Company Car Drivers Exempted From Private Parking Charges

It's highly likely that if you are a company car driver the government may have accidently exempted you from paying private parking charges. Here's why.

Many company car drivers are not the registered keeper of the car they drive. Either their company is, or perhaps a specialist third party 'car provider' such as a lease management company. These third parties assume the duties of the registered keeper, including taxing and insuring the vehicle.

Suppose you are the driver of a company car, and one day a private parking company decides to ticket you. They don't know where you live, so they get the registered keeper details from the DVLA, and send a Notice to Keeper to your company. Your company pass it on to you.

Now, here's the good bit. To comply with the POFA 2012 requirements, the Notice to Keeper has to be sent within a certain timescale; before 14 days for ANPR cases, and between 28 and 56 days for tickets placed on the windscreen.

The beauty is, at this point in time, the Notice to Keeper has not yet been served at all. This is because, for the purposes of the POFA 2012 requirements, the Registered Keeper is not the same as the actual 'keeper'. POFA 2012 defines the keeper as:

“keeper” means the person by whom the vehicle is kept at the time the vehicle was parked, which in the case of a registered vehicle is to be presumed, unless the contrary is proved, to be the registered keeper;

The "keeper", under the definition of the act, is you, the company car driver. The Notice to Keeper has not been delivered to you by any of the required methods under the act, which are defined as:

(4)The notice must be given by—(a)handing it to the keeper, or leaving it at a current address for service for the keeper, within the relevant period; or(b)sending it by post to a current address for service for the keeper so that it is delivered to that address within the relevant period.

Therefore, all that you, the company car driver, needs to do is wait until the timescales expire: 14 days for ANPR and 56 days for windscreen tickets. At that point keeper liability ceases to exist, and the parking company can only pursue the driver of the vehicle. Then you can write to the parking company to appeal the charge:

Dear Parking Company,

I am the keeper of the vehicle as defined in POFA 2012. Your Notice to Keeper has not been delivered to me in the timescales required by the act, and I therefore wish to invoke your appeal process. If you do not agree that your notice should be cancelled, please send me a POPLA code.

 If they do not cancel the charge, then ask POPLA to do it.

I am appealing the charge because the notice to keeper has not been delivered to me within the timescales required by POFA 2012. I am the keeper of the vehicle as defined in POFA 2012. The parking company can therefore no longer pursue the vehicle keeper and may only pursue the driver of the vehicle. The parking company have offered no proof as to the identity of the driver.

You will need to send POPLA proof that you are the keeper, such as a letter from your company.

The Parking Company cannot pursue your company or indeed anyone else for the parking charge, because the legislation simply does not make them liable.

Of course, you would want to make sure that your company does not grass you up by sending the parking company your details prematurely. You also need to make sure that any lease management company are not going to impose their own administration charges on you. In such cases it may be better to fight the parking charge by other methods.

The same exemption unfortunately does not hold for hire cars, because there is a separate clause in the act to specifically deal with this situation. It does hold for other situations where you use and keep a car for a while,  even cases where you lend a mate a car for a while and they keep it at their place. If that happens, you may consider it wise to write your mate a letter first, because you will need to prove you are not the keeper during that period. Otherwise you become liable for your mate's bad parking!

Dear Dan,

I'm lending you my car for a while, and expect you to look after it at your place. This makes you the 'keeper' under the POFA 2012 definitions, which means you will be liable for parking charges if a private parking company serves you a correct Notice to Keeper.
Regards,

Prankster

Please note that the Prankster does not encourage bad or irresponsible parking, or misuse of parking facilities. The Prankster believes that all parking charges should be paid whenever the ticket is legitimate, the Private Parking Company has a proper contract with the landowner, has the correct signage in place, obeys the BPA Ltd code of practice, issues the ticket in accordance with POFA 2012 and charges a genuine pre-estimate of loss.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

The Parking Prankster would like to thank various posts on pepipoo for bringing this to his attention.

POPLA delays increasing

This is an update to The Parking Prankster's earlier post which mentioned POPLA delays. Back in April, The Prankster's last appeal was adjudicated 20 days late. The Prankster's current appeal is already 22 days late, and today he received the following from POPLA.

