UKPC Worcester Blackpole McDonalds Car Park

[b789]

Hi @Ogrebear. There are now several things you must do. The first is that you need to respond to that Letter of Claim (LoC). Whilst I am extremely confident that no matter what else happens, they will issue a county court claim and when defended using the advice you receive here, they will, in due course, discontinue the claim just before they are required to pay the £27 trial fee, several months down the line from now. However, for now, simply respond to the LoC with the following by email to info@blegal.co.uk and CC yourself:

Subject: Response to Letter of Claim – [DCB Ref] / [PCN Ref]

Dear Sirs,

I refer to your Letter of Claim.

The alleged debt is denied.

Your client was already put on formal notice that it had escalated this matter to debt recovery prematurely and had failed to operate any proper appeal or ADR process. That complaint was ignored. Rather than engage with it, address the clear procedural failures, or restore ADR, your client has simply attempted to bypass its own misconduct by pressing on to pre-action correspondence through solicitors.

That conduct is unreasonable. It is the very opposite of the engagement and information exchange required at the pre-action stage. Your client was given the opportunity to address its own failings and chose not to do so. The Defendant will place that conduct before the court and will seek appropriate case management directions and costs consequences on the basis that your client has ignored a legitimate formal complaint and pursued litigation conduct first.

For the avoidance of doubt, liability is denied, including for the following reasons.

1. Your client failed to properly deal with the complaint that it had referred the matter to debt recovery before the appeal window had expired.
   
2. An appeal was submitted through your client’s online portal. Your client then provided no acknowledgement, no rejection and no POPLA code. That is not a lawful or fair ADR 
   process. It is either a systems failure for which your client is responsible, or a deliberate failure to process an appeal. Either way, your client is responsible for the consequences.
   
3. The signage and alleged terms are disputed, including their visibility, prominence and intelligibility at night, and the adequacy of any notice of any alleged parking restriction.
   
4. ANPR timestamps do not prove any actual period of parking. Your client is put to strict proof of the alleged parked period, as distinct from any time spent entering, queueing, circulating, using the drive-thru, waiting, or exiting.
   
5. Strict proof is required that your client had valid landowner authority at the material time to issue parking charges and to pursue them in its own name by litigation.
   

If your client intends to continue with this baseless threat of proceedings, then provide the following documents and information without further evasion:

1. A copy of the original Parking Charge Notice and all photographs relied upon.
   
2. Copies of all letters, notices and other correspondence allegedly sent by or on behalf of your client.
   
3. A copy of the contract or chain of contracts with the landowner authorising your client to operate on the land and to recover parking charges in its own name through litigation.
   
4. A dated site plan showing the signage said to have been in place at the material time.
   
5. Clear photographs of the signage actually in place at the material time, including entrance signs and the full wording relied upon.
   
6. Evidence of the terms allegedly in force at the material time, including evidence that any evening restriction or any material change in terms was prominently brought to motorists’ attention.
   
7. Full ANPR records for the vehicle, including all images, timestamps, audit trail data, maintenance records and calibration records relied upon.
   
8. A clear explanation of the legal basis of the proposed claim, namely whether it is alleged to be breach of contract, a contractual sum, trespass, or otherwise.
   
9. A full breakdown of the sum claimed and a proper explanation for each element.
   

Until that material is provided, the matter remains disputed and wholly unsuitable for litigation. You are required to place the matter on hold and refer it back to your client for proper consideration of the unresolved complaint and the procedural misconduct already identified.

No admission is made as to the identity of the driver. No contrary inference may be drawn.

Yours faithfully,

[Full name]

At the same time, you also need to do two other things. First, make a formal complaint to the BPA about UKPC’s failure to engage with the formal complaint at all, despite then moving on to solicitor pre-action correspondence. That goes directly to operator conduct and their failure to deal properly with an unresolved complaint before litigation was threatened.

Second, send UKPC a Subject Access Request (SAR) so you can see exactly what personal data they hold, what correspondence has been logged against the case, and whether your complaint emails were actually received and retained on their systems. You already have evidence of what was sent. If those complaint emails do not appear in the SAR material, that may expose a separate personal data handling issue for which UKPC can be challenged and, if appropriate, reported to the ICO or pursued further.

Use the following form to submit the complaint about UKPC to the BPA:

https://portal.britishparking.co.uk/comp...gComplaint

You can use the following for the main part of the form:

Primary complaint subject: No response to appeal

Details of your complaint along with any supporting evidence:

I complain about UK Parking Control Ltd in relation to PCN [reference] for vehicle [VRM].

