliged to name the driver.

Good luck

Theyre taking things more seriously now, and will prosecute you, and if you dont pay will send in Bailiffs.

Deep breath, pay, move on.

Are those services actually in Scotland, because in that case it will be Scottish law.

I don’t think there’s much they can do.

As a matter of interest, how come a govt body is giving out our private information?

Theyre taking things more seriously now, and will prosecute take you to court, and if they win and you dont pay will send in Bailiffs.

As above, head over to Pepipoo for a more thorough guide to how to take this on.

As a matter of interest, how come a govt body is giving out our private information?

Because they can for a fee

If it happened in Scotland you can ignore

If it happened in England you cant ignore. You need to act quickly and appeal it using POPLA. Go to Pepipoo. Ignore conflicting advice on here. The Pepipoo guys are experts.

You need to appeal it with Parking Scum.
They will throw it out.
Appeal again. This time, if they feel it worth the gamble, they will pass it to POPLA (parking on private lands appeal service), I say gamble because it costs them somewhere in the region of £20 to do so.
If you say you simply fell asleep / the signage was poor / you don’t consider £50 or £100 a fair estimate of their loss / that this is a penalty which, under the contract law that exists between you on entering the car park, is unenforceable under contract law / that Parking Scum have no planning permission to run a money making business from the site etc, POPLA may agree & let you off
Or, sell the ticket to one of these fixed price ticket fighting outfits, & save yourself a ton of hassle.

Whatever you do, dont ignore it.
Trust me, I had the court papers & everything but backed down & paid.
The reason…they had a test case heard by a high court judge at Southend magistrates court & he found in favour of Parking Scum on every count. A lot of local magistrates started using that judgement as a guide.

Also, I’m sure I found out that Capita, who own Parking Scum, are political party funders, hence the change in law to hold the registered keeper liable. This law doesn’t apply in Scotland & Wales apparently.

Good luck.

All other advice aside,

Parking Eye are tenacious and will pursue it, ‘ignore’ is a poor choice.

Appeal then POPLA as the previous poster says.

The ‘fair estimate of loss’ argument / ‘illegality’ of a penalty no longer holds either, as noted above someone took them to court on this point, made a hash of the argument, lost and now there’s a precedent set.

“Applying these principles to Mr Beavis’s case, they decided that whilst the penalty rule was engaged, the £85 charge was not a penalty since ParkingEye had a legitimate interest in charging overstaying motorists which extended beyond the recovery of any loss. The company was managing car parks in the interests of the retail outlets, their customers and the public at large and had a legitimate interest in influencing the conduct of the contracting party which is not satisfied by the mere right to recover damages for breach of contract. ParkingEye could not charge a sum out of all proportion to its interests but there was no reason to suppose that £85 was out of all proportion. There was no suggestion about what an unreasonable charge might be”

Not exactly – IANAL, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t in a high enough court to set a formal precedent, even if as noted above it might be used as “guidance” by other courts. In which case you’d just need to argue it better.

Gretna services appears to be in Scotland though, so that wouldn’t apply in any case – I think as advised above you can still ignore as you can’t be forced to name the driver, though the correct advice to go to pepipoo has also already been given.

As this is Scotland, you can ignore them. Under no circumstances name or imply who was driving, which is why you don’t contact them.

If this was in England or Wales, the above does not apply.

That Mr Beavis has quite a lot to answer for. The eejit. 😡

(Didn’t he self-represent too? Not sure about this bit though…)

IANAL either so you might be right, but you get what I mean, once someone’s ruled one way then others tend to follow.

That’s actually an interesting thought though. I used to work with a real petrolhead barrack room lawyer, and his summarised opinion from the forums he frequented was that the PPCs would always fold before court because if they went to court and lost on the penalty argument then they’d lose the fear of court as a weapon. If it genuinely would be overturnable then it should be easy to put someone up to taking it to court but then arguing it properly with the weight of the motorists’ advocacy groups providing some proper legal punch.

[JHJ Mode] was he a stooge of the parking companies [/JHJ mode]

Makes you think

Edit: I’m wrong – a bit of googling suggests it’s been to the Supreme Court which has now taken on the role of the HoL.

