I'm talking specifically about unpaid PCNs - the thread was initially posted on behalf of a friend of mine (who doesn't have a computer) for a PCN intially issued in December 2006, and for which she is still receiving visits from bailiffs, the first visit I know of was in November 2007 (so time yet) although I find it hard to believe that the council in question waited around a year before applying for a w for an unpaid and uncontested PCN. This isn't the same one as mentioned above - 22 month gap between issue of PCN and latest visit in this case! However, having thought about this further I am sure that I personally have been pursued for over a year for the same PCN.

It is - quote from the govt. website in the above link - "For the purposes of execution a warrant will be valid for 12 months beginning with the date of its issue." I have certainly been pursued in the past for over 12 months by bailiffs, and presumably if the matter is in the hands of the bailiffs the warrant must have been issued, which surely means they are pursuing the debt illegally?

As far as I can ascertain 14 days must have elapsed since service of the notice of the amount due, after which time they can apply for enforcement - there are other time limits they need to comply with too (see MORE INFO) but I can't find anything in relation to any maximum time. For the purposes of the thread though I'm presuming the PCN is uncontested but unpaid. It strikes me as, um, call it "suspicious" that letters issued by bailiffs never quote the date of issue of the warrant. MORE INFO

Only just spotted the fact that the TEC website still refers to a PCN as an "offence"! "What happens before the penalty charge is registered? The following stages occur before the charge is registered with TEC: * A penalty charge notice would have been issued. This should have been paid or appealed against as per instructions given on the notice. * A Notice to Owner/Enforcement Notice would have been sent to the registered keeper of the vehicle (not necessarily the driver at the time of the offence)."

The length of validity of a warrant for an unpaid PCN is something I've mentioned a couple of times recently - here's why: It is my understanding that a warrant expires after 12 months. I also believe that the warrant must be issued within 6 months of the date on the PCN, but I'm not sure about this. So what's the possibility of a bailiff being able to legally execute a warrant on 7th September 2008, for a PCN issued on 2nd February 2007 (over 19 months earlier)?

Yes, am aware of it from the link in pin's earlier post. I'm expecting a rejection to be honest, from a council that seem to automatically reject everything else, though it may buy a little time and if I can make it as difficult as possible - or rather do as much as I can to prevent becoming another victim, willing or otherwise, of what I call the national parking [problem], then I intend to do just that. I have no intention of being screwed by this bunch of mercenaries if I can help it and will be reporting them in any event for posting "open" letters through the door which have been seen by a third party, as well as giving dates on those letters for their next visit which they have not kept to, which means I've sat around all day waiting for them for nothing. Well that's not going to be at my expense!

Sorry, posted in error, please ignore

Well that's obviously the reason behind introducing the charge. More and more people are fighting unfair tickets, which defeats the object of the system in the first place (which in my opinion is already designed to make you pay up rather than go through the hassle of appealing then paying more when you lose etc. etc.) All part if this country's obsession with taking as much off you as they can, in whatever way they can. The whole issue of parking enforcement is just another stealth tax in my view, and with the amount of money they are raising from it, it will only continue to get worse and worse.

Well to add my 2p worth, Mr. Herron was EXTREMELY helpful when Blackpool Council were issuing illegally worded PCN's a couple of years ago leading to many of those tickets being dropped (or at least no longer being pursued), including my own because they wrongly quoted a "Date of Offence". At no point was I asked for any payment and all help and advice was by email. This country is obsessed now with taking as much money as it can from it's citizens by whatever means it can, and the already-financially-harrassed motorist is being ripped off - there is no other word for it - by councils and their traffic wardens (or whatever they are called these days) who are making it more and more difficult to park anywhere legally (for free anyway) and hammering those who fall foul of the rules with ludicrous fines (yes, fines) which are already completely out of proportion - you now pay more for a parking fine than for a speeding fine - and then are forced to pay up or pay hundreds of pounds more if you dare to try to challenge it or can't afford to pay it. It is an absolute disgrace when a warden blatently ignores the fact that the lines/signage are not legal and continues to issue a ticket anyway. That's obtaining money by deception in my opinion, made worse by the fact that you are effectively fined without a trial and then have to jump through hoops to try and get it overturned (I wonder how many councils, like Blackpool, don't even tell you of the existance of NPAS when rejecting your appeal?) and the powers now given to private mercenary companies and the charges imposed by them are shocking. I find myself stunned more and more every day that we allow this charade to continue and it would be far worse if it wasn't for people like Neil Herron. I don't care if he is charging for his services, somebody has to stand up against this madness and he has done so and continues to do so on many occasions. Good luck to him because I would rather pay somebody like him double than pay the council £60 (that's if I'm lucky and the council haven't towed the car) because I was 3 minutes late back to the parking meter, my permit had slipped and was partly obscured, or for parking on a hard to see yellow line at 11 p.m. at night in an otherwise unused cul-de-sac (all of which has happened to me). Let's not lose sight of who the REAL bandits are.

