10 PCNs from Parking & Property Management Ltd

[b789]

What you are seeing on the IAS portal is not a quirk, and it is not something you are expected to “solve” by finding the correct combination of answers. It is a deliberate structural feature of the IAS process.

The law recognises three distinct roles in private parking cases: Driver, Keeper, and Hirer. PoFA explicitly creates Hirer liability as a separate, conditional mechanism. Your case sits squarely in that category. You are not admitting to being the Driver, you were not the Keeper (Hertz was), and the only reason the operator is attempting to pursue you at all is because it asserts Hirer liability under PoFA.

The IAS portal simply refuses to recognise that statutory reality. It is designed to force appellants into conceding either Driver identity or Keeper status. When it tells you that you may not continue unless you were the Driver or the Keeper, that statement is legally wrong. PoFA does not say that only drivers and keepers may be pursued; it says that hirers may be pursued only if strict conditions are met. The IAS system is not aligned with the law and you cannot make it so.

That does not mean you stop. It means you proceed in a way that preserves your legal position while navigating an obstructive interface.

When you answer that you are being held liable, you are stating an objective fact. The Notice to Hirer (NtH) expressly asserts liability against you. When you state that you are not prepared to say whether you were the Driver, you are exercising a lawful right. When you indicate that you were the Keeper, you are not making a substantive admission; you are satisfying a procedural gatekeeper imposed by a non-statutory ADR scheme that otherwise blocks access entirely. That is why your written appeal matters far more than any dropdown menu.

Your written appeal is explicit. It states that you are appealing strictly as Hirer, that you do not admit to being the Driver, that Keeper liability is denied, and that any forced tick-box confirmations are rejected and overridden by the written statement. In any later forum that actually applies the law, substance prevails over form. No court is going to treat an IAS UI constraint as determinative when the written position is clear and consistent.

The wording you have noticed in the Notices to Hirer about recovering the charge from you “as the Hirer Keeper” does not improve the operator’s position. It actively undermines it. There is no such legal status as “Hirer Keeper”. PoFA does not recognise it. Liability cannot be created by inventing labels or by asserting entitlement in a notice. Either the statutory conditions are met or they are not. Here, they are not. The mandatory documents were not served with the NtH, and an instruction to request them later is legally ineffective. Liability never arose and cannot be cured retrospectively.

Engaging with the IAS is not about expecting fairness. It is about locking the operator’s failures onto the record: the failure to establish Hirer liability under PoFA, the failure to form a contract with an authorised residential occupier, and the failure to show standing or authority. Whether the IAS allows or dismisses the appeal does not change the underlying legal position. A dismissal that avoids those issues often strengthens your position later.

Nothing in what you have described weakens the case. The portal behaviour and the wording in the notices are both symptoms of the same thing: assertion replacing law. Your approach remains correct.

As the IAS appeal process is a kangaroo court and has no bearing on anything going forward if it is unsuccessful (likely), it is really just for the record. Remember, the IAS is not "independent".  The IPC and IAS are both owned by Uniti, all owned/controlled by Will Hurley Ltd and a couple of years ago, he also registered a commercial Ltd company called The Independent Appeals Service Ltd with himself as the sole director. It's all part of a big con.

I will give you a separate IAS appeal for the first PCN where no NtH was issued. Then I will deal with the two PCNs not appealed in time and finally the IAS appeal for the remaining PCNs.

The first PCN is actually much less of a problem than it feels. What happened here is procedurally untidy on the operator’s side, not yours.

They issued an NTK to Hertz. Hertz forwarded it to you. You appealed early, before any Notice to Hirer was served. PPM rejected that appeal. They then failed to serve a Notice to Hirer at all.

That sequence matters. Under PoFA, an NTK served on a hire company does not create liability against the Hirer. It is merely a step in the statutory chain. The operator only acquires any right to pursue the Hirer if — and only if — it then serves a compliant Notice to Hirer with the mandatory documents.

If no NTH was ever served, then PoFA hirer liability never arose, full stop. The fact that you appealed early does not create liability, does not waive statutory requirements, and does not “convert” an NTK into an NTH. The statute does not allow that. Liability arises by service of a compliant notice, not by correspondence.

In practical terms, that PCN sits in a worse position for the operator than the others. They rejected an appeal made without standing, failed to follow the statutory route, and are now left with:

• no keeper liability (keeper was Hertz)
  
• no hirer liability (no NTH served)
  
• no identified driver
  

That PCN is effectively dead from a PoFA perspective. Use the following for the IAS appeal:

I am the Hirer of the vehicle. This appeal is made strictly in that capacity. No admission is made as to the identity of the Driver and I will not be identifying the Driver. Any attempt to infer Driver identity is denied.