I screwed up at a parking eye controlled services a few years back.

Was staying overnight and forgot to log number plate at reception.

Phoned and grovelled and all resolved on the phone for no cost.

If you bought something and have the receipt I’d be tempted to see if you can do a deal over the phone and move on.

There is no semblance of any law in this suggestion just a bit of pragmatism.

the PPCs would always fold before court because if they went to court and lost on the penalty argument then they’d lose the fear of court as a weapon

They have lost in court many times

http://parking-prankster.blogspot.co.uk

The Beavis case hasn’t overruled dunlop pneumatic v new garage as far as I’m aware, which is the case law that ruled you cannot claim damages for breach of contract, only actual losses. Beavis had no defence or argument in court, he just thought he would win

Pre- or post- Beavis?

From the parking prankster site

There have been a number of recent court cases where gun-for-hire lawyers** have swaggered into court, chanting ‘Beavis, Beavis, Beavis’ only to leave with their tails between their legs whn the judge patiently explained that Beavis did not apply in this instance.

http://parking-prankster.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/mil-panic-and-ask-to-adjourn-but-judge.html

Basically alternative defences from GPEOL are available

The forums suggested above are a good start for a template letter, I had a similar situation coming back from France the other year at Stafford services heading back up north, i wrote a very polite email to Moto the owners of the services (its them that you are in contract with for parking, not the other lot) highlighting the motorway matrix’s were suggesting take a break if i was tired, i had bought food at their establishment and filled up with £100 of diesel, they contacted the parking enforcement lot and got it dropped.

PM me if you like and i will see if I can find copy of the email i sent them, will be worth a go for sure.

So post Beavis. My reference was to the pre-beavis times when the PPC’s would threaten with court, and people would pay up, or even (according to my ex- Barrack room lawyer colleague) go as far as issuing court papers and if someone called their bluff on it to go to court then withdrew.

Why they eventually decided to go through with Beavis I don’t know – maybe they realised that he was a loose cannon where they could win a judgement based on their precourt exchanges. i hadn’t thought of the idea that he could be a patsy but I guess there’s a chance of that too…….

I racked up, by my best estimate, £17k in parking tickets from Central Ticketing a few years ago. (it’s a long story, and I was in the right)

Never paid them a penny, never contacted them. I laughed the day they went out of business.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/private-parking-tickets

As a few people have pointed out it was in Scotland so just bin it and do not be tempted to communicate with them. You might get a follow up letter and even a third threatening court but just keep binning them.

In Scotland the responsibility lies with the driver but the registered keeper is under no obligation to identify the driver, unless it is for a speed camera ticket.

Interestingly (maybe, if you’re into that sort of thing), having done a bit of reading up on it, it seems in a lot of cases in England you can also refuse to name the driver, because they don’t follow the correct rules to transfer liability to the keeper. However in England you can’t just bin the correspondence, because they will still make a case against the keeper and get a CCJ against you if you do that – you have to make the case that they haven’t followed the correct rules, and such a case will also almost certainly still fail at both stages of appeal (the appeal process now appears to be almost worthless in many cases). Hence you’ll probably have to go to court to get it thrown out given the companies increased keenness to go all the way since the Beavis judgement (even in cases where that is irrelevant).

Do NOT ignore parking eye stuff..

I’ve had five or six tickets from Parking Eye over the last few years. All of them including subsequent correspondence have gone into the wood burner. They’ve not taken me to court yet 🙂

My tenant in London got a ticket for not displaying the correct permit. I wrote on his behalf to the managing agent who employed the cowboys and they got him let off.

So my advice is write to operator tell them you regularly stop at Gretna and disapprove of this behaviour and any chance they can cancel the ticket.

You could always embellish the story with the addition of vulnerable people, medical history etc

Good luck

I did write to Gretna Services indicating it was due to the driver falling asleep and got a long winded break down of why they and others manage their car parks for 2 hours stays and that I would need to make an appeal if I wanted to go further. They did not really give a moneys and the contractor was entitled to claim its charges

Just had a look at the map. The Gretna services are in Scotland.

Scottish law should apply.