UKPC moved this matter to debt recovery before the appeal window had expired. An appeal was then submitted through UKPC’s online portal, but no acknowledgement, no rejection and no POPLA code were ever provided. A formal complaint was then sent to UKPC by email setting out those procedural failures and requiring the matter to be placed on hold and either cancelled or properly progressed to ADR. UKPC did not engage with that complaint at all. Instead, the matter has now been escalated to pre-action correspondence through DCB Legal.

This is therefore a complaint about premature escalation, failure to process or determine an appeal, failure to provide access to ADR, and failure to acknowledge or respond to a formal complaint. I attach the complaint email(s) sent to UKPC, proof of sending, the debt recovery correspondence, and the later Letter of Claim from DCB Legal. As UKPC gave no complaint outcome at all, there is none to upload beyond the complaint evidence itself and the subsequent solicitor correspondence showing that the matter was simply escalated instead of addressed. The BPA complaint form states that complaints should first be made to the operator and that a copy of the ([portal.britishparking.co.uk][1])

The following clauses of the Code of Practice have been breached:

• Clause 10.4: enforcement action must not commence until the parking charge is overdue. A parking charge only becomes overdue after expiry of the 28 days for payment or, where an appeal is pursued, after the appeals process has been completed and the time to pay has passed.
  
• Clause 11.2: a complaint must be acknowledged within 14 days.
  
• Clause 11.3: a full response to a complaint must be provided within 28 days.
  
• Clause 11.5: where a complaint includes an appeal against the validity of a parking charge, it must also be treated as an appeal for the purposes of clause 8.4.
  
• Clause 8.4.3: the operator must allow the parking charge to be appealed within 28 days.
  
• Clause 8.4.4: the operator must respond to appeals within 28 days or acknowledge the appeal and confirm the timeframe for concluding it.
  
• Clause 8.4.7: where an appeal is rejected, the operator must offer the option to appeal to the relevant Appeals Service.
  
• Clause 8.4.8: where an appeal is lodged with the relevant Appeals Service, enforcement proceedings and or debt resolution must not commence, or if commenced must be suspended, until the appeal is determined.
  

For the SAR, send it to the UKPC Data Protection Officer at dpo@ukparkingcontrol.com and CC yourself:

Subject: Subject Access Request – [PCN reference]/[VRM]

Dear Data Protection Officer,

I am the data subject and the registered keeper in respect of PCN [reference] and vehicle registration [VRM]. This email is a formal Subject Access Request pursuant to Article 15 UK GDPR and section 45 Data Protection Act 2018.

Please provide all personal data held by UK Parking Control Ltd concerning me, my vehicle, PCN [reference], and any associated appeal, complaint, debt recovery referral or pre-action activity.

This request includes, but is not limited to:

1. All letters, notices, emails and other correspondence sent to or received from me.
   
2. All appeal records, complaint records, portal submissions, webform submissions, internal notes, case logs, account notes, diary entries, screen notes and call logs.
   
3. All data showing whether, when and how my appeal and complaint emails or portal submissions were received, logged, processed, acknowledged, rejected or otherwise handled.
   
4. All ANPR data, images, timestamps, audit trail records and associated metadata connected with this case.
   
5. All data shared with or received from any third party, including ZZPS, QDR and DCB Legal, together with the dates of such sharing and the categories of data shared.
   
6. All records of the source of my personal data, including DVLA request and response records relating to this PCN.
   
7. All internal correspondence, memoranda, comments or notes referring to me, my vehicle, this PCN, any appeal, any complaint, or any decision to escalate the matter.
   
8. A copy of all personal data held in any electronic or manual filing system connected with this matter.
   
9. The purposes of processing, the categories of personal data concerned, the recipients or categories of recipients to whom the data has been disclosed, the envisaged retention period, and the source of the data where not obtained directly from me.
   

For the avoidance of doubt, this request specifically includes any complaint email(s) and any attempted appeal or complaint submitted through your online portal, together with any associated submission records, CRM entries, workflow records, server-side logs, processing notes or audit records capable of showing receipt, non-receipt, or subsequent handling.

You already hold more than sufficient information to identify the data subject and the data sought, including the PCN reference, vehicle registration mark, name and address linked to the case. There is therefore no proper basis for any prevarication, obfuscation or delay by raising unnecessary identity or clarification requests. If you contend otherwise, you must explain precisely and substantively why.

The response is required by electronic means to [your email address]. If, for any reason, you say you are unable to comply by electronic means, then the full response must instead be sent by post to [your postal address].

You are required to comply without undue delay and in any event no later than one calendar month from receipt of this request. If you contend that any extension applies, or seek to withhold any data, you must explain the specific legal basis relied upon within that initial one month period.

Yours faithfully,

[Full name]
[Postal address]
[Email address]
[PCN reference]
[Vehicle registration]