ParkingEye lose case which was referred to POPLA from court

A while back, ParkingEye obtained a default judgement against a motorist, as reported on MoneySavingExpert.

The Prankster blogged about this case here.

After some effort, the judgement was overturned, and the case re-instated. As a point of conduct, the judge ordered the case to use the industry standard arbitration process and be referred to POPLA. This saves court time and costs for both parties.

The POPLA verdict is now in. POPLA ruled that as this was a free car park, no costs were incurred to the landowner as a result of any overstay.

Costs could include loss of revenue at a shopping centre. However, in this case either there was no loss of revenue, or ParkingEye declined to provide any evidence of such.

Therefore, any costs incurred in chasing up a debt of £0 are not consequential to any initial loss and so fall outside of any estimate of loss calculations.

The POPLA verdict is reproduced below.

This is in line with judgments from ParkingEye v Clarke, where DDJ Buckley described ParkingEye's business model as bizarre, and ParkingEye v Collins-Daniels (warning, do not read while drinking coffee), where the judge pointed out that an overstay of 40 years cost the landowner the same as five hours, which was nothing.

All parties will now be extremely happy. The court has saved time and scarce resources. The motorist has had her charge cancelled. ParkingEye have saved large amounts of court and legal costs which they would have otherwise incurred in order to reach this same verdict.

ParkingEye still have not dropped charges. Hopefully this is now just a formality.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster