Hi tomtubby, how do I obtain a Statement of Truth? I did write to Tessa Jowell, and she in turn said she'd forwarded my email on to the Head of Parking at Southwark but I have not heard anything further. I do plan to file a N244, but it's Sunday today, I'll get on it first thing this week.

Wow...I come back to find battle as broken out on this thread! I totally agree with tomtubby here...if notices are being sent to a different address, the person committing the parking offence doesn't have a chance in hell of trying to pay their dues. In my case, (getting technical here), the bailiffs apparantly sent everything to our old address, car registration was updated with DVLA within a few weeks of miving to new address. Their claim was that they have to send things to the address that is on the original parking ticket...which then carries on to the warrant when issued. So...that means that they seized a car that was not registered at the address they had on the warrant. They found it probably with one of those ANPR cameras...and took it. WRONG I want my £700 back from these m- f-.

Just a recap...we had to pay the bailiff to have our car released, then filed an out of time. For anyone who hasn't read the whole story, they sent all notices to an old address, even though we updated our details with the DVLA as soon as we moved, but then they subsequently picked up our car from the new address, without ever leaving any notice at the new address. Having contacted our old neighbours about this, they confirmed that a notice had been dropped through the letter box at our old address the same morning they removed our car from the new address. Clearly they had no intent of every letting us know that there was a warrant out for an unpaind parking ticket. What I want is my money back. £676 is what we paid the bailiff plus another £90 to the place that was holding our car. Now that the Out of Time has been refused, how do we take this further?

Okay so after all this business we filed an Out of Time and it has been refused.....what now???

If anyone's interested in how our car came to be towed by a bailiff...read this post from another site....we weren't the only one's who were shafted by Southwark's online parking payment website... Southwark parking payment website epic fail - MoneySavingExpert.com Forums

Okay...but when they take the goods they have no idea what they may sell for at an auction...it could be more than the debt, less, or nowhere near the value they expected. So is there some sort of 'guidline' stating bailiffs can estimate 10% of a car's (or anything else) value and use that as proportional value to the debt??

I'm wondering whether anyone can shed some light on this matter. If regulations state that a bailiff must make every effort to ensure that the value of goods they take to settle a debt is proporionate to the amount of the debt owed, how is it that they have power to remove and sell cars at auction to recover money owed on things such as a single parking ticket? (even with their charges included)

Oh, I'll be writing to the Council for my cash back no doubt about that, thanks very much for your insight

I don't know about that really, it sounds like I could be putting myself in a bad position for a claim to recover our money if it came down to facts and playing by the rules. I'm filing the Out of Date declaration first thing tomorrow, and considering the last time we managed to recover most of the money we paid I rather go that route. Can't drag myself down to the underhanded ways of the bailiff

Hmmmm...it makes sense. How long does a chargeback take have you any idea?

Not if you don't know about it and they send all their notices to a wrong address, and then the bailiff somehow knows where to go to collect your car. I can't say that would be a 'you deserve what you deserve' scenario.

On what grounds though? Being forced to pay under duress? I'll be willingly paying them, they are not supplying me with faulty goods, there will be no non-delivery of goods...just me complaining that this is all wrong. If there is a way to do this I'd love to hear it.

No to slander this country's way of doing things, but I am actually Canadian from Ontario, been living here for 5 years. There is a very effective policy to combat unpaid fines set up over there. There is a similar thing to Road Tax which is a sticker that is applied to your reg plate that must be renewed every year or (or every other year, can't remember) that indicates that you have paid the fees for the period for which is it valid. If you drive your car past the valid period, you are will be fined serious serious money for doing so. The catch in all of this is that you cannot renew this sticker if you have an outstanding tickets/fines etc against your car. Therefore you have to pay them, all of them before you can pay for a new valid sticker. For vehicles that do have an abnormal number unpaid parking tickets (something like more than 10 or around there) they can clamp your car, but it's clamped, not hauled away, and it will cost you to have the clamps removed obviously. This sort of policy could so easily be introduced in conjunction with Road Tax, because it's the same situation. If you get caught out with a Road Tax disc out of date...well we all know what can happen then. I'm just so very disappointed that the UK has such good sense in many matters and yet allowed the evolution of legalized theft (that's the way I see it). I already know that the price they gave us on Friday to release the car was £638, which will be at least £730 to included their charges to hold our car over the weekend and then they will most definitely add on an additional fee for coming round our house on Monday to collect their money. That will most definitely mean we will have to pay in or around the sum of £1000 to get our car back. Having room on a credit card to pay this does not by any means mean we can afford to pay this, but what choice do we have? I can only pray that we will be able to recover the money later.

