Tribunals co-operate to resolve car hire appeals

Jane Anderson

Jane Anderson

Chris Nicholls

Chris Nicholls

A car hire organisation consistently failed to co-operate with local authorities pursuing unpaid penalty charge notices (PCNs), parking adjudicators have decided. 

In an unprecedented step, Enterprise rent-a-car (Erac) UK Ltd were called to attend back-to-back hearings with both the Parking and Traffic Appeals Service (PATAS), which covers London, and the Traffic Penalty Tribunal (TPT), which covers the rest of England and Wales.

Several cases relating to Erac were considered together by the adjudicators at the PATAS hearing centre in Angel, London.

Both adjudicators found that the company acted “frivolously” and consistently failed to provide the hire agreement to four councils during the representations stage. 

Often the hire agreement was  provided only at the appeals stage or after a statutory declaration, or not at all. This meant the parking authority incurred additional costs. 

Court costs

TPT awarded costs of £2,500 to Nottingham City Council to cover the preparatory work of the hearing and lawyers’ fees. Oxfordshire County Council was awarded £50 to cover its travel costs and other expenses. 

PATAS awarded Westminster costs of £1,527, which covered 20 cases at £71.38 each, while Camden was awarded £642 for 11 cases at £58.30 per case. The councils were also awarded additional costs for attendance, preparation, travel and other expenses.

Representatives from the London Boroughs of Brent, Ealing, Haringey, Hounslow and Waltham Forest attended the PATAS hearing as observers. 

PATAS adjudicator Jane Anderson ordered Erac to pay Westminster and Camden £100 each to cover the costs of attendance, preparation, travel and other expenses.

Anderson found that in a large number of cases Erac only provided the hire agreement at the appeal stage or after witness statements had been filed with the Traffic Enforcement Centre (TEC). 

Erac said that delays arose when hire agreements were transferred to its contractor Xerox for scanning and storage. The scanning process tended to take between two and four weeks, said Erac.

The company argued that delays were unavoidable due to the volume of cases and pressure on resources to access hire agreements linked to PCNs.

“I find this unacceptable and unreasonable,” said Anderson. She was also not satisfied that the firm had a suitable training programme in place for staff dealing with traffic contraventions. “It may be that staff are simply not aware of the time limits and requirements of the relevant regulations to transfer liability,” she said.

Late evidence

Anderson concluded that Erac was not taking seriously its obligations and had failed to provide the “right information at the right time”. She said: “The conduct of the company prevents enforcement authorities pursuing legitimate PCNs in a timely manner. The habitual provision of late evidence causes increased costs to be incurred.”

TPT adjudicator Chris Nicholls said Erac had “acted frivolously rather than vexatiously”. The firm’s failure to provide the hire agreement on time showed that it had not taken its obligations “under the various Regulations as seriously as it should and has acted wholly unreasonably in its conduct for this hearing”.

The firm’s failure to co-operate with parking authorities was brought to TPT’s attention by Helen Crozier, Oxfordshire’s civil enforcement manager. “Erac needs to get its act together and provide us with driver details in a timely fashion so that liability can be transferred,” said Crozier. 

Transferring liability

The adjudicators’ decision would be applicable to any hire firm that conducts its business in the manner scrutinised in the ERAC cases, said a TPT spokesman. 

He said: “The impact of the adjudicators’ decisions is that although a hire company may ultimately produce a hire agreement that covers the period when the PCN was issued, if they unreasonably fail to produce the agreement within the time periods set out on the civil enforcement regulations they may not be able to rely on the existence of the hire agreement subsequently to transfer liability to the hirer. 

”Where the conduct of the hire company involves an enforcement authority in undue administration in issuing and dealing with various Traffic Management Act process steps, it may render the hire company liable for paying the enforcement authority’s costs.”