Shocked but sadly, not surprised. What does shock me is that the tactics are more or less becoming common knowledge but it's getting worse - where anything involves collecting money owed to the government, nobody in authority wants to know. That we have got into this state is bad enough, but where does it all end? Where do we go from here?

Update: I got my Stat Dec sent off yesterday (30th Sept) and will await the results of that. In the meantime I got a letter back from the bailiffs, who have as expected effectively said that they will pursue it unless the council tell them otherwise. In the meantime they have been out again while I was away last week pushing the cost up to £613, and sent me a seperate letter saying I owe £670. As for the issue of needing the vehicle for my job, I travel all over the country covering around 20,000 miles a year in the course of my job, often having to call in at various locations in various towns on the same day and often coming home with a bootful of items in relation to my work which I could not otherwise carry. I couldn't do this without a car, not a prayer of covering the area I need to cover by train or public transport even if I could carry the stuff, and I certainly couldn't afford to hire or buy another one. Nobody else uses the car, ever. What disgusts me is the way they completely ignore the rules, pushing open letters through the door (picked up last week by the person looking after my dog while I was away), and claiming extortionate fees for what are, lets face it, minor misdemeanours (so minor that the government decided to decriminalise them!) and giving no indication of why they charge these fees. How can they charge what seems to be £80 + for pushing a note through a door? How we ever got into this state for a civil charge that isn't even classed as a fine is beyond my comprehension.

Thank you to everybody for this very interesting thread. On a slightly different note I do wonder where we are heading when the police are willingly becoming involved in civil issues, while the bailiffs are allowed to break every rule in the book with hardly any recourse. Last year I had my car repossessed by two men claiming (to the police) to be bailiffs, who were in fact no more than collection agents hired by Welcome Finance. To cut a long story short they called the police, who subsequently told me to get out of my car and allow these two guys to take it. I told the police that these guys were not legally allowed to take my car without a court order (H.P. agreement, more than a third paid) which they did not have but the police insisted that if I did not get out of the car I would be arrested - and remember these guys weren't even bailiffs! I got compensation from Welcome Finance eventually, but although I reported the matter to the IPCC I was reluctant to take any further action against the police as the officers did not put in their report that they had threatened me with arrest, so it would have effectively been my word against theirs. I've since had my front door damaged beyond repair by two bailiffs who tried to force their way in (cost me £675 to replace the door and frame + I was placed in a situation where I was forced to pay the bailiffs fees, around £350), and again the police ignored my request for action against them and instead gave me a lecture on not paying my dues. Where does it all end?

Sad to here that even those who are trying to help and fight back are eventually beaten by the bailiffs and their underhand tactics. What a shocking state of affairs the whole parking fine situation has become, surely it's time something was done about all of this at the very top level? It's a national disgrace.

For what it's worth I received a similar letter from a firm when parked in Deepdale Retail Park, Preston (Lancs) a couple of years ago. I wrote to the company suggesting that parking enforcement was not covered by the RTA, that they were trying to defraud me of my money and I would report them to the police for attempted fraud. Never heard another word about it! Worth reporting them as well though if you have the time.