I read through it, and it is astonshing that this sort of thing is still happening. I don't think anyone who has first hand power to take action actually cares. This is theft in my opinion, and from the sounds of it in that speech people are being robbed to the tune of millions with this sort of thing. And when you look at it from a financial point of view, of course the Councils don't care...they get their money when they want it regardless of any mistake or shortcoming on their part, and the 'enforcers' are quids in. They may as well be giving murders a slap on the wrist in opposite relation to what can happen to a person for an unpaid parking ticket.

I don't know, but the document is clearly titled National Standards for Enforcement Agents. That would mean all of them definitely.

This is interesting, I've jsut had a look at the full document and from my layman's point of view the bailiffs haven't done a lot of the things on the list...including this particular point: "Enforcement agents should take all reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the value of the goods impounded in satisfaction of the judgement is proportional to the value of the debt and charges owed." How does a £638 equal, even if approximately, the value of a car currently valued at £5800? Even at auction you'd get more than £638 for it. Very wrong.

I'm pretty sure I've read that somewhere as well. The way I see it, if they had our new address then they are supposed to announce that they are there to take your stuff by knocking on your door or putting a notice/letter through your letter box, present their certificate to show they are a certified bailiff if asked to, accept payment if it is offered and release the vehilce, or take it if no payment to settle is offered. If they deliberately dropped a notice at the old address on the day of the towing, in full knowledge of the fact that the car is no longer registered there it is obvious there was no intention of allowing us to pay up. I have since contacted our old neighbour (we lived on different floors of a house) who told us that a notice was dropped through the letter box the morning that they took our car. I leave for work at about 8:00am everyday and our car had been removed by that time already. They knew that was not where we lived and proceded to send notification to one address and take a car from another. Somebody please tell me if this is infact legal. It doesn't sound right to me. They KNEW we had a new address.

By the way, I need to mention that this is actually the SECOND time in 2 years this has happened to us, almost identical situations...moved house and then car was clamped (that time we managed to catch the bailiff in front of our house before he'd taken the car away and paid him) That time it was JBW Enforecement. That time we sent an Out of Time Declaration and recovered only a portion of our money. The fact that this exact thing has happened again it was bothers me. There is definitely something very wrong with the system when the 2 times you've been issued a PCN, both end up in the hands of a bailiff before you've had a chance to even blink.

Tessa Jowell, do you know if she/her office would would be any use in fighitng this sort of thing?

Wait a minute...are you saying that the bailiffs after doing a 'data cleanse' have your correct address and then choose to send all warning letters to your old address purposefully? The company was not JB it was Davies Enforcements. I am in disbelief about this and I agree that councils should have to do a data cleanse themselves before issuing warrants to clamp and seize vehicles. I've already written to my MP, I am not letting this go.

Thanks very much for the advice. I've just gone through all my records and here is how it went: We had a Royal Mail redirection set up which was to expire on 11 June 2009 (we moved 6 May 2009). We had sent notification to the DVLA of our address change probably 3-4 days of moving and they sent us the revised registration document with a document date of 17 June. We had received a reminder notice from the Council about the ticket which was dated 11 June, 6 days before the date of the official DVLA doc date. It was at this point we tried to pay the charge again online, which showed no penalty charge and then we phoned them to find out what was going on and were informed that the website was down. We then sent the appeal stating that we were willing to pay the £60 but not £120 due to the fact that our previous attempts to pay the charge (unknowingly) never took place due to the website problems. It was after this that we never heard anything back. It probably would have been smart on our part to follow up on this, but after some time had passed we'd just simply forgotten about it until the car went missing. Looking back though, had we received any more correspondence we would have paid what we owed. My concern here is that the Council will just say that they were never made aware of the address change (not by us anyway). Are they required to keep their records up to date with the DVLA? I am going to send an official complaint, hopefully I will get somewhere with this mess.

