Thread: legality of private company or council

There is no legal basis for issuing any type of "penalty" or "fine" for parking on privately owned land. That's the law, and the PPC's rely on our ignorance of that fact to get away with what they do.

The PPC's will do their utmost to persuade you that what you are receiving is a legally enforceable parking ticket, (often by the unlawful tactic of mimicking legally backed documents issued by local authorities and councils). In reality, the best that they can be construed as is an "invitation to pay". In other words, they are an invoice for a breach of a contract allegedly entered into by the driver when leaving his/her car on private property. (I emphasise the word driver, because a PPC will always tell you the registered keeper is liable. Again they try and mimic the road traffic act and persuade people that their tickets are issued under the same legislation. Again this is a lie and unlawful to do.)

However, in issuing this invoice, the PPC's often commit other unlawful acts by invoicing you for more than they are rightfully allowed to under consumer law. They do this knowingly, and in the hope that their threats of courts, debt collectors, bayliffs etc (also unlawful) will persuade you to pay up rather than challenge them as to the legalities of their actions.

Those that do challenge the PPC's, either passively by ignoring them completely, or agressively by inviting them to go to court/reporting to trading standards etc, normally find the action successful in that they never have to part with a penny.

Originally Posted by crem

The use of a black and yellow envelope by the PPCs i, once again, to make it appear to be a lawful pcn issued to you. It is not!

Also I believe the use of the statement "It is an OFFENCE for any person other than the driver to remove this notice" (which I am sure would be written on your envelope) pretty much screws the PPC if they ever considered going to court with it.

IMO one law they definitely break with this one are the Administration of Justice Act 1970 S40.

"Section 40 of the act provides that a person commits an offence if, with the object of coercing another person to pay money claimed from the other as a debt due under contract, he or she:

utters a document falsely represented by him to have some official character or purporting to have some official character which he knows it has not."

You could also look at the Fraud Act.

I'm not sure whether the Malicious Communications Act would be relevant as well.