Actually I think the fact that dustmen and milk delivery boys hanging off the side of a vehicle and being allowed to do so IS relevant. Surely it could be argued in court, bearing in mind there is no specific offence involved here, that if they are allowed to do that on a regular basis then is surely must be considered that sitting (or even standing) in the back of a pick-up truck is no more dangerous and probably less so, and therefore a conviction would be unjust? Of course I'm not sure of the courts would see it that way, everything seems to be argued from a safety issue point of view these days and let's be honest, most motoring convictions are probably unique in law in that, unless the charges are brought as a result of an actual accident, there is no actual victim of the "crime"! But it might be worth having photos of binmen and milkmen doing just that and if I were to argue the case in court it would be on that basis. To be honest I don't fancy your chances though, the system is heavily weighted against the motorist more than ever these days.

Obviously it's just another way of putting people off appealing and expecting them to pay up instead. For the record the forms are available to print off in PDF format, link below. Note you can print them off but not save them. FORMS HERE MORE INFO HERE Oh, just one other thing to bear in mind - you don't have to let the bailiffs in but they can take your car unless it's on a driveway with locked gates or in a locked garage!

Huh? Are you saying that a warrant EXPIRES after 12 months? What (legally and in practical terms) happens after that then? The reason I ask is I still have bailiffs chasing me for unpaid PCNs which are well over a year old!

Well surprise surprise, 2 years on and the repair agents, Homeserve, have now been out no less than FOUR times for FOUR seperate but similar faults - collapsing seats - and the barely-used middle seat of the three-seater has now gone for the second time (when I say barely used I'll bet it isn't sat on once a month!). Add to this one missed appointment, no reason or apology given, for which I waited in all day. Because of other, far more serious issues in my life I haven't got around to doing anything about this yet, but because the suite is uncomfortable and unusable and we both suffer from back problems (perhaps unsurprisingly), I now have to. So I rang LoL yesterday and asked to speak to the manager. The girl who answered simply told me to ring Homeserve when given details of the problem. I said that wasn't good enough, I can't keep taking a day off work at my own expense every time the suite develops the same fault, and that it clearly wasn't going to stand the test of time once the paid-for 5 year warranty ran out. At that point she simply asked me to contact trading standards and hung up. The whole conversation lasted less than 20 seconds! I did contact Trading Standards, who locally I have always found to be, well not particularly helpful shall we say (they once told me that there was nothing I could do about it when I bought - and paid cash for - a display-model washing machine then was told I couldn't collect it for three weeks by the store as they needed it for the display). In the case of LoL, Trading Standards said there was nothing I could do now "after all this time". So I'm now going to be filing a claim against LoL, as per Legal Bob's post earlier in the thread. I will post the eventual results here.

For what it's worth, a year or so ago I had a "parking ticket" placed on my car in a (private) retail park, the reason for issue was that I had not parked in one of the designated parking bays thus effectively breaking their parking rules. I had parked (safely) on the approach road as the car park was full. There were no double yellow lines but this was a private road anyway. I binned it. About a week later I got a letter from the firm who had issued the "ticket" (which had been deliberately designed to look like an official PCN) demanding that I pay something like £180 or face court action etc. I replied, telling them in no uncertain terms that their "fine" was unenforceable without a trial and that their "parking regulations" did not fall within the scope of the Road Traffic Act and as such their "parking ticket" wasn't worth the paper it was written on. I also threatened to file a counterclaim and warned them that I would report them for trying to obtain money by deception, or words to that effect. Never heard another word about it. Incidentally the question of signage was never raised, but I don't remember seeing any signs stating the T&C's when driving around the car park looking for a space, and there definately isn't any on the approach road. My main contention with signage is that it should be clearly displayed. how do you define that? It's virtually impossible to read the warning/clamping notices etc. until you have actually parked up and gone to read them on foot. "Clearly displayed" should surely mean that you are aware of them before you have parked up, not have to go looking for them afterwards!