I can confirm that, unfortunately, due to the large number of appeals now being received at POPLA, there is now a delay in appeals being considered. Your appeal should be considered within the next three or four weeks and as soon as a decision is made, it is forward to both parties.

That means that POPLA are now running 43-50 days behind schedule.

Does this matter? Well, it does to POPLA, because the Service Specification Schedule in their draft contract with the BPA Ltd contains the following clause:

11. Maintain the quality of responsiveness of the management of the appeals process on a basis and timescales specified by the IAS Code of Practice using agreed performance indicators such as:

• Average number of days taken to decide on-line cases
• Average number of days taken to decide postal cases
• average number of days taken to first consider cases
• average number of days taken to close cases
• number of complaints about the service (excluding complaints about judicial style decisions)

So while we do not know the exact values in days for the performance indicators, we can be sure that POPLA want to keep to them.

How can they cut down the time needed? One way of doing this is for them to act smarter, and we have already seen this in action. There is no need for them to wade through a forty page evidence pack from the Operator if the motorist asked to see a contract and the Operator did not provide one. Bang! Appeal upheld! Next!

One problem here is that this may lead eventually to both the motorist and Operator evidence packs growing ever larger and more complex. This will make appeal processing time even longer. We will have to keep an eye on this. (Or perhaps, a Parking Eye on this.)

Another way of cutting down the time is to add staff. More bodies = more cases that can be processed each day. The Prankster's previous post on POPLA costs shows this is already happening. However, this does not seem to be cutting into the backlog. Solution? Even more bodies!

This solves POPLA's problem, but it then becomes the BPA Ltd's problem. From The Prankster's previous post we saw that as POPLA's wage bill increases, they don't really care because they pass all costs directly onto the BPA Ltd with their monthly invoice. The BPA Ltd then funds this from the levy they make on all the Parking Companies.

The problem is, this levy is intended to fund a whole host of things, not just POPLA. The more money POPLA costs, the less money BPA Ltd has for everything else. As they are a limited company, this directly affects their profits. In theory, if the POPLA costs increase sufficiently, the BPA Ltd could even go bankrupt! In practice, this is not likely to happen; they could adjust the key performance indicators, for instance, so POPLA have longer to process cases.

So, how can the BPA Ltd protect their profits, which of course you can be sure their shareholders are very keen to happen.


One way for them to address this is to put pressure on Parking Companies to cancel tickets when they know they have no hope of winning. Parking Companies should be doing this anyway, as part of their code of practice:

22.1 Under the Code you must have procedures for dealing
fairly, efficiently and promptly with complaints, challenges
or appeals. 

We know this is not happening because over 60% of motorists are winning their appeals at POPLA (as of Feb 6th).

As an example, The Prankster currently has a ticket from Smart Parking Ltd. He appealed to Smart Parking, stating that the signs were in the name Town and City Parking Ltd. Smart Parking waffled a little, not answering the question, and provided a POPLA code, which The Prankster duly used.

Smart Parking, in The Prankster's humble opinion, do not have much of a chance at POPLA, seeing as The Prankster has asked them to supply a contract in the name of Smart Parking and they have not done so. Other POPLA cases have had their appeal upheld for the same reason. We still have to wait another few weeks of course. Who knows, the Prankster may still end up with egg on his face if Smart Parking rustle up the missing document.

But, if they don't, then Smart Parking should never really have let this get to POPLA. This will, after all, cost the BPA Ltd £137.30. That's not really fair on the BPA Ltd. Perhaps the BPA Ltd will start to get tough on Parking Companies making vexatious claims for money and flouting their code of practice with regard to appeals. They have the right to audit the Parking Companies and check that their appeal processes are fair. Perhaps they could do no better to start with, than to get the list of Parking Companies from POPLA with the highest percentages of appeals upheld. If they find that those companies are not playing fair with the motorist then they can write to them requiring them to make changes by a specified date, and after that, issue sanction points. If a member accrues 12 sanction points they can be suspended or even expelled, effectively shutting them down.

