Clamping on private land by parking companies has been illegal for a few years now in England, unless under the authority of someone like the DVLA/Council/Police.
Parking Fines - your experiences
- Thread starter Musty Pie
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Soldato
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Sorry disagree, I cannot see a court backing this as acceptable.
Its a generally accepted way of implying terms for someone, to clearly display them when someone comes to your site, they have the choice to accept them and enter, or reject them and not. In fact there is legislation to this effect, hence if you make it unclear, or hard to find then you DO lose the benefit of those implied terms, hence the assumption that those terms are accepted and you cannot just simply reject them if you feel fit.
Remember this would include all liability claims etc and they stand up in court, they are implied. So I don't believe you can do as you say and reject the T&Cs (forming the contract) but still rely on being able to do the thing that the other party gives you the ability to do, if you accept their T&Cs.
If you really argued it, and won, then I guess technically you would be admitting tresspass. Being on private land without permission (which is granted in return for accepting the T&Cs)
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yes you’d be trespassing, which is a civil matter with barely any chance of prosecution.
Soldato
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Think you should get in contact with Martin Lewis, money saving expert guy, because he says, so you can correct him 
"He goes on to explain that tickets from private companies are not fines and just invoices - but they are enforceable under contractual law"
"He goes on to explain that tickets from private companies are not fines and just invoices - but they are enforceable under contractual law"
Even if trespass could be proved, the damages have to be genuine. So what monetary damage was caused? It is never a tact these companies use.
They always attempt to use contractual law to claim their £160 fine + costs (more on this below). However, this is an arena where they would almost always lose to someone putting up a decent defence.
I've had a company actually file court papers. Once I put in a defence and I accepted showing up to a hearing instead of paying, they cancelled it all. It costs them £30 to get the papers sent to you and they didn't want to waste more money on a hearing fee, because their bluff had run out at that stage.
* The amount they claim is also hilarious. So it starts out at £100, that's their initial claim. So you'd have though they should be claiming £100 + costs. Instead they pass it round multiple companies who add their own amount to it. So it eventually goes from £100 to £160 and for me £235. So they claimed £235 + costs. Even if they won it would have been easy to get it back down to £100 + costs, but obviously they wouldn't win.
For private parking fines the best place to go is below. There are hundreds of examples of people going all the way and nearly always the company cancels at the last second. Or more rarely does get a local lawyer to show up who is completely unprepared as they only got the details that week. Unfortunately I suspect many people pay up at the first sign of court papers (which mean nothing, as they could be completely frivolous).
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=163
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You are right that is a terrible defence. However, you cannot agree to a contract you didn't even read. That opens up the whole avenue of how clear everything was, and often the signs and contracts do not pass even BPA (their own body) guidelines.
Soldato
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Not quite right, you have to have been given the right to reasonably read it. If you choose not to you cannot rely on that as your defence.
Its precisely why they did make it that signs etc have to be clearly visible, people were putting them in small type 20 feet up in the air in unlit areas, impossible to read. So they made it that they needed to be visible because they were failing the test of being reasonably able to read it, so you could use the defence of couldn't accept as couldn't read it.
I got one at the beginning of November with the date of the offence being 29/10.
The claim was that I had overstayed the 2hr limit. They claimed, via ANPR photos that I had stayed 2hrs 17mins.
Now I was in that car park that day but recalled only staying a little over an hour.
It wasn't till my Mrs looked at the timestamps on the photos and noticed that my entry time was logged as 13:05GMT and my exit was logged as 15:27BST
I wrote an appeal letter pointing out the the incorrect time on their evidence.
They wrote back cancelling the fine and apologised blaming "a technological failure"
Made me wonder how many others got fines from this "failure" and had paid up not realising.
The claim was that I had overstayed the 2hr limit. They claimed, via ANPR photos that I had stayed 2hrs 17mins.
Now I was in that car park that day but recalled only staying a little over an hour.
It wasn't till my Mrs looked at the timestamps on the photos and noticed that my entry time was logged as 13:05GMT and my exit was logged as 15:27BST
I wrote an appeal letter pointing out the the incorrect time on their evidence.
They wrote back cancelling the fine and apologised blaming "a technological failure"
Made me wonder how many others got fines from this "failure" and had paid up not realising.
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I got one over Christmas, a invoice from a parking firm. I paid the £40 for a couple of reasons a- I really can't afford the time to write lots of letters and get into a protracted back and forward and 2 - I park in so many private car parks without getting caught it was about time 
One of the joys of owning a commercial vehicle is that so much more available parking opens up
One of the joys of owning a commercial vehicle is that so much more available parking opens up
We were in Ireland last year in our motorhome, as it is 21ft we usually have to park taking up 2 spaces, one in front of the other and buy two tickets, one for each space. We parked in a car park in Ballymoney, it was almost empty, plenty of spaces so we parked as usual straddling two spaces, bought two tickets and put them on the screen. When we got back we had a parking ticket stating we were parked over the white lines of the parking bay. I uploaded photos I took showing the situation and online the traffic warden had put up photos identical to mine showing we were well inside the lines.
I got online and contested the ticket saying I had bought tickets for two spaces and that I was well inside the combined outline of the two spaces I had paid for. When we got home a couple of weeks later we had a letter saying the ticket had been cancelled and we did not have to pay a fine
I got online and contested the ticket saying I had bought tickets for two spaces and that I was well inside the combined outline of the two spaces I had paid for. When we got home a couple of weeks later we had a letter saying the ticket had been cancelled and we did not have to pay a fine