Please don't take this the wrong way, I fully appreciate your input but I have heard on several occasions in the past few years that bailiffs cannot remove your vehicle if you need it for work. More specifically I remember a commentator speaking for bailiffs on a radio chat show a couple of years ago during a discussion about parking tickets specifically state that "bailiffs are often reluctant to remove vehicles and only do so as a last resort because they may be removing it illegally if the owner is self-employed and needs it for his work". pin1onu seems to think so too - "While you are correct about (a), Bailiffs often seize first and ask questions later. It's not how they're supposed to operate." I'm out of time because I can't get the Stat. Dec sworn until I get home, there's no getting around that. I feel that I've done as much as I can for now.

Have tried to phone the TEC in what little spare time I had today (my last day for getting urgent parcels sent out in connection with my business before I go away) and couldn't get through. The council (Blackpool) said on the phone that the PCN was issued outside my home on 16/01/08 for contravention 15 - "Parked in a residents parking space without clearly displaying a valid residents permit". I've no idea why, as my permit is clearly visible, wardens are up and down the road 3-4 times a week and I would have had many more tickets if my permit, which has never been moved, had not been clearly visible. As for time, I can't get the Statutory Declaration in until I get home again which will be on 1st October. There's nothing I can do about that. For the moment I have written to the bailiffs, Phoenix, and told them that I intend to file a Stat Dec and have informed them of my need for the vehicle as i am self-employed, stating that Citizens Advice have informed me that I am entitled to retain the vehicle. I've sent this by Special Delivery, the purpose being that they can not now subsequently claim that they didn't know I was self employed if they do take it which - in theory anyway - should allow me to launch a claim against them if they do. Hopefully of course it will be enough to stop them removing the car in the first place in the future. It won't be at my home address anyway until I return from my holidays, I just need to find somewhere to leave it over the weekend. For the moment I'm more concerned about the validity of the "Notice of seizure", which also describes the (metallic blue) car as "grey" Incidentally the "location" on the council's parking tickets usually only show the road, not the town itself - is this acceptable? I would actually like to find the exact bit of legislation that states the bailiffs can't take the car because I'm self-employed, I've been here before in slightly different circumstances when Welcome finance repossessed a car without a court order and the collection agents (not bailiffs) called the police when I refused to get out of the car, and the police let them take it! (I did win compensation in the end from Welcome)

Unbelievable - I have just read that from 1st October it will cost £35 to file an out-of-time statutory declaration, effectively costing you more than the original £30 fine (in my area).

Thanks, that's a help. I'm actually going away on holiday next week so I'm basically trying to avoid the car being removed between now and then and not have to pay the £473 fee, plus whatever else they add on for towing it. Yes, this is the first I've heard - at this stage I have no idea what the ticket was for, I haven't seen one and although I have older unpaid tickets (different car which the bailiffs wouldn't be looking for), this one appears to be for this car (PCN number and vehicle reg it relates to is on the "Notice of seizure" letter). I have (or thought I had) been extremely careful not to get any PCN's on this car. Incidentally the reverse of the letter includes a "Form of Walking Possession Agreement (Agreement not to remove goods)" which of course I haven't signed, what does this mean? Does this invalidate the Notice of Seizure because I haven't signed it? Re. the second and third points, I'm sure I've read somewhere that there is a limit to what they can charge?

I have received a notice through the door this morning for an unpaid council-issued parking ticket stating "amount now due - £473, we will call again tomorrow etc...", usual stuff. 10 minutes later the bailiff was back with a "Notice of seizure of goods and inventory" notice, which states that they have seized the car (which is parked on the road). Both notices were pushed through the letterbox of the house (not owned by me), each time the bailiff did not knock. However I have heard that (a) the cannot legally take the car if I need it for work (I'm self-employed) and (b) that there is a limit to what they can charge, and © that any statement must be itemised. Is this correct, and if so what can I now do about it?

I have received a notice through the door this morning for an unpaid council-issued parking ticket stating "amount now due - £473, we will call again tomorrow etc...", usual stuff. 10 minutes later the bailiff was back with a "Notice of seizure of goods and inventory" notice, which states that they have seized the car (which is parked on the road). Both notices were pushed through the letterbox of the house (not owned by me), each time the bailiff did not knock. However I have heard that (a) the cannot legally take the car if I need it for work (I'm self-employed) and (b) that there is a limit to what they can charge, and © that any statement must be itemised. Is this correct, and if so what can I now do about it?