Case law that matters when you fight a charge

The most detailed judicial analysis yet of airport-style “No Stopping” charges — and a comprehensive defeat for the operator. VCS pursued a motorist over two alleged contraventions at Leeds Bradford Airport: once stopped at a malfunctioning entry barrier, once caught stationary in a vague CCTV still. He won at trial and won again on appeal.

• “No stopping” signs can form a contract — but the operator must prove the driver actually passed a sign before stopping. No sign passed, no acceptance, no contract.
• “No Stopping” does not mean “no stopping for any reason whatsoever”. Stopping under compulsion — a broken barrier, blocked traffic, someone crossing — is not a breach.

“There is no authority, binding or persuasive, which dictates that in the case of a ‘no stopping’ contract, any stoppage must necessarily constitute a breach.” … “The stoppage, therefore, cannot be described as a matter of choice, and can only be regarded as a matter of compulsion, and thus not within the ‘no stopping’ term.”

Read: full judgment on BAILII · plain-English analysis at Parking Cowboys

Ms Jopson paused outside her block of flats for about a minute to unload furniture and was charged £100. On appeal the court held that briefly stopping is simply not “parking”, and that residents’ rights of access cannot be overridden by an operator’s signs. It also held that Beavis does not automatically apply to residential parking.

“The concept of parking, as opposed to stopping, is that of leaving a car for some duration of time beyond that needed for getting in or out of it, loading or unloading it… Merely to stop a vehicle cannot be to park it; otherwise traffic jams would consist of lines of parked cars. Delivery vans, whether for post, newspapers, groceries, or anything else, would not be accommodated on an interpretation which included vehicles stopping for a few moments for these purposes.”

Read: approved transcript (PDF)

Three linked claims over a residential access road covered by purely forbidding signage (“no parking”). All three were dismissed: a sign that only prohibits offers the motorist nothing, so there is no contract to breach. Operators answer this argument with later “no stopping” appeal decisions (see Ozog above), so treat it as one strand of a defence, not the whole defence.

VCS had not complied with POFA, so it argued the court should simply assume the keeper was the driver — especially as he declined to say who was. HHJ Gargan rejected that squarely: being the keeper does not make it more likely than not that you were driving, and no adverse inference arises from refusing to name the driver, because the law imposes no duty to do so. The appeal succeeded and the claim was dismissed.

“My decision preserves and respects the important general freedom from being required to give information, absent a legal duty upon you to do so; and it is consistent with the appropriate probability analysis whereby simply because somebody is a registered keeper, it does not mean on the balance of probability they were driving on this occasion.”

The transcript circulates on consumer forums as a defence exhibit — see the MoneySavingExpert parking forum.

Excel had not used POFA but argued the driver must have been acting as the keeper’s agent, making the keeper liable anyway. On appeal, HHJ Smith dismissed the claim: outside an employer/employee-type relationship there is no such agency — and if the law worked that way, Schedule 4 of POFA would never have been needed. The judge admonished Excel for relying on a bare assumption that the keeper was driving.

Background: case report at the Parking Prankster

Heard deliberately as a test case after judges across the country had repeatedly disallowed the add-on. DJ Jackson struck the whole claim out as an abuse of process: the costs of chasing payment are already built into the £100 charge (that is precisely how Beavis justified it), so a further fee is double recovery, pursued for an “improper collateral purpose” — extracting sums through default judgments that the small-claims costs rules (CPR 27.14) would never allow.

Permission to appeal was refused, and dozens of similar strike-outs followed. The evidence has only strengthened since: the Government’s own impact assessment put the true cost of the “debt recovery” letter stage at roughly £8.42 per case, against the £70 routinely demanded.

Discussion and transcript: MoneySavingExpert abuse-of-process thread

Know this one exists, because operators will cite it. District judges had been striking out fee-inflated claims in bulk paperwork; on the operator’s appeal, HHJ Parkes held that a strike-out effectively accuses the claimant of dishonesty and needs clear evidence — the right course is usually to test the fee at a hearing. Crucially, he did not decide the fee is recoverable; he decided the question deserves a hearing.

“It will only be in the clearest cases that it will be right to strike out a claim as an abuse of process.”

Read: full judgment on BAILII

The practical position after Wilkinson and Semark-Jullien:

• Automatic strike-outs are rarer since Semark-Jullien, but district judges still routinely disallow the £70 at the hearing as double recovery or as an unfair term under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 — even when the underlying £100 is upheld.
• Plead it in your defence: the fee is not on the signage in plain terms, duplicates costs already priced into the charge, and circumvents the small-claims costs cap.
• The policy tide runs your way: the withdrawn 2022 statutory code banned these fees outright, and the code due before Parliament in autumn 2026 consults on capping or abolishing them (see the history page).

The case every operator cites. An £85 charge for overstaying a free two-hour retail car park was held not to be an unenforceable penalty: operators have a legitimate interest in deterring overstays and funding their scheme, beyond recovering any loss.

But Beavis is narrower than operators pretend: it turned on about 20 large, prominent, legible signs and a genuine traffic-management interest. Where signage is poor, the land is residential (see Jopson), or the operator piles fees on top (see Wilkinson), Beavis can cut the other way — the Court stressed the charge must not be “out of all proportion” to the legitimate interest.

“Both ParkingEye and the landowners had a legitimate interest in charging overstaying motorists, which extended beyond the recovery of any loss… Further, the charge was neither extravagant nor unconscionable, having regard to practice around the United Kingdom, and taking into account the use of this particular car park and the clear wording of the notices.”

Read: full judgment on BAILII · official press summary (PDF)

From the clamping era, but its principle underpins every modern signage argument. Ms Vine, taken ill, parked without seeing a partially obscured warning notice and was clamped. The Court of Appeal held the clamping unlawful — consent to terms cannot be assumed merely because a sign existed somewhere.

“To show that the car owner consented or willingly assumed the risk… it has to be established that the car owner was aware of the consequences of his parking his car… That will be done by establishing that the car owner saw and understood the significance of a warning notice or notices.”

Read: full judgment on BAILII

A modern Court of Appeal decision with a very practical moral. VCS obtained a default judgment for £9,500 of accumulated parking charges after serving the claim at an address it had reason to believe Mr Carr had left. The district judge set the judgment aside and struck out the claim for defective service; the Court of Appeal ultimately restored that decision.

Read: full judgment on BAILII