PCN reference: [PCN REF]
Vehicle registration: [VRM]
Site: [SITE / ESTATE NAME AND ADDRESS]
Date of alleged event: [DATE]
Operator’s stated allegation: [ALLEGATION]
This appeal concerns a Parking Charge Notice for which no Notice to Hirer was ever served. The operator has therefore failed to invoke, engage, or comply with the statutory mechanism required to pursue a Hirer. As a matter of law, liability cannot arise against me.

1. No Hirer liability can arise because no Notice to Hirer was ever served
The operator initially issued a Notice to Keeper to the vehicle-hire company. That notice was subsequently forwarded to me by the hire company. Acting on advice given by the operator’s representative, I submitted an early appeal against that notice. The operator rejected the appeal.

Crucially, however, the operator never served a Notice to Hirer at any point.

This omission is fatal.

Under Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (“PoFA”), an NTK served on a hire company does not create liability against the Hirer. It is merely a preliminary step. Parliament has imposed a strict and mandatory requirement that, if an operator wishes to pursue a Hirer, it must serve a compliant Notice to Hirer in accordance with paragraphs 13 and 14 of Schedule 4.

If no Notice to Hirer is served, the statutory chain ends. There is no gateway to Hirer liability.

No amount of correspondence, early appeals, portal submissions, or rejection letters can substitute for service of a Notice to Hirer. Liability under PoFA arises by operation of statute, not by conduct, implication, or administrative convenience.

In this case:

• No Notice to Hirer was served
• No statutory transfer of liability ever occurred
• No lawful cause of action exists against me as Hirer

The operator cannot retrospectively create liability by asserting that I should be treated as a “Hirer Keeper”, nor by relying on an NTK that was never addressed to me and was never capable of imposing liability on me.

As a matter of law, this appeal must succeed on this ground alone.

2. No contract formed with an authorised residential occupier
This PCN arises at a residential site where the vehicle was authorised to be present under a paid residential arrangement administered by the landlord/managing agent.

The operator’s signage requires residents to hold a “valid permit”. It does not state that permits must be issued by the operator, nor does it state that permits previously issued by the managing agent are invalid. At the material time, the managing agent was responsible for resident parking administration and had authorised the vehicle.

A third-party contractor cannot unilaterally impose a new contract upon a residential occupier who is already entitled to park by virtue of tenancy rights and express authorisation. There was no offer capable of acceptance and no breach of any term.

Any failure to migrate resident permit data during a management handover is an administrative failure between principal and agent. It does not convert an authorised resident into an unauthorised parker and does not create contractual liability.

3. No standing and no proof of landowner authority
The operator is put to strict proof of standing. It must demonstrate, by production of a contemporaneous and unredacted contract, that it was authorised at the material time by the landowner (or a party with sufficient proprietary interest) to:

• offer parking contracts in its own name;
• impose and recover parking charges; and
• pursue legal proceedings in its own name.

In a residential context, that authority must extend to enforcement against authorised occupiers and interference with resident permits. No such proof has been provided.

4. Evidential and signage deficiencies
The operator is further put to strict proof of:

• the exact signage relied upon at the material time;
• its location and prominence relative to where the vehicle was parked;
• the prominence of any parking charge term; and
• evidence of a genuine period of parking rather than mere presence or ANPR timestamps.

No such proof has been supplied.

Conclusion
This appeal must be allowed because:

• no Notice to Hirer was ever served and Hirer liability cannot arise as a matter of law;
• no contract was formed with an authorised residential occupier;
• the operator has failed to prove standing or landowner authority; and
• no actionable breach has been established.

Procedural fairness and the asserted legal competence of the IAS assessor
Finally, I note that the IAS states that appeals are determined by legally qualified assessors, typically solicitors or barristers. Decisions are anonymous, unsigned, and provide no verifiable indication of the assessor’s qualification, practising status, or independence.

Given that this appeal turns on core legal issues, including statutory construction of PoFA, the creation (or absence) of liability by service of notices, contract formation in a residential context, and standing, I invite the IAS to confirm in its decision, without disclosing personal data, whether the assessor determining this appeal is a practising solicitor of England and Wales, a barrister holding a practising certificate, or another legally qualified person, and to confirm that no conflict of interest exists.

If the IAS declines to provide even this minimal confirmation, I request that it explains how that position is compatible with transparency and consumer confidence in an ADR scheme that relies on claimed legal expertise as a marker of credibility. If the appeal is dismissed, I further request that this is done by reasoned legal analysis engaging with the issues above, rather than by conclusory assertions.

The two PCNs that were not appealed in time are not a problem, and you do not need to “fix” or chase them now. In fact, doing nothing further at this stage is the correct tactical position.


What happens next is predictable and legally uninteresting. Because they were not appealed internally, the operator will almost certainly pass them to a debt recovery agent. That step has no legal effect whatsoever. Debt collectors are not a party to any contract allegedly breached by the driver, they have no standing, they cannot determine liability, and they cannot add enforceable sums. Their letters are designed to intimidate the low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree into paying out of ignorance and fear.

