ANPR on naughty step again?

The Parking Prankster has been following this thread on moneysavingexpert.

A summary of the thread is as follows.

A motorist rented a car from Hertz. Hertz are the registered keeper. The motorist is also the 'keeper', according to the POFA 2012 definitions.

“keeper” means the person by whom the vehicle is kept at the time the vehicle was parked

The car was parked behind the keepers house overnight. A parking charge notice was stuck on the windscreen of a vehicle on 21 June. The vehicle keeper claimed that when the vehicle was parked there was no signage, and that the signage was introduced later. He claims to have spoken to the ticketing attendant who told him that the signage was present, but was on the floor, and has now been restored to its proper place. There is no photographic evidence to back this up.

The keeper then made a short appeal to ANPR denying all liability, but without supplying further reasons.

ANPR turned down the appeal on 6 July and issued a POPLA code. The keeper claims that this was hidden in the letter and not obvious. The Prankster has not seen a copy of the appeal rejection so do not know if this is true. However, he has seen similar letters from ANPR in the past.

The keeper appealed to POPLA on 27/7, and POPLA confirmed this on 31/7. (ANPR claim they were notified on 1/8)

On 5/8 ANPR requested registered keeper details from the DVLA. (Note; this differs from the date ANPR claim they contacted the DVLA, which was before the 1st August. Perhaps the motorist actually meant this was the date the DVLA replied.)

On 8/8 ANPR send a parking charge notice to Hertz, who paid it without challenge and are now claiming money back from the motorist plus £42 admin charge.

As the parking charge has now been paid, the motorist is in danger of POPLA cancelling the appeal. POPLA have recently had a secret policy change and have started to cancel all appeals where the charge has been paid.

Allowing this situation to continue therefore threatens the motorists ability to use POPLA because the parking company can simply go behind their backs to the hire company, who will pay up and add their own charges.

The Prankster considers the following breaches may have occurred and therefore should be investigated.

1) The POPLA code was hidden in the rejection letter and the instructions were not clear. This can easily be cleared up by the BPA Ltd on sight of the actual letter. This is a potential breach of the DVLA's KADOE Suspension Principles document, published on 31 Jan 2013, punishable by unlimited suspension until the situation is remedied.

2) The charge was pursued while the POPLA appeal was ongoing. The Prankster consider this is not in the spirit of the following two BPA Ltd code of practice directives

22.6 When you receive a challenge about the issue of a parking charge, you must stop work on processing the charge immediately.
22.20 If POPLA rejects the appeal you may continue to recover the parking charge.

While these do not explicitly bar processing the charge during a POPLA appeal, they do seem to imply that this is not allowed. The Prankster recommends that the BPA Ltd clarify this with their next issue of the code of practice. Eg

When a case has been referred to POPLA, you must stop work on processing the charge until POPLA have finished with the case

3) The DVLA details were requested when the keeper details were already known. The Prankster considers this is not in the spirit of the DVLA's KADOE Suspension Principles document, again punishable by an unlimited suspension until the situation is remedied.

Although the driver had made themselves known to the operator, the keeper has. The Prankster recommends that the DVLA clarify their stance in this situation.

The Prankster asked ANPR for their view of the case, to make sure they were not being misrepresented. Here is Trev's reply, edited only for confidentiality.

We knew nothing about this case until the 1st of this month when we received an invoice for cases to be heard. On the invoice we noted case number [popla ref] and according to our records this case did not exist. We of course made contact and enlightened them to the error of their ways. In the mean time we had already made a justifiable application to the DVLA.

Mr [motorist] implies that he is perhaps the registered keeper but possibly not the driver. On the 24/06/2013 Mr. [motorist] wrote: 'in regards to the invoice received with reference number P1345BH dated 21/06/2013 on my vehicle reg [reg]. I deny all liability to your company, If you reject this challenge then I require within 35 days a POPLA verification code' Nowhere does it indicate that he was the driver.

By his tone we have understandably presumed that we have ticketed a vehicle that is not driven by the registered keeper. We therefore felt at liberty to pursue the registered keeper who will then inform us of the driver at the time of the incident. We still do not know who the driver was. But as suspected we now know that Mr. [motorist] is NOT the registered keeper. We of course replied with a POPLA verification code ([popla ref]) and an application form template.

