Private Parking tickets and the law

Nobody wants a parking ticket, but (as in every other field) it pays to be aware of your rights when confronted with seedy little scrotes trying to extract money from you. Much as Private Parking Companies (PPC's) would have you believe otherwise, there is a clear and distinct difference between a ticket issued by a police officer or a council warden and those issued by PPC's.

Note: This is a rather long and involved topic, and even by condensing it hugely this is still going to be a long blog post. At the bottom I'll give some links to some other online resources where you can investigate your position a little more and hopefully end up with all the information you need to make a decision on whether you should pay or not (hopefully not!).

The parking tickets issued on a private piece of land, for example an Asda car park or anywhere not on the public highway, are not actually 'parking tickets' in the full meaning of the word, but are instead private 'invoices'. In essence, these invoices state 'we let you park here in exchange for following our rules, and you agreed to pay us some money if you didn't follow them. We've decided you didn't follow the rules, so now pay us the money you agreed'. Hang on, I agreed? When?! Well, when you read the terms and conditions of parking and then decided to park. The PPC's position is that you agreed to be bound by those conditions, and that all they're doing now is to ask you to make the payment that the conditions said you would pay.

Now we get to the fun part. The PPC is well aware that many (if not most) people would not pay an 'invoice' based on this, so they decide to play a little smoke and mirrors trick on you. Their tickets will bear a remarkable resemblance to an 'official' genuine parking ticket, and thats not an accident. Yellow front with black and yellow chevrons on it. Big bold letters saying Fixed Penalty Charge or similar? On, and a line that says "it is an offence to remove or interfere with this ticket"? The closer the PPC can get their ticket to look like a 'real' one, the better the chance that the victim will just pay up. So, why do these companies choose to misrepresent themselves like this? Because the 1991 Road Traffic Act has specific provisions for genuine tickets, notably ones that require the owner of a car to identify the driver, and for a penalty to be applied to the owner of a car rather than its driver. It cannot be said firmly enough that the RTA does NOT apply to PPC's, even though the PPC will assure you that it does.

So lets look at those 'terms and conditions' for a moment. In Morrisons car park, for example, you'll often see conditions that your parking is limited to two hours. Depending on how close they are to other shops, you might also be told that you cant leave the premises while parked there, and that you'll only park 'properly' within marked bays, etc. Being (reasonably) reputable, they'll not be among the ones that hide their signs behind a tree, or print them in tiny letters ten feet up a pole, as you'll find in some smaller parks. So are these conditions 'valid'? Dont necessarily assume so - there have been cases through the courts that held that the mere display of a sign is insufficient to 'prove' that the customer accepted those conditions. The drivers attention must be shown to have been brought to the conditions, and he must have demonstrated his acceptance, and the court has held that the mere act of parking does not, in and of itself, constitute that acceptance.

But thats not all of it in relation to conditions. The terms will say that if you break the conditions of parking, you 'owe' the landowner a charge of (usually about) £50. This is another potentially fatal flaw in the PPC argument should you ever make it to court, because as we all know now courtesy of the banks, the charge cannot be a penalty and can only be their measurable loss by you having broken the terms. For example, if you park such that you're preventing the bay next to you from being used, the actual loss to the PPC is the money they may have been able to charge someone else for parking in that bay. Spotted the flaw yet? Asda/Morrisons etc. are usually free car parks, so their loss is, precisely, zero. Even in a pay car park, you're probably only talking £2 or so. So where does this £50 come from? Its irrelevant for the PPC to point to the terms and say that you've "agreed to them", as every single UK bank will painfully attest. In their instance, they went all the way to the High Court to decide on whether 'penalty charges' that the customer had signed acceptance to were valid, and I'm afraid they lost. And at least the banks had your signature to prove you accepted it - what chance does the PPC stand when they cant even prove that much!

Fail to pay one of these 'tickets', and what will happen is that the PPC will obtain details of the registered keeper from the DVLA. It costs them £2.50, and unbelievably the DVLA will happily give them the info. That's a whole new blog in its own right - that HMG are so happy to sell on our information to scammers - but the important part here is that the DVLA can only identify the keeper of the vehicle, not the driver. For legitimate tickets issued by the police or local councils, that's sufficient, because it is then the keepers responsibility to identify the driver at any given time under pain of a large fine or imprisonment. For private parking tickets, this presents the company with an immediate and usually insurmountable problem - there is no obligation for the keeper to identify a driver for a PPC, and try as they might, the PPC cant hold the keeper to be responsible. But because any 'agreement' that they are referring to in order to extract money can only be between the driver of the car and the landowner (obvious, since it is not possible to bind a third party to an agreement between first and second parties), it is now down to the PPC to show that the registered keeper was in fact the driver as well! That's very hard, but not necessarily impossible - the company could, for instance, take a photograph of the car and driver as it left the car park, but of course there's no responsibility on the driver to admit that its them!

