Britannia Parking PCN... what should I do next?

[b789]

Welcome to the forum @johnny p. It would assist if you could show us both sides of the Notice to Keeper (NtK) the Keeper received and the dates of the alleged contravention and the date the NtK was issued.

Britannia have admitted their NtK is not PoFA compliant and therefore they cannot hold the Keeper liable. Instead of cancelling, they resort to misleading assertions that contract law somehow creates a probability that the Keeper was the driver. It does not. Their threat about obtaining the insurance certificate is equally hollow, as being insured to drive is not evidence of who actually drove on the material date. Their reply is therefore not a genuine rebuttal of the appeal but a transparent attempt to pressure the keeper into naming the driver or paying despite the absence of any lawful keeper liability.

My advice is to have a bit of fun at their expense as this could never go against the Keeper if it were to ever reach a hearing in front of a judge. The appeals process is a different matter but is irrelevant to any eventual claim, should they be so stupid as to try and press it that far. They are hoping you are low-hanging fruit on the gullible tree who will pay up out of ignorance and fear.

For now, my advice is to respond to Britannia with he following:

Dear Appeals Department,

I have read your response to my appeal. It is difficult to say whether it was drafted in ignorance of the law or in the hope that I would be.

You expressly admit that this Parking Charge is not compliant with Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA). That should have been the end of the matter as against the Keeper. Instead, you then launch into a string of legally illiterate assertions which only serve to expose how weak your position really is.

You state that payment can still be sought under old “implied contract with the driver” rules. That is beside the point. Of course an operator may attempt to pursue a driver under ordinary contract law. The difficulty for you, which you appear desperate to evade, is that I am the Keeper and you do not know who the driver was. Your inability to use PoFA means you cannot transfer liability from the unknown driver to the keeper. That is not a technicality. It is the central defect in your case.

You then claim that “under Contract Law there is a probability that the Keeper was the Driver if the Keeper does not nominate anyone else.” That is complete nonsense. There is no principle of contract law creating any such presumption. None. This is not law. It is merely a parking company inventing a rule because the actual law does not assist it.

Your letter then becomes even more absurd because, having just asserted some supposed “probability” that the Keeper was the driver, you immediately say that Britannia have made no assumptions as to the identity of the driver. Those two statements cannot sensibly coexist. Either you are making an assumption or you are not. Your letter manages to do both at once, which is impressive in entirely the wrong way.

Your attempt at intimidation becomes even more pathetic when you threaten that, if the matter reached court, you would ask a judge to inspect the insurance certificate to determine who was able to drive the vehicle. That is a laughably weak point. Being insured to drive a vehicle is not evidence of who actually drove it on any particular occasion. It proves only that someone could have driven it, not that they did.

Worse for you, your threat is so poorly thought through that it defeats itself. Many motorists are insured under third party provisions to drive vehicles they do not own, provided they have the owner’s permission and meet the policy terms. On your logic, the pool of “possible drivers” extends far beyond those named on any one policy and could in theory run into huge numbers. So your grand idea of waving an insurance document around in court does not identify a driver at all. It merely demonstrates that your evidence is so weak that you are reduced to pointing at a list of people who might have been able to drive, plus an indeterminate number of others who may also have been insured to do so. That is not proof. It is clearly desperation, and I suspect you know it.

You then say it is your “choice” whether to rely on PoFA. That is true only in the most limited and misleading sense. Yes, it is your choice whether to comply with the statutory conditions for Keeper liability. But if you choose not to comply, then you choose not to have Keeper liability. You do not get to reject the statute and then pretend some alternative Keeper liability regime exists because it would be more convenient for you. It does not. The law is not a buffet from which Britannia can pick the bits it likes and ignore the rest.

Your further statement that it is “not a requirement” to notify the Keeper within 14 days because you are not relying on PoFA is another transparent attempt to muddy the waters. The issue is not whether you are physically capable of sending a letter later than 14 days. Plainly you are. The issue is what legal consequence follows from that letter. In the absence of PoFA compliance, the answer is none as against the Keeper. So this point, like much else in your response, is little more than noise designed to distract from the central defect in your position.

Your request for “additional evidence or comments” is transparently what it really is: a fishing expedition. You have admitted you cannot rely on PoFA. You plainly cannot identify the driver. Having failed on both fronts, you now appear to hope that I will help repair your case for you. That will not be happening.

The reality is very simple. You have admitted the NtK is not PoFA compliant. You do not know who was driving. You have no lawful basis to hold the Keeper liable. Instead of accepting that obvious problem, you have produced a letter padded out with contradiction, bluff and invented legal principles. It reads less like a reasoned appeal decision and more like a speculative attempt to see whether the recipient is gullible enough to be intimidated by confident-sounding rubbish.

For the avoidance of doubt, I will not be naming the driver. No inference may be drawn from that. Your inability to invoke Keeper liability is your problem, not mine.

You should now cancel this Parking Charge or issue a rejection with the appropriate next-stage appeal details. If you persist in sending misleading responses of this kind, that correspondence will be retained and may be relied upon in any complaint to your principal, your trade body and any other relevant authority as evidence of Britannia Parking knowingly attempting to misstate the legal position to a Registered Keeper after expressly admitting that PoFA does not apply.

Yours faithfully

[Name]