The actions taken by Hertz is of their concern but as perceived Mr. [motorist] is not, was not the registered keeper of the vehicle. Should Mr [motorist] case prove to be successful we will gladly reimburse Hertz.

Mr [motorist] who lives at [his house] was ticketed on the [college grounds] whose car park is located to the rear of his property.

What now?

The Prankster considers that there is reasonable cause for confusion here and that a sensible outcome would be something along the lines of the following.

• POPLA continue to rule on the case, and do not suspend it because the charge has been paid
• Hertz suspend charges until POPLA finish
• ANPR change their rejection letter, if necessary, to clearly give the POPLA code and explain how to appeal to POPLA. They remove all offers to do this on the motorist's behalf.
• If POPLA rule in the motorist's favour, ANPR reimburse Hertz as they have promised to do
• The BPA Ltd clarify the situation on pursuing charges while a POPLA case is ongoing
• The DVLA clarify the situation on requesting registered keeper details when the keeper (by POFA 2012 definitions) is known by the operator

The Prankster has seen emails suggesting that Peter Beasley from the BPA Ltd is currently investigating this incident, so awaits the outcome of investigations. 

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

AOS board minutes from FoI request removed

The AOS board minutes which were formerly here have been removed. The Prankster has no idea why.

The Prankster blogged about these minutes here.

[Update 30/8/13] The Prankster has been informed that WDTK were asked to remove the content because personal information remained. A new redacted version should be provided 'in due course'.

BPA allow operator to ignore appeal reasons they have lost with in the past

Previously, The Parking Prankster won an appeal at POPLA against CP Plus when their Notice to Keeper was delivered outside the required timescales. CP Plus withdrew the charge rather than supply any evidence.

When they sent him a new notice, also outside the required timescales, The Prankster therefore appealed using the same grounds he had won at POPLA before. CP Plus refused to accept this as a valid appeal, ignored his letter and started debt collection procedures.

Astonished, The Prankster complained to the British Parking Association Limited.

The BPA Ltd found in the operator's favour and replied that:

"The operator has advised that they never accepted your correspondence as an appeal."

The Prankster considers that letting an operator decide what is or is not an appeal is not the right of the operator, especially when they have lost on that appeal point in the past.

Presumably operators will now be flocking to follow in CP Plus's footsteps, and decide that all manner of grounds are no longer valid ones for appeal. The Prankster guesses that landowner permission and justification of pre-estimate of loss will be the first ones to go.

Highview Parking spurred into immediate action - for real!

For once, Highview Parking came good on their threat to be spurred into immediate action, as this Parking Charge notice shows.

Highview Parking issued this charge one minute after the free parking time expired at Tesco. This surprised The Prankster, who naively believed their claim in his POPLA appeal:

...as a company that strives to adhere to the best practice in the industry...

Surely Highview are aware that the British Parking Association Limited code of practice states that grace periods should be allowed for leaving a car park?

13.4 You should allow the driver a reasonable period to leave the private car park after the parking contract has ended, before you take enforcement action.

The Prankster believes that at least 5 minutes is an acceptable grace period for most situations, rising to larger amounts when congestion prevents drivers leaving the car park.

The Pranksters awaits the result of the appeal!

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Cat found not guilty

Today POPLA ruled that a registered keeper's cat should be found not guilty of all parking charges.

The appellant asserted his cat had driven to Staples. The Staples parking attendant, despite searching the store diligently, could not find the driver. Presumably this was because they did not look under the shelves. Maybe the cat was playing with the mice in the computer department. Possibly even, the cat was in the warehouse having a quick kip, as cats do. In any case the operator could not come with a pre-estimate of loss justification.

No doubt CPS Midlands will think twice before purr-suing any feline drivers in the future.

The Prankster notes this case was filed on 31 May and it took 88 days to complete. The nominal target is 35 days, and the POPLA KPI set by the BPA is 44 days. Thus POPLA are still well behind schedule and do not yet seem to be eating into the backlog. The Prankster's last two decisions took 83 and 91 days, and he has outstanding cases which have been waiting for 126, 103 and 78 days.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

The Prankster would like to thank the cat lover who sent him this. See post #206

British Parking Association Limited 2011 Impact Assessment report to government turns out to be no more than fantasy and hot air

The Impact Assessment for introducing keeper liability for parking (compiled in 2011) considers the financial impact of changing the law.

