If you receive a "Penalty Notice" from APCOA or SABA, why you should not use POPLA fo

[b789]

What follows explains why POPLA is wrong to claim it has lawful authority to adjudicate so-called “Penalty Notices” issued under the Railway Byelaws, and why its continued involvement exposes its operator, Trust Alliance Group Limited, to legal and regulatory risk.

  Byelaws - POPLA Position and DFT Response.pdf (Size: 505.17 KB / Downloads: 0)

POPLA is not a statutory tribunal. It is a private dispute resolution service operated by Trust Alliance Group Limited, trading as POPLA. Its published remit is to consider appeals against civil Parking Charge Notices issued by private parking operators. It has no criminal jurisdiction and no statutory power to determine liability under criminal or quasi-criminal law.

POPLA now asserts that it has authority to adjudicate “Penalty Notices under Railway Byelaws” based on correspondence with the Department for Transport in 2018. That correspondence is often relied upon by POPLA as justification for its role in railway land cases. When examined properly, it does not support POPLA’s position.

The DfT correspondence is not legislation, not a statutory direction, not legal advice and not a delegation of authority. It is a policy letter expressing a departmental view at that time. The key passage relied upon by POPLA states that nothing in the Railway Byelaws prohibits parking operators from offering an appeal process, and that the DfT would encourage operators to reinstate independent appeals. That is all. Encouragement is not authorisation. The letter does not confer jurisdiction, does not empower POPLA to determine liability, does not approve the creation of private penalties and does not permit POPLA to adjudicate criminal matters.

Crucially, the same DfT letter draws a clear distinction between penalties and prosecution. It confirms that prosecution for Railway Byelaw offences is a separate process which can only take place in the magistrates’ court. The letter does not state that a Penalty Notice creates criminal liability, nor does it authorise private companies to threaten criminal prosecution or criminal records as a means of securing payment. Those threats appear in operator notices and POPLA decisions, but they do not appear anywhere in the DfT correspondence.

POPLA went further than the DfT ever did. In its own internal guidance produced in response to the 2018 correspondence, POPLA invented rules that do not exist in law. It decided that it would presume the registered keeper to be the “owner” unless proven otherwise, borrowing concepts from local authority parking regimes. The Railway Byelaws contain no such presumption. DVLA keeper data is not proof of ownership, and nothing in the Byelaws allows a private appeals body to reverse the burden of proof. This was not interpretation of the law; it was policy fabrication.

The problem is compounded by how these Penalty Notices are actually used. Operators such as APCOA issue documents framed as criminal penalties, refer to offences, threaten prosecution and criminal records, yet demand payment to themselves, not to a court or the public purse. POPLA then adjudicates those demands as if they were civil disputes, giving them an appearance of legitimacy. That hybrid approach has no basis in statute.

The situation has become even clearer following the amendment to the Protection of Freedoms Act which took effect on 24 December 2025 and brought railway land within the definition of relevant land for civil parking enforcement. That amendment did not abolish the Railway Byelaws, did not convert Byelaw penalties into civil charges and did not give private companies criminal enforcement powers. What it did do was create a clear civil route for parking enforcement if operators choose to use it. If an operator now wants keeper liability, it must issue a civil Parking Charge Notice and comply strictly with PoFA. If it chooses instead to issue a Penalty Notice under the Railway Byelaws, it is choosing the criminal route, where only a magistrates’ court can determine liability. POPLA cannot sit in the middle and do both.

Against that background, POPLA’s continued reliance on a non-binding 2018 policy letter to justify adjudicating criminally framed Penalty Notices is untenable. It is applying its own invented rules, based on analogy rather than law, in a context involving threats of criminal consequences. That is not within its published remit and not something the DfT ever authorised.