I would appreciate it if you could take a few moments to read my email thoroughly as I am about to throw quite a few details your way. My apolpgies for the length of this post but it's necessary I believe. My husband and I moved to East Dulwich back in May of 2009. The very weekend we moved into our flat, my father-in-law was issued 2 parking tickets and my husband was issued one himself. We tried to pay the charge online a few days later but the website showed us that there was no penalty charge against our car registration number. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to pay the charge online, we phoned to enquire whether there was indeed a penalty charge. We were told that the online payment system was down and that we could either appeal the charge or pay the full extended amount right there on the phone. We decided to appeal and sent a print out of the website page showing that there was no record of a penalty charge against our, along with a letter to Southwark Parking Enforcement after which point we have not had any correspondence regarding this penalty charge. This morning our car was not parked outside as it always is, it had gone missing. Naturally we reported this to the police who then told us that a bailiff had reported clamping and removing our car. We obtained the details from the police for the bailiff who then told us that this clamping and removal was indeed for that very ticket that we were issued back in May. We have not once in all that time been notified of unpaid parking charges, penalty charges etc and when we told this to the bailiff he claimed that all notices were probably sent to our old address as that would have been the address on the original ticket. This is either a lie or utterly inexcusable incompetence on someone's part. We changed our address details immediately after moving and unless the DVLA do not bother updating systems when people inform them of address changes, their records would have shown that we had indeed moved. What is most infuriating however is that even though all the notices regarding the penalty were apparantly sent to our old address, somehow they knew exactly where to find our car to clamp and take away, directly outside our new flat's front door. We are now being asked to pay £638 pounds to release the car, and we cannot not even know the location of the pound where it is being held until full payment has been made. We are also having to pay £20 plus VAT per day to hold the car. We would have settled the payment on Friday when this happened but 'unfortunately' the pound was conveniently closed when we tried to settle it at about 3:00pm. They do not open on Saturday or Sunday and we cannot go to anyone to pay and release our car, we must wait at home on Monday for someone from the Bailiff's to come and collect the money, after which point we can go and collect our car. This means my husband now also has to take a day off from work to wait around for someone to show up. This will mean 4 days holding charge adding about £100 to the final payment. I cannot accept this sort of 'enforcement', the punishment grotesquely outweighs the crime, especially as we had tried to pay the charge and then appealled it so that we wouldn't be paying the double charge for paying late. If letters were sent to our old address even though we'd properly updated our address with the authorities, could you please point out to me where you see justice in the paragraphs above? I cannot believe that is is actually a legal procedure, to force people to pay this kind of money and suffer emotional shock...for a parking ticket, that you tried to pay. Why not refuse Road Tax disc renewal for ourstanding parking tickets or penalty charges? I believe this procedure of bailiffs coming to take your car for parking tickets should be illegal. What can I do to recover this money? I want to take someone to court for this, I just don't know where to begin, or whether I can.

Any thoughts would be helpful.

Hi I work for an architectural firm that has just announced that they will be cutting jobs. They say that eveyone under the job titles "Architect, Architectural Assistant and Architectural Technician" will be at risk. About 50 people were notified and asked to attend a briefing meeting explaining the circumstances and that about 15 jobs were being cut. Funny thing though, there were a number of people whose job titles fell under those categories I mentioned who were not asked to attend. In any case, my concern is this: The project I am on has been going for about 3 years and has another 2 in the pipeline until completion and I am wondering if they are allowed to cut my team down and then get someone else within the firm to carry on the work for this particular project. From my understanding, technically MY job is not redundant, there's plenty of work to do and we (my team) are up to our necks with work everyday. There are people in the company whose projects are finishing up, or who work strictly on feasibilites who have been there longer than I have (2 years). I worried that they could cut me and put someone else in there. I can say for myself that I do a very good job and that the project wold take a nosedive if any of us were cut and the team reorganized from within the company, mainly because the learning curve necessary to hit the road running is VERY steep. Somehow I find myself in the list though. Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.