One of the key benefits is listed as

A reduction in the number of cases taken to court, due to the introduction of an independent appeals service, which in turn would benefit the Criminal Justice System.

To determine this, the government consulted with none other than the British Parking Association Limited.

The Department for Transport has consulted informally with the British Parking Association (BPA). The BPA is the largest professional association in Europe representing organisations in the parking and traffic management industry. These organisations are many and varied, and operate in a variety of different ways. They include manufacturers, car park operators, local authorities, health authorities, airports, railway companies, shopping centres and theme parks. The BPA currently has over 700 corporate members (of which 148 are members of an ATA and so authorised to obtain vehicle keeper information from DVLA), split about equally between the public and private sectors. The BPA has asked for the same parking enforcement regime as that operated by local authorities on public roads - in particular, the introduction of keeper liability for parking charges on private land.

Other than making changes to their paperwork and processes, the BPA considers that keeper liability will have a positive impact on "ticketing‟ enforcers. Benefits will include:
 a reduction in the number of complaints/appeals where the defence is that the keeper of the vehicle was not the driver at the time;
 a reduction in the number of cases taken to court, which in turn would benefit the Ministry of Justice;
Both these scenarios are expensive and time consuming. Businesses will benefit from better compliance and an increased proportion of tickets paid when parking transgressions do take place, instead of incurring costs on debt recovery.

The BPA has said that of the 1.8 million parking charges currently issued each year around 2-5% (36,000 to 90,000) of cases are taken to civil court per year. Court costs are not expected to increase and have not been forecast because keeper liability will not be brought into force until an independent appeals service is operating throughout the country. 

As it so happens, these figures are a complete fiction invented by the BPA Ltd. This report on TV licence dodging shows that there were 1.46 million court cases in 2012, with 180,000 of them being TV licence cases. A figure of 90,000 parking cases a year would make more than 1 in 20 court cases parking related.

Obviously no quality assurance whatsoever was done by any of the people involved in this report, because it would have been immediately obvious that this figure was ludicrously inaccurate had anyone done the most cursory checks.

One person (Bargepole) who did check these figures found the truth was rather different.

The number of cases filed at county court in 2011 was 845, which is approximately 0.5% of the figure guessed by the BPA Ltd. Of these, only 49 proceeded to a contested hearing.

In 2012 the figures dropped to 600 cases filed and 34 contested hearings.

We can safely say therefore that the figures produced by the BPA Ltd were complete fabrication with no basis in fact, and that no-one bothered to check them in the slightest. This will no doubt eventually be an embarrassment for the minister that signed the report off.

What of the predictions that court cases will fall?

So far, we have not yet had a full years worth of figures. However, the ones that are available are pretty damning. Here are the FoI requests that The Prankster is aware of.

Number of claims filed by AOS members in 9 months since Keeper Liability introduced
Number of claims filed by ParkingEye in 8 months since Keeper Liability introduced
Number of claims filed by ParkingEye June/July 2013

The figures show we have already had 4806 cases filed in the first 9 months of Keeper Liability, with ParkingEye contributing around 2378-2438 of these (there is some discrepancy between the different FoI requests, probably cause by variations in the name used to file), and Civil Enforcement Limited 1101 cases.

An initial projection for a full years worth of figures gives 4806 * 12 / 9 = 6408.

However, this fails to take account of the way the number of claims are escalating. Here are the month by month claims by ParkingEye so far.

If ParkingEye continue to escalate at this rate, we can expect another 4,000 cases filed by them alone.

This would give a new projected amount as:

(total cases to Jun - PE cases to Jun) * 12 / 9 + (PE cases to July + PE estimate Aug/Sep)
(4806 - 2378) * 12/9 + (4219 + 4000)
3237 + 8219
11456

The Prankster thinks 11,500 cases filed is a sensible estimate, and this figure is likely to increase next year. Thus, far from saving the courts time and money, we will have almost 20 times more cases filed in 2013 than 2012.

The Prankster has no idea how much a court case costs the Ministry of Justice. However, ParkingEye pay £15 to file each case. Some cases are no doubt settle by scared motorists without court involvement, but others are not. The Prankster thinks that the amount of management time needed by the court will soon swallow up the £15. If the case proceeds to a hearing, ParkingEye pay another £50 for 1-3 hours of a Judge's time, and in those cases the taxpayer is certainly losing out. On balance then, The Prankster thinks that the MoJ is worse off as a result of the new schedule 4 POFA 2012 law.

