The Prankster Unredacts

Previously The Parking Prankster redacted some information regarding job titles at the request of ParkingEye. The Prankster has now reconsidered that decision, and it is his opinion that this information is in the public interest and is published in his accordance with his article 10 rights.

As ParkingEye are regularly in the habit of making untrue statements in court regarding their pre-estimate of loss calculations, The Prankster considers it is in the public interest to know just how many ParkingEye employees are involved with ticketing, and how many employees have jobs which cannot be included in any pre-estimate of loss calculation. ParkingEye regularly state that the cost per ticket issued to them is £53, while their own accounts show it can be a maximum of £16. The job titles further show that this maximum of £16 will in reality translate to a true figure of somewhere between £5 and £10.

The Prankster gave ample notice of his intention to unredact to ParkingEye, who chose not to object, and therefore to implicitly agree with the contents of his letter, stating that false claims had been made to the court and so on.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

ParkingEye accuse forums of vendetta in court. Judge not impressed

ParkingEye are apparently upset that defendants can use online forums to gain access to information on why their charges are not legally enforceable.

This happened in Bristol court on Friday 24/01/2014, with Deputy District Judge Prigg presiding over the case. ParkingEye's legal representative accused unspecified online forums of waging a vendetta against ParkingEye and stated that ParkingEye could not show their landowner contract in court because this may break confidentiality laws with their clients. Judge Prigg said this was rubbish and the contract needed to be supplied.

ParkingEye almost always try and  prevent their contract from being shown in court because it is often dated after the parking event and contains clauses which judges have found means they have no standing to bring the claim themselves. Instead, ParkingEye rely on landowner witness statements which are often obvious photocopies not signed by the witness themselves. Apart from this glaring problem, the witness statements never contain the address of the witness making them procedurally unsound. Often, the statements contain the wrong car park address or the wrong company name. Some judges have accepted these statements in the past when defendants have not known how to challenge them properly, so it is important to come armed to court with full information on witness statement irregularities.

Incidentally, the defendant won the case because the signage was not adequate.

If ParkingEye try this on again, the defendant should ask exactly which 'confidentiality laws' are being broken.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Reclaim Service Launched

http://parking-prankster.com/reclaim.html

Many parking tickets on private land have no basis in law; some parking companies derive their entire income from charges for breach of contract and it is obviously impossible to run a business entirely on this basis. As Judge Buckley put it:

"...they are pursuing a claim for their own profit as opposed to quantifying a breach and loss which this has caused them..."

When a charge is invalid, it may be possible for anyone who has paid up to reclaim their money for up to 6 years after the event. I am therefore investigating the possibility of setting up a service to help people reclaim money paid for invalid private parking charges.

At the moment the service is running on a trial basis. If you are interested, please go to the Parking Prankster website and fill in the form. If there is enough interest I will select some trial cases and proceed with those.

It is likely that the first cases will involve car parks where I already have plenty of evidence that POPLA or the courts have ruled the charges were invalid.

I am therefore especially interested if you want to reclaim money after being charged for the following sites:

• The Peel Centre
• The Range
• Burton Hospital
• Fistral Beach
• Rheidol Retail Park
• Any airport
• Any port
• Corporation Street, Preston
• St Helen's retail park
• Hawarth
• Eurogarages (KFC/Starbucks) at Bath Road, Heathrow

Any other car parks are of course also welcome. However, this service is for private parking charges only - not council or police parking charges.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

ParkingEye court losses roundup

News of ParkingEye court cases losses are coming in thick and fast and The Parking Prankster has had to redesign his web site to keep up.

Overall losses can be accessed at this link
ParkingEye court losses in 2013 are recorded at this link.
ParkingEye court losses in 2014 are recorded at this link.

Here is the round-up for the last few days. Please contact The Prankster if any results are missing from this list.

3JD02430 ParkingEye v Howe. (Rhyll 30/01/2014) District Judge Thomas. Crewe Arms Hotel car park. The judge ruled the signage was not adequate and the defendant had done all she could be expected to do to ensure she had complied. The landowner witness statement had a company which did not exist at Company's House.
Read Bargepole's account here

3JD02462 ParkingEye v Thomas. (Preston 29/01/2014) District Judge Buckley dismissed the case because the signage was inadequate and so the motorist cannot have formed a contract with ParkingEye.

3JD06925 ParkingEye v Hopewell. (Halifax 29/01/2014) Deputy District Judge Gardner. The case was adjourned to await the results of the HHJ Moloney case.