As a private company, Trust Alliance Group Limited is not immune from legal consequences if it misrepresents its authority, misstates the law or facilitates practices that mislead consumers about criminal liability. The publication of the POPLA/DfT correspondence makes clear that POPLA’s authority has been overstated and that its current position rests on interpretation rather than law. Consumers, operators and regulators should understand that POPLA is not a court, does not have criminal jurisdiction, and has no lawful basis to adjudicate Penalty Notices issued for alleged breaches of the Railway Byelaws.

This matters because the use of criminal language and threats of prosecution to coerce payment is a serious issue. Where a private appeals service lends credibility to that practice without lawful authority, it risks crossing from error into unlawfulness.

[kryten3000]

This is mostly superseded by the recent change in the law. Railway land now comes under POFA regulation and SABA/APCOA and others should no longer be issuing Penalty notices.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/dis...ecember/p1

[b789]

Welcome @kryten3000 . I don’t disagree. The point of the article/post was to explain why POPLA never had jurisdiction to adjudicate Penalty Notices in the first place, rather than to argue that anything material changed in POPLA’s favour in 2025.

It is important to look at what happened in 2025 as a combined legislative exercise. At the same time as PoFA was amended, the Railway Byelaws were also amended in a way that directly addresses parking. The most significant change was the complete restructuring of former Byelaw 14 and the insertion of new Byelaws 14A and 14B, together with the express exclusion of contractual parking schemes from the scope of Byelaw control.

For England and Wales, Byelaw 14A now governs the use, leaving and placing of vehicles on railway land. While it continues to regulate obstruction, misuse of land and non-compliance with genuine traffic signs or operational instructions, it explicitly states that neither “traffic signs” nor “instructions” include anything conveying the rules of a contractual parking scheme. That exclusion is critical. It makes clear that the Railway Byelaws do not regulate contractual parking arrangements at stations and do not criminalise failures to comply with private parking terms.

At the same time, Byelaw 24 was amended to replace the word “penalty” with “fine”, expressly confirming that Byelaw enforcement is criminal in nature and can only result in a fine imposed by a court. This removes any residual ambiguity about whether Byelaw enforcement could be treated as a civil or hybrid regime.

Taken together, these changes draw a bright and deliberate line between criminal regulation of railway operations and civil enforcement of parking contracts. Parking that is subject to a contractual scheme now sits outside the Byelaws entirely, while any remaining Byelaw enforcement is unequivocally criminal and reserved to the magistrates’ court. Contractual parking enforcement and Railway Byelaw offences are legally distinct and cannot be blended.

What this also exposes is that POPLA’s historic role in adjudicating Railway Byelaw Penalty Notices was never lawful to begin with. POPLA did not lose jurisdiction in 2025; it never had it. For years it purported to adjudicate so-called Penalty Notices despite being a private ADR scheme with no statutory footing and no criminal jurisdiction, relying on a non-binding 2018 DfT policy letter and importing concepts such as “owner liability” that do not exist in the Byelaws. That was not legal authority and not adjudication in law.

The 2025 amendments make that historical error impossible to ignore. By excluding contractual parking schemes from the Byelaws and by confirming that Byelaw enforcement results only in a criminal fine imposed by a court, Parliament has confirmed what was always the correct position: alleged Byelaw offences are matters for the magistrates’ court alone, and a private appeals body could never lawfully determine liability for them. The law has not changed POPLA’s position; it has simply made the absence of jurisdiction undeniable.

[kryten3000]

This is a good point and will help any motorist who is pursued by SABA or NCP as they try to recover historic unpaid Penalty notices.

[b789]

It’s largely a non‑issue now. With the recent amendments to PoFA and the Railway Byelaws, these private firms should no longer be issuing so‑called Penalty Notices at all. They’re now restricted to issuing standard civil‑law PCNs, which means the long‑running practice of dressing up their invoices as criminal penalties—complete with threats of prosecution and fines—has effectively been shut down.

It’s taken years, but it finally brings an end to a system that intimidated countless motorists with misleading and unlawful wording. They were allowed to operate like this for far too long.