In the past, the BPA Ltd did not have any great incentive to issue sanction points. Perhaps now that the operator's actions will be having a direct effect on the BPA Ltd's bottom line, they will be a bit freer with awarding them.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

How much does POPLA cost the Parking Operators?

To answer that question, we should look first at how POPLA, the independent adjudication service for parking on private land, is funded.

POPLA receives it's money in two ways. Firstly, it got a chunk of money to set up in the first place. It then gets a monthly payment based on actual expenses - wages, building rent, phone bills, postage, etc. This money all comes from the British Parking Association (BPA) Ltd which is billed monthly by POPLA.

The BPA Ltd then recoups that money from its members in the following ways. Firstly, the BPA Ltd charge the appropriate member £27 for each POPLA appeal. If that is not enough (and it probably isn't, as we will see later), then each member pays the BPA Ltd an association fee based on the size of the company, and any shortfall is made up from that.

The figures

That's all very well in practice, but how does that look in hard cash terms?

Well, the setup fee for POPLA was £64,500, and the monthly fees billed to the BPA Ltd were:

Oct £21178.14
Nov £23777.87
Dec £36642.62
Jan £64069.84
Feb £49440.80
Mar £51336.69

The January figure is a little inflated because POPLA forgot to bill 8-10k for the 3 previous months.

Overall this comes to a total of £246446, or £310946 if you include the setup fee. This works out at an average of 41k a month (not including setup). However, we can expect to see that rise. Staffing costs were low in Oct and Nov as the service took off. The February and March figures include extra staffing costs to try and clear the current backlog.

This might fall over time, perhaps if less people appeal, or if the assessors get quicker at adjudicating cases, meaning fewer staff are needed. However, it might also rise over time. Given that currently 61% of cases are judged on the side of the motorist, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain for a motorist to appeal. As knowledge of POPLA increases, we may therefore see the number of appeals rise. The BPA Ltd estimated initially that there would be 23k appeals per year, but have now revised this to 17k.

Time will tell of course, but an estimate of 50k/month does not seem unreasonable for the running costs of POPLA.

What do the Parking Operators get out of this?

Currently we only have 2 sets of figures for POPLA, from 25th January and 6th February. Further, these figures may not actually be for those days, but for a few days previous.

       Cases Completed Won by Operator

Jan 25 1490  650       260
Feb 6  1551  843       328

We can see a few things from this. Over the time period, 61 new cases arrived, and 193 were resolved. Perhaps this means that POPLA are getting to grips with the backlog issue. We probably need more data to get a better picture. However, in April the backlog on The Parking Prankster's case was 20 days, and in May the backlog is already over that, so perhaps the backlog problems are not yet solved.

Let's look at the Feb 6 figures. The Operators had won 328 cases, and the BPA Ltd are reporting that in 70% of cases where the motorist loses at POPLA, they pay up straight away. Thats 230 cases. Assuming an average charge of £130, this gives the operators £29918. They had to pay out 843 * £27 for this privilege, or £22761. They will no doubt be very happy with their £7k profit. Assuming it takes 2 hours for them to prepare a case for POPLA, this works out at a very exciting return of  £4.25 an hour, or a little below the minimum wage.

This may increase a little if the Operators take the other cases to court, and win. On the other hand, the Parking industry is clogging up the courts at the moment, so that money won't be coming in for a long time, if at all.

Minimum wage? That's not too bad, is it?

Hmm.

By the end of January, the BPA Ltd had paid £145668 in monthly fees to POPLA. In reality, any shortfall from the £27 per case fees has to be paid for by the Operators via their subscriptions. So the true balance sheet reads something like this.

Cases:             843
Money in:       £29918
Money out:     £145668
Loss:          £115750
Loss per case:    £137.30

So there you have it. Each case submitted to POPLA costs the parking operators an average of £137.30.