Nothing about debt recovery correspondence alters the legal position on those PCNs.

The key point is this: failure to appeal does not create liability. There is no requirement in law to exhaust an operator’s appeal process. An internal appeal deadline is a private administrative rule, not a statutory one. Missing it does not waive statutory protections, does not cure PoFA failures, and does not convert an unenforceable charge into an enforceable one.

Those two PCNs still suffer from the same fundamental defects as the others:

• no PoFA-compliant Notice to Hirer
• no identified Driver
• residential authorisation under the tenancy and permit arrangement
• no standing proven
• signage incapable of overriding tenancy rights

Debt collection letters cannot cure any of that. Strategically, those PCNs are now parked. You do not engage with debt collectors. You do not argue with them. You do not “appeal” to them. You keep everything they send and ignore it.

If — and only if — the operator later issues a Letter of Claim (LoC), which must come from the operator or its solicitors, not a debt collector, that is when you respond. At that point you set out, in full, that:

• no Hirer liability arises under PoFA
• no Notice to Hirer was served or it was non-compliant
• no Driver has been identified
• the vehicle was authorised under a residential arrangement
• the operator has no standing to pursue the claim

Until that point, there is nothing to do.

From a wider strategy perspective, the IAS appeals you are submitting on the other PCNs do the heavy lifting. They lock the operator’s legal failures onto the record. If the operator later tries to litigate on the two “late” PCNs, you will be able to point to identical facts, identical signage, identical tenancy rights, and identical PoFA defects already raised and ignored.

In short:

• Debt recovery is noise, not risk.
• You do nothing in response.
• The legal position on those PCNs does not worsen.
• They are dealt with later, if at all, at pre-action stage.

You remain in control of this. So, here is the IAS appeal you should submit for each of the remaining PCNs. One for each:

I am the Hirer of the vehicle. This appeal is made strictly in that capacity. No admission is made as to the identity of the Driver and I will not be identifying the Driver. Any attempt to infer Driver identity is denied.


PCN reference: [PCN REF]
Vehicle registration: [VRM]
Site: [SITE / ESTATE NAME AND ADDRESS]
Date of alleged event: [DATE]
Notice to Hirer issue date: [NTH DATE]
Operator’s stated allegation: [ALLEGATION]

The operator purports to hold me liable as “Hirer/Keeper”. That is denied. There is no such legal category as “Hirer-Keeper”. Liability can only arise against a Hirer (if at all) by strict compliance with the statutory conditions in Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (“PoFA”). Those conditions were not met. Further, this is a residential context in which the vehicle was authorised to be present under the tenancy and under the landlord/managing agent’s permit arrangement. The operator is put to strict proof of standing, contractual formation, and any lawful basis to levy charges against an authorised residential occupier.

1. No Hirer liability: failure to comply with PoFA Schedule 4 paragraphs 13 and 14
The operator seeks to rely upon PoFA to transfer liability from an unidentified Driver to me as Hirer. In hire cases, Parliament imposed additional, mandatory safeguards. These are not technicalities; they are the legal gateway to Hirer liability.

PoFA Schedule 4 paragraph 14(2) is explicit. A creditor may only recover an unpaid parking charge from a Hirer if the Notice to Hirer (NtH) is accompanied by prescribed documents. Those documents are not optional and are not capable of being supplied later at the operator’s convenience. They are the only lawful means by which the operator can demonstrate that the person pursued is in fact the Hirer and that the statutory chain of liability has been complied with.

The statutory requirement is that the Notice to Hirer is accompanied by:

(a) a statement signed by or on behalf of the vehicle-hire firm to the effect that, at the material time, the vehicle was hired to a named person under a hire agreement;
(b) a copy of the hire agreement; and
(c) a copy of a statement of liability signed by the Hirer under that hire agreement;

and, to complete the statutory chain, a copy of the Notice to Keeper (NtK) served on the vehicle-hire firm.

In this case, the Notice to Hirer was not accompanied by the above documents. Instead, the operator purported to reverse the statutory burden by stating that the documents were “available upon request” and instructing the recipient to request them within 14 days. That approach is legally ineffective. PoFA does not permit liability to arise conditionally, prospectively, or upon request. The statute requires the operator to serve the documents with the notice. An invitation to ask for them later defeats the safeguard and would render paragraph 14(2) meaningless.

This is not a minor defect. It goes to the root of jurisdiction. Where the mandatory documents are not served with the NtH, the statutory right to pursue the Hirer does not arise at all. There is no discretion for an assessor to overlook this failure and no power for the operator to cure it retrospectively by later disclosure, by producing documents in an evidence pack, or by obtaining documents from the hire firm after an appeal is submitted. If the documents were not enclosed at the point of service, PoFA Hirer liability never arose.