So, for the princely sum of £2.50, the PPC now have the name and address of the keeper of the car. Now they'll write to the keeper demanding payment of the 'ticket', in some cases along with further daily charges that they threaten will continue until payment. You have two choices here - either ignore it entirely but keep it in a drawer somewhere in case you need it later, or write back and deny liability. Of course, you do have a third option, that of paying up, but if you do that after reading and understanding this post then you're a mug! If you ignore it, they'll usually send an average of three or four more letters before they give up and move on. Its perfectly possible, and depending on the company even likely, that their demands for payment will increase with each letter, and/or they'll threaten to send 'debt collection officers' or bailiffs to your home. They'll also usually 'pass on' the debt to a 'collection agency', but a bit of digging will usually uncover that the collection company and the parking company are based in the same office and have the same directors! Apart from being scammers, they're not stupid, so why do they persist in sending these demands? Because, unfortunately, a percentage of people get intimidated by the letters and just pay up regardless of whether they actually committed a parking 'offence' or not.

That is what makes me so angry about it - they are effectively intimidating people into paying. Not only are the victims out of pocket by paying, they are also encouraging the PPC to try the same trick again on the next poor unsuspecting mug. And if you write back and deny the charge, that only encourages them anyway - they realise they have a 'live' one on the line and ramp up their collection activities. So what's the best choice if you've been accosted by a PPC? Unless you're a contrary bugger like me, and just enjoy baiting them, your best bet is to completely ignore their letters unless and until one comes from a small claims court. Even if one does, read it carefully, and make sure its actually come from the court and not from the PPC 'disguised' to look like an official document. Also check that its been 'served' to the court - its not unknown for the seedier companies to send out a genuine claim form (available free from the courthouse) directly to a victim and not through the court itself. And you wonder why I call these people lowlifes?

Now lets assume that you do get served with a properly constructed claim. Now you should pay up and cut your losses, right? Nope, definitely not. In order for the court to find against you, they will need to be satisfied 'on the balance of probabilities' that all of the following have been met (in no particular order).
That you, the registered keeper of the car, were actually the driver of the car on the day the alleged contravention occurred.
That a contravention did occur (no, the PPC saying that it just did isn't sufficient).
That the driver of the car agreed to be bound by the conditions (no again, the mere display of one or more signs indicating the conditions is not, in itself, sufficient proof that the driver agreed to be so bound).
That the charge is a genuine reflection of the losses incurred by the land owner (remember the bank fiasco?!).
As I've described, the odds of them managing to fill any of these criteria are slim to none, let alone all of them, but lets for the sake of this post assume you got an anti-car judge who didn't get his end away last night or whatever, and that you lost. Here's where the small claims court service helps you out, because costs are strictly limited. The PPC wont be able to claim some ludicrous figure that they just dreamed up, and the odds are massive that it will be limited to the cost of bringing the action, i.e. between £30 and £50. Its fair, then, to treat this process with the same degree of risk assessment that you would for, say, house insurance. You weigh up the odds of losing out, the loss if you do lose out, and the cost of 'insuring' yourself against the loss (in this case, by paying the penalty at an earlier stage). You don't have to be a mathematician to work out that the odds of losing are tiny, and that even if you are unlucky enough that you are the one in a million that does lose your losses are small. So why buy the 'insurance'?

It wouldn't be unreasonable for someone reading this blog to think that, presuming what I've written is true (and it is!), surely there is something unlawful in this scam. You'd be right - there is plenty thats unlawful. The problem is that the police are disinterested and would much prefer to chase softer targets like some poor sod who'd accidentally done 34 in a 30 zone. To be perfectly honest, your odds of getting the police to take action are slim indeed, but if your drinking buddy is a flatfoot you might stand half a chance. Trading Standards have responsibility here too, but are similarly uneducated. In my case, I had to make a formal complaint about the advice I was given ("tell them who the driver was and they'll go away") before I finally got a letter from the area manager thanking me for the information I'd given and promising to re-educate his call line staff on the law in relation to this.

Because of the length of this blog post (and even then I haven't discussed all of it!) I'll try and break it down into more manageable chunks later and hopefully deal with each of the problems the PPC faces in seperate posts. In the meantime, please PLEASE dont pay one of these tickets if you get one, and if your nerve fails contact me via this blog and I'll give you all the further detail you need!