Now, seeing as the average parking charge the Operators want is around £120, that does seem like an excellent incentive for the motorist to take their case for POPLA! Note of course, that if the Operators acted sensibly, and only referred cases to POPLA where they had a chance of winning the figures would be completely different. Remember, they currently lose 61% of cases. Perhaps the real incentive then, is for the Operators to cancel the 61% of parking charges where they will lose at POPLA. The more people that appeal and use POPLA, the quicker the message will get through.

The figures

All figures used here are taken from FOI requests. The Parking Prankster is grateful to his sources. You know who you are!

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Prankster to lose persistent evader status?

The Parking Prankster recently learned that he has been labelled a 'persistent evader' by Smart Parking.

The Prankster feels this is a little harsh, especially as the appeal process has not yet completed for most of these tickets. He feels quietly confident in his appeals to POPLA, especially as the signs in the car park were in the name of Town and City Parking Ltd, and the tickets were issued in the name of Smart Parking Ltd. He has asked Smart Parking to produce their contract with the landowner ASDA, to show they, and not Town and City Parking Ltd, can issue parking charges and pursue them to court. This is a requirement for the BPA Ltd code of practice:

7.1 If you do not own the land on which you are carrying
out parking management, you must have the written
authorisation of the landowner (or their appointed
agent) before you can start operating on the land in
question. The authorisation must give you the authority
to carry out all the aspects of the management and
enforcement of the site that you are responsible for. In
particular, it must say that the landowner requires you
to keep to the Code of Practice, and that you have
the authority to pursue outstanding parking charges,
through the courts if necessary.

 7.2. The written authorisation should include certain information. See the Operators’ Handbook for more details

As Smart Parking have not produced either their authorisation or the relevant sections of the Operator's Handbook to POPLA, The Prankster feels quietly confident the adjudicator will be consistent with previous judgements such as here, post #7.

The Appellant made representations, submitting that the case of VCS v HMRC held that the Operator needs rights of occupation or possession in order to have authority to issue parking charge notices. The Appellant submits that the Operator does not have this authority.

Membership of the Approved Operator Scheme does require the Operator to have clear authorisation from the landowner (if the Operator is not the landowner),to manage and enforce parking. This is set out in the BPA Code of Practice.Therefore the Operator is likely to have authority to issue parking charge notices. 

The Operator also submits that they have a contract with the landowner that authorises them to issue parking charge notices. 

However, as the point was raised by the Appellant, then the Operator should address it by producing such evidence as they believe shows that they do have authority. A copy of the contract the Operator submits they have with the landowner has not been produced. 

Having carefully considered all the evidence before me, I must find as a fact that,on this particular occasion, the Operator has not shown that they have authority to issue parking charge notices. As the Appellant submits that the Operator does not have authority, the burden of proof shifted to the Operator to prove that they do. The Operator has not discharged the burden. 

Accordingly, this appeal must be allowed.

The Prankster suggests that anyone with a ticket from Smart Parking might also ask when appealing to POPLA to see the relevant documentation from the Operator, satisfying 7.1 and 7.2 of the BPA Ltd code of practice.

Exciting News

Anyway, back to the actual subject of this blog. Exciting news! The Prankster has just received notice that Smart Parking themselves have cancelled one of these tickets, taking the number of outstanding tickets down to 3. The Prankster therefore has high hopes that he might now be downgraded from 'persistent evader' to 'occasional evader' or even 'might be an evader, but most likely we accidentally ticketed him without any legal basis for doing so'.

Here is The Prankster's successful appeal.

Dear Smart person,

I have received the invoice referred to above and as my car was not parked at this location between the times stated I wish to invoke your appeal process.

Your parking charge notice shows pictures of my car at 06:22 and 18:54. I enclose a copy of a parking charge notice from one of your friends showing pictures of my car at 09:38 and 16:14. Obviously my car cannot be at both places at the same time.

I require you to respond within 14 days, then either cancel the invoice or issue me with a POPLA code within 35 days. Any communication with me other than acknowledging this letter, cancelling the invoice or issuing a POPLA code will be treated as harassment.
Yours faithfully

The Parking Prankster,

Phew! What a relief it will be when I finally get downgraded to 'parker'.