The two companies filing the most cases, ParkingEye (PE) and Civil Enforcement Ltd (CEL) seem to have different strategies. CEL do not appear to want to go to court, and appear to be using the threat of a hearing to scare motorists into paying. This obviously works in sufficient number of cases. When the motorist fights back and uses a robust defence, CEL drops the case like a hot potato. Where the motorist does not appear to know what they are doing, CEL will chance the occasional court punt.

ParkingEye on the other hand, will go to court whatever the cost. Where they feel their case is weak they will offer between £50 and £100 to settle, but if this not paid they will still proceed to a hearing. Even in cases where the landowner orders PE to cancel the parking ticket, PE still want £50 to drop the case. This hardball attitude is undoubtedly very successful for them, and persuades many motorist to pay. When the case does go to court, the outcome can be a bit of a lottery depending on the judge's leanings and the ability of the motorist to articulate the case. However, PE always lose out financially whatever the outcome because they pay their lawyers from LPC Law £200-£300 which they cannot normally reclaim. Their strategy must be therefore to eventually accumulate enough court wins so that they can frighten more motorists into paying.

So, why is this happening? The prediction that court cases would decrease is based on the following assumption:

A reduction in the number of cases taken to court, due to the introduction of an independent appeals service, which in turn would benefit the Criminal Justice System.

This assumption has been proved completely wrong for many reasons. The Prankster assumes that no serious thought was given to this assumption and it was waved through without wasting any brain cells.

• POPLA are upholding 50% of appeals. Furthermore, POPLA cost the parking company a non-reclaimable £27 (with a true cost of over £100), and a large amount of internal effort to put together the evidence pack. Therefore POPLA is not an appealing proposition for the parking company. They can pay £15 (which is reclaimable) and go to court instead, with a much better chance of frightening the motorist into paying without spending any serious effort.
• The number of motorists projected by the BPA Ltd to use POPLA is minuscule (23k per annum). The actual number using POPLA is even less (estimated around 15k this year). As this is less than 1% of tickets issued, and 30% go unpaid, POPLA was never going to be an influence on court case figures.
• Parking companies actively try and avoid POPLA. Despite warnings from the BPA Ltd and POPLA this practice still continues.

The Prankster concludes that no thought whatsoever was given to the assumption that court cases would fall as a result of the new law, and that this statement was once again, total poppycock.

So what will happen now? The policy will be reviewed in 2016. The Prankster considers that this will be an interesting review.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Warning. Some of the statistics The Prankster used in writing this report came from the BPA Ltd. They may therefore be as much use as a chocolate teapot.

UK Parking Control pursue dead motorist

The Prankster has received a copy of a letter from UKPC who are intent on pursuing a dead motorist for parking charges.

We write with reference to your recent correspondence in relation to the above Parking Charge.

As per our previous letter, we can confirm that we have made our final decision regarding your appeal.

Please refer back to this letter and the three options that are available to you.

We appreciate that this is not the outcome you will have hoped for. Please forward on a copy of the drivers death certificate, otherwise, unless you have any additional information that you have not already brought to our attention, this decision is final. Although further correspondence will be noted and filed, please do not expect any response from us except where you have provided new evidence to substantiate your case.

The Prankster is amazed (but probably shouldn't be) at the crass insensitivity of this letter. Given that the car park was Mount Vernon Hospital (a well known centre for cancer treatment), The Prankster feels that the tone of the letter at this sad time for all concerned is completely over the top. Mr Mustard, who provided The Prankster with the letter, (and who is top notch on fighting council tickets) suggests a more reasonable reply would be along the lines:

Dear Sir,

I was very sorry to read of the death of Mr X. If you could send us a copy of the death certificate, or order for service or in fact any document which notes the passing of the deceased we would be delighted to cancel the parking charge.

Given that this is a stressful time we will take no further action to pursue our claim until 90 days has elapsed.

Yours most sincerely
UKPC

The Prankster agrees. Sadly, it seems that UKPC are more concerned with pursuing the loot at any cost, even though they are in breach of the British Parking Association Limited Code of Practice for pursuing a driver with a blue badge.

16.5 If your landowner provides a concession that allows parking for disabled people, if a vehicle displays a valid Blue Badge you must not issue it with parking charge notices.

The Parking Prankster