Accordingly, as a matter of law, the operator has no lawful basis to recover any sum from me as Hirer under PoFA. In the absence of full compliance, the operator’s only remaining course would be to pursue the Driver, who has not been identified and whom I am under no obligation to identify.

2. No contract formed with an authorised residential occupier and no breach of any term
This is a residential site. The vehicle was authorised to be present by virtue of the tenancy arrangement and the landlord/managing agent’s permit system. The operator’s assertion of “unauthorised parking” is denied.

The signs relied upon do not state that permits must be issued by the operator. They simply state that residents must hold a “valid e-permit”. At the material time, resident permits and authorisation were issued and controlled by the managing agent/landlord under the paid residential arrangement. The operator’s signage does not state that a permit issued by the managing agent is invalid, nor does it state that residents must “register with” the operator or that any earlier permit regime is void. The signage therefore cannot support the operator’s allegation that the vehicle was present “without authorisation” where a valid resident permit existed under the scheme that actually governed residential authorisation.

More fundamentally, a third-party contractor cannot impose a new contract upon a residential occupier who is already entitled to park by virtue of pre-existing rights and authorisation. There is no offer capable of acceptance in those circumstances; the occupier is not a transient visitor seeking permission to park from the operator. The operator’s attempt to re-characterise authorised residential parking as a contractual licence granted by the operator is misconceived.

If the operator contends that authorisation depended upon internal whitelist administration following a management handover, then any failure is administrative between principal and agent. It does not create a contractual breach by an authorised resident and cannot lawfully give rise to a £100 charge.

3. No standing: strict proof required of landowner authority and scope of enforcement powers
The operator is put to strict proof of standing. It is not sufficient to assert that it “manages” the car park. The operator must produce a contemporaneous, unredacted contract demonstrating that the landowner (or a party with sufficient proprietary interest) granted the operator authority at the material time to:

(a) offer parking contracts in its own name;
(b) impose and recover parking charges in its own name; and
(c) pursue legal proceedings in its own name.

In a residential context, this must extend to strict proof that the operator was authorised to enforce against residents and to override or interfere with resident permits/authorisations historically issued by the landlord/managing agent. The operator must prove that its mandate genuinely permits imposing charges against authorised occupiers for alleged administrative non-registration/whitelist issues. Absent strict proof, the operator has no locus.

4. Signage and evidential deficiencies: no proof of contractual terms, no proof of breach, no proof of a period of parking
The operator is put to strict proof of the signage relied upon at the material time, including its content, location, prominence, and the legibility of any charge term. In particular, the operator must prove:

(a) the exact wording of the signs in force at the material time;
(b) that the signs were positioned so that a Driver would necessarily see and understand them before parking;
(c) that the parking charge term was prominent and unambiguous; and
(d) that the operator has evidence of a material period of parking and not merely entry/exit timestamps or momentary presence.

Where the allegation is “unauthorised parking”, the operator must also prove what constitutes “authorisation”, who issues it, and how any resident permit could be rendered invalid. The operator has not done so.

Conclusion
This appeal must be allowed for multiple independent reasons:

(a) PoFA Hirer liability fails because the Notice to Hirer was not accompanied by the mandatory hire documents (and the chain document) at the time of service;
(b) no contract was formed with an authorised residential occupier and no actionable breach has been established;
(c) the operator has not proven standing or landowner authority to contract and litigate in its own name, still less to enforce against authorised residents; and
(d) the operator has not proven clear contractual terms, prominence, or a period of parking sufficient to establish a breach.

Procedural fairness and the asserted legal competence of the IAS assessor.
The IAS states that appeals are determined by legally qualified assessors, typically solicitors or barristers. Decisions are anonymous, unsigned, and provide no verifiable indication of the assessor’s qualification, practising status, or independence. Where an ADR scheme relies on claimed legal expertise as a marker of credibility, it is reasonable to expect decisions to demonstrate that expertise through structured legal analysis rather than assertion.

I therefore invite the IAS to confirm in its decision, without disclosing personal data, whether the assessor determining this appeal is a practising solicitor of England and Wales, a barrister holding a practising certificate, or another legally qualified person, and to confirm that no conflict of interest exists. If the IAS declines to provide even this minimal confirmation, I request that it explains how that position is compatible with transparency and consumer confidence in ADR.

This request is directly relevant. The present dispute involves core legal issues: contract formation, the distinction between prohibition and contractual offer, evidential proof of parking as opposed to momentary presence, locus and landowner authority, and compliance with mandatory Code requirements. A legally trained decision-maker will recognise that these are determinative questions and will address them by reasoned analysis. If the IAS intends to dismiss the appeal, I request that it does so by engaging with those legal elements rather than by conclusory statements such as “signage was present” or that the charge was “issued correctly”.