Of course, The Prankster still has the parking charge from the other company to worry about. They haven't cancelled yet, but The Prankster is sure they will see sense rather than cost themselves £27 at POPLA.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Parking Companies suck £millions out of the economy

A recent FOI request gives an idea of the scale of the parking industry.

The parking companies need to write to you to get you to pay up, and so they ask the DVLA for your address. Between 01/04/12 and 31/03/13 parking companies made 1,897,572 electronic requests for your data. There were also 319,739 paper requests, but not all of these were made by parking companies.

You will have to allow allow me some guesswork from now on. If anyone has references for better statistics or figures, please get in touch. Also, if you hate maths, just skip down to the next heading!

Let's assume that half of the paper requests were from parking companies. That makes 159869, giving a grand total of 2057441 requests. Each request is for one parking charge - you are not allowed to lump them together.

Now, not everybody knows that private parking tickets are largely unenforceable. Let's estimate that about 40% of people pay up; thats a total of 822976. How much money does that equate to?

The BPA suggest a maximum parking charge should be £100. Surprise surprise, most parking companies therefore make their parking charge £100. They have to give a 40% discount for early payment, making £60. However, they can also add on money for late payment. Highview parking, for instance, add on another £40 if you pay after 28 days. I have no idea how many people pay at each stage, so lets assume it's equally spread out, and that the average payment is £100. If anyone has better figures, please get in touch.

An average payment of £100 x 822976 gives us £82,297,600.

But wait! There's more. Some people pay up even before the parking company asks the DVLA for their details; they see the yellow sticker on their window, panic and cough up. Let's guess that an extra 10% of people do this, or 82,297. They paid early, so the cost to them is £60, or a total of £3,291,880.

Adding that all together, we get £85,589,480

How much?

Yes, that's right. Parking companies leach an estimated amount of £85,589,480 out of the economy each year.

This is dead money. It doesn't provide anything useful; we all got along perfectly well before these companies existed, using systems such as barrier controls and the like. Moreover, this money comes predominantly out of the pockets of the poorer members of society; pensioners, disabled people and low paid workers. This is because these are the most likely people to cave in to the demands of the parking companies.

This money is sucked from their pockets into the directors and shareholders of the parking companies, financing their yachts, cars, foreign villas and so on. When the economy is struggling, such as now, this money would be far better off back in the pockets of the people it actually belongs to. Everybody is struggling right now to make ends meet, and a huge parking bill can mean serious difficulty for some people. Not having money causes lack of consumer confidence, causing lack of spending on other things, which depresses the economy leading to depression.

More than eighty five million pounds a year is being sucked out of the economy right now by the parking companies, money the country could really use to help get us back on our feet.

It gets worse. The parking companies would really rather we all paid up. if that happened, that would take the bill to £193,049,080 - nearly two hundred million pounds a year! And the parking companies are expanding their operations, placing ANPR cameras in more and more car parks.

Would you be happy to see two hundred million pounds a year leached from the economy? Or even eighty-five million? Well, luckily most parking charges are not enforceable. If you have a ticket and want to fight it, hop over to parking cowboys, pepipoo or moneysavingexpert for free advice.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Secret reasons you can use in your appeal to POPLA

Another gem from the January 2013 minutes of the AOS.

Here are the four reasons that POPLA list as valid for appealing:

The grounds under which you can appeal the parking charge notice are as follows:

• The vehicle was not improperly parked: e.g. that the vehicle was not parked where stated on the parking charge notice; that you believe you were still within the time you paid for; that the voucher was clearly displayed or that the conditions were not properly signed. 
• The parking charge (ticket) exceeded the appropriate amount: e.g. that you are being asked to pay the wrong amount for the parking charge or that the charge has already been paid. 
• The vehicle was stolen: e.g. that the vehicle was improperly parked after being stolen. However, the fact that someone else was driving your vehicle, for example a family member, friend or colleague, is not in itself a valid ground of appeal. The fact that you told the driver that they could only use your vehicle on condition they did not get any parking tickets is not a valid ground of appeal.
• I am not liable for the parking charge: e.g. that you had sold the vehicle before, or bought it after, the alleged improper parking. However, the fact that you had paid to park the vehicle in the first place (even if, for example, the voucher was not clearly displayed) is not in itself a valid ground of appeal.