3JD06533 ParkingEye v Collins-Daniel. (Bristol 24/01/2014). Deputy District Judge Melville-Shreeve felt the signage was inadequate.
Read Bargepole's account here

3JD05814 ParkingEye v Taylor. (Morpeth and Berwick 24/01/2014) District Judge Howard. Belvedere car park, Newcastle upon Tyne. ParkingEye did not produce a contract. The judge ruled that without a relevant contract they could not issue parking charges as they were not the landowner and they could not therefore bring the claim in their own name.
Read Bargepole's account here

3JD02357 ParkingEye v Gosnold. (High Wycombe 23/01/2014). District Judge Devlin. The judge agreed the landowner witness statement from Workman LLP was worthless. The LPC Law representative produced a heavily redacted version of the contract which the judge decided did not satisfy the 'relevant contract' provision of PoFa 2012 sch 4. The judge decided he did not need to rule whether Jonathan Langham's statement that ParkingEye's costs were £53 per ticket, when their accounts and DVLA figures showed the true figure was nearer £15, was perjury. As there was no standing for ParkingEye to bring the case, it was dismissed. £90 costs were awarded to the defendant.

Read Bargepole's account here

If anyone thinks that the reason ParkingEye have difficulty walking right now is because they have a pretty large bargepole shoved right where they don't want it...they are probably correct.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

ParkingEye court wins dip to 62%

The Parking Prankster has been made aware of a new FoI request showing the number of court claims won by ParkingEye.

The Prankster freely admits he might be interpreting the figures incorrectly. ParkingEye can feel free to update him with the correct figures if he is wrong.

Hearings marked with a 'J' are apparently judgements, but this can be 'Judgement for Claimant' or 'Judgement for Defendant'. The Prankster thinks 'Judgement for Defendant' will only happen if the defendant counter-claims. He doesn't know of any cases where this has happened, so has assigned all 'J's to ParkingEye wins.

Hearings marked with an 'O' are apparently 'Claim Dismissed'. They may include other categories as well, but The Prankster does not know what these would be. He has therefore assigned all these to ParkingEye losses. The Prankster has also attempted to match up known ParkingEye losses with the data. This was partially successful. In one case the claim was marked 'X' as not recorded yet, and in the Lemon and Harris case there appeared to only be one claim recorded instead of two.

Based on these adjusted figures, The Prankster has come up with the following graph.

The data behind this is as follows.

	pe win	pe loss
may	1	0
jun	0	1
jul	7	2
aug	9	1
sep	10	6
oct	13	8
nov	31	14
dec	30	16

If The Prankster is correct in his assumptions, the following paragraph is true. If not, this is a situation known in the parking world as 'telling ParkingLies'

ParkingEye's infamous claim that they win 90% of cases was only applicable in August. After that the percentage of cases won per month has hovered between 62% and 69%. This means ParkingEye win less than 2 cases for every 1 case won by the motorist. 

The Parking Prankster has seen transcripts of case won by ParkingEye and can quite understand why they won - the defence was poor or non-existent.

If you are defending a ParkingEye claim and they quote cases they won, you should immediately ask them for all transcripts quoted. These will provide you with a good lesson on how not to conduct your case at court. 

To win a case the Prankster recommends you look at winning transcripts, at the winning legal arguments and that you know your facts when it comes to the hearing. Take a friend with you if this will help.

http://parking-prankster.com/case-law.html

http://parking-prankster.com/sample-defence.html

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

ParkingEye v Clarke transcript donated

Mr Clarke has kindly made available for the common good the judgment in the case of ParkingEye v Clarke.

The judgment can be downloaded from here.

This case was for one of The Range car parks in Barrow-in-Furness. Previously in other claims ParkingEye have produced contracts dated Feb 2013 for this car park. In this case, ParkingEye suddenly produced in court a contract dated November 2011. Although Mr Clarke was never allowed to view this, he did raise the date discrepancy with the judge. In any event, in this particular case the judge did not need to worry about this.

Deputy District Judge Buckley ruled that the letter of authority which allowed ParkingEye to manage the car park did not allow them to take proceedings in their own name. He ruled that the 'commercial justification' arguement that ParkingEye used to justify their own profit was invalid because they could not show any financial loss due to the breach of contract; in fact they make a profit from the breach of contract. The judge referred to the situation as 'bizarre'.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

Whitehaven Harbour Commissioners enter the fray. Most incompetent legal department 2014?

This post on pepipoo tells the sorry tale of Whitehaven Harbour Commissioners.

WHC submitted multiple claims against multiple defendants, but failed to adhere to the Protection of Freedoms Act and the Civil Procedure Rules in almost all aspects. Only one Notice to Keeper was served. That was 7 months late and on the day that the court bundle was also served.

A brief defence stating no cause of action was filed, but this was not accepted and the cases were allocated to the small claims track. A more detailed defence was filed outlining WHC's lack of, well, competence.

All 5 defendants then received notices of discontinuance.

WHC have with this master-stroke put themselves in contention for the most incompetent legal department of 2014, easily batting aside Excel and their spreadsheet worries, and are now vying for top spot with ParkingEye.

This is January though, so there is still a long way to go.