Apparently however, this list is not exhaustive. Here is the quote from the January minutes where the POPLA representative says the motorist can use any grounds they like.

So there you have it. You can use absolutely any reason...just as long as your mind is focussed. And you are clairvoyant. Oh, and you better have some way of magically rewriting web forms as well, because you can only use those four reasons when you appeal online.

The Prankster urges POPLA to clarify this on their web site. It simply cannot be fair that POPLA say one thing in a mostly-secret meeting, yet do not say the same to motorists on their web site, and in fact make it impossible to appeal under any other grounds. If you feel the same, then you can make your point to London Councils, who run POPLA, here.

Let's take a look at the current results:

So, the meeting was Jan 25th, which means POPLA had been up and running for around 8 weeks, or 6 if you count the Christmas break. Not taking IT and other teething problems into account, this gives them a throughput of 650 appeals in six weeks (assuming he meant to say 'processed 650 appeals' rather than 'received 650 appeals' which does not make sense).

This is about 110 appeals a week, or 22 a day; lets call it 20. That means their backlog is currently 42 days, or well over a month. The Prankster looks forward to the April report for an update on this situation..

Meanwhile, 60% of appeals were upheld, making a total of 390. Now that POPLA are building such a good mine of reasons why appeals are upheld wouldn't it make sense to update their web page to help the motorist? Something on the lines of:

• I am not liable for the parking charge: the most common successful reasons are: the operator did not have a contract to issue tickets and follow up in court; the operator could not justify the charge as a genuine pre-estimate of loss; the Notice to Keeper was not compliant; perhaps even, this was a first-in last-out ANPR error!

Perhaps that's taking hope a bit too far. But hey, if you think the web site should say that, you know where the complaints page for London Councils is!

Lastly, let's have a look at the BPA Ltd code of practice:

22.1 Under the Code you must have procedures for dealing
fairly, efficiently and promptly with complaints, challenges or appeals...

If 60% of appeals that the operator rejects are being upheld by POPLA this doesn't seem too much like the operator's complaints procedures are run 'fairly'. I doubt whether the BPA Ltd will worry too much about that though!


Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Geoffrey, the Parking Warden

Yesterday, as he has many times before, The Parking Prankster had a long chat with Geoffrey, the Parking Warden in his local car park. Geoffrey is a sweet old guy; I guess he is retired and earning some extra pin money managing car parks, but I never asked. He loves to chat on any subject, although parking is an obvious one for us both to settle on. He looks after several car parks, taking an hour to go round each one, carefully marking down number plates in pencil in his neatly-lined notebook.

My guess is that he knows the number plate of each of his regulars. "That red one," he points out to me as we speak, "she was a right terror! Kept filling in the wrong number when she paid by Ringo (telephone). I had to leave four notes under her wiper before she learned how to use it properly."

Notes, not tickets. You see Geoffrey isn't one of those parking wardens trying to exploit his customers. He cares about them and wants them back. He's not interested in ticketing for minor transgressions. If someone parks in his disabled bays who isn't disabled, he would rather have a quiet word and move them on, than hide in his office and leap out to ticket them as soon as they leave the car park. If a car doesn't have a ticket, he always leaves plenty of time in case the motorist is off to the train station. Although you are meant to buy your ticket straight away, even if you use Ringo, Geoffrey realises that  if people are hurrying to catch a train they may need some time before they settle down to buy their ticket.

If only every warden was like Geoffrey. Then the motorist wouldn't have a problem with the parking industry.

I fear for Geoffrey - not his real name for obvious reasons. One day I expect to see a new guy there, officiously ticketing everything in sight, and explaining Geoffrey had to be got rid of for "not meeting targets."

"He was a harmless old buffer, but didn't really understand the parking industry. Never mind, I'm in charge now. If I can get out 10 tickets a day I'll soon make reserve-lieutenant-colonel parking warden status."

Even worse, perhaps he will be replaced by ANPR. That seems to be the way the industry is going.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster