company vehicles, parking violations and the right to appeal

Hi Guys,

Having been to court on such a case. I can confirm that most standard leasing / rental agreements have a term in the agreement which cover things such as fines and parking charge notices.

In the standard agreement the leasing / rental company will often say that they will pay all fines and pass this on to you as the customer. Therefore they have not broken any laws as they have remained in the terms of the contract.

Vicki is correct that “although under the Traffic Management Act 2004 a fine once paid should not be appealed however many local authorities will allow people to appeal especially on these types of occasions”.

Also when it comes to private companies you can still appeal. If they reject your appeal you can still take them to the small claims court (due to it being a civil matter).

According to the Traffic Management Act 2004 a fine once paid should not be appealed however many local authorities will allow people to appeal especially on these types of occasions.

One point also worth bearing in mind, if the employee gets a ticket, he or she has 14 days in which to pay it PRIOR to it being registered with the DVLA and therefore avoiding these problems completely. Obviously i appreciate that they can't always do that with the case of the chap in the yellow hatched boxes but in the cases where they are actually issued a physical ticket they should either pay it within the 14 day reduction period or appeal it themselevs before it expires.

The other point here is that James S's company may well have agreed to this happening, in some master contract that has been put in place.

I agree that it is morally wrong - but it may well be legally correct.

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Dairmuid, that's a fair comment and I think in retrospect I may have misunderstood the issue some what. If you are forwarding on the penalty notices within a reasonable time frame the onus is on the company leasing the vehicles to address the issue internally.

I think where employees are not responding upon receipt of the penalty notice then it is an issue of internal processes of the organisation leasing the vehicles, and they have a duty to ensure they have a robust policy in place for guidance to employees who use lease vehicles.

The employer must make sure that their staff understand what to do when they recieve a penalty notice and the time scales for appeal.
Its about clear and transparent communications internally.

Thanks for your comments people, really appreciate it. I hear what you are saying Diarmuid regarding the additional costs, but it also important that we don't take away the rights of the indivdual because of cost. I know it's an extreme but for example if we are accused of a crime we don't say well we wont have a trial because you are probably guilty and a trial would cost a lot of money. Surely the same principal should apply here, and as a Manager I have a duty to look take up any issues that my staff have where they believe they have been unfairly treated. Yes I agree that some drivers probably don't respond to these contraventions in the correct manner when they are sent direct to the driver. But once again we should not punish the people who do things in the correct manner because of the behaviour of others. I think what I will suggest to HR is that they ask the leasing company to have a look at the way they are handled, because if the employee disputes the ticket can my company legally deduct the money from his/her wages if they are not in agreement? Anyhow I don't want to spiral this post out of control, thanks for all your input people

Can I correct you on one point, Martin.

WE have the infrastructure in place to deal with fine administration, but the problems begin once we forward it on. We found that in passing the issue directly to drivers, a significant number failed to deal with it in time and their employer ended up with extra penalties to pay.

To be honest, as everything is recharged to the customer anyway, it's largely irrelevant to us how it's dealt with! We tend do whatever the customer asks us to do in this regard.

My advice to the OP would be to speak with your leasing company and ask them to change their process for your vehicles. It may not be the simplest thing in the world to do, but they should be able to satisfy your needs. Brace yourself for additional costs though.

James, they may well be breaking the law by defualt. If there is an appeals process put in place to comply with the law then they must also comply.

They cannot justify not honouring it just because they don't have the infrastructure to administrate it.

In any event it is a tricky one. My advice would be to seek legal guidance on this first. It may well be that many leasing companies operat the same practice, but in doing so could be in breach of the law. At best it could be deemed a fraudulent charge.

Thanks for the answers people. But I'm afraid I do not have my answer, what I want to know is it right for a leasing company to take away your right to appeal by paying a fine without your knowledge and are they acting correctly? The leasing company in question carry out the same procedure for parking tickets, congestion charge violations, and other violations such as stopping in the yellow boxes. What brought this whole issue up in the first place was a van driver was accused of stopping in the yellow boxes and photo evidence was produced. However it wasn't as cut and dry as it looked, the reason the van driver stopped in the yellow box was because he had to perform an emergency stop to avoid another vehicle that was driving dangerously. But because the leasing company just paid it and by the time our company even knew about the alleged offence 6 weeks had passed since the date of incident which was paid straight away by the leasing company. The whole point of my original post was because you cannot appeal if the fine has been paid. If you read the print on the contraventions it states that once the fine is paid that is classed as acceptance that there will be no appeal. The matter is then closed by the council or whoever issued the fine. They are hardly going to accept any appeal when they already have the money are they? You are much more likely to win an appeal if you appeal without paying them, so by leasing companies just paying the fines they are virtually taking away any chance the driver has of winning his appeal, and believe me many tickets are cancelled if you appeal them but not once they have been paid.

I bow to your superior knowledge of these things, my dealings were rarely with parking fines so apologies for the wrong info.

Keith, what you say in the first part of your message above is correct if you're talking about speeding fines, but not when it comes to parking tickets (I work in the leasing industry). When we receive a NIP, we respond with the driver details, and the process continues from there. With parking tickets, the clock starts ticking as soon as the ticket is issued to the the registered keeper (i.e. the leasing company) and it can't be redirected. It used to be the case that we would send the ticket to our customer before paying the fine, but far too many went over the time limit because of this and we were paying thousands of pounds in penalties every month.

The decision was taken, therefore, to pay the penalties on receipt and then pass this to our customer. This made them a substantial saving on the previous process, given that only a tiny number of tickets were ever contested.

The appeal process is still open to the driver, however. The only difference is that it's retrospective.

The leasing company are not acting in a proper manner and are under no liability to pay these fines.........
With the penalty comes a form to fill in so you can state that if you weren't the driver, then who was. If they respond to the penalty by filling that form in with your company details on it as leaser of the vehicle then they are off the hook so to speak. Whoever it is sending out the penalty will then send the same paperwork to you, you then fill it in saying Joe/Jo Bloggs was using the vehicle and send it back. That gets 'you plc/ltd' off the hook and the same paperwork will be sent to your company car driver. Penalty uplift dates only start from when the driver is identified and the paperwork sent to them - this also allows the appeals procedures to take place within the specified timescales.
There was something going on about whether or not you had to provide driver details if it was a company car or even if you didn't feel like doing so if it was yours - was there a legal obligation to do so?.
Cant recall the outcome but if you comply by giving these details then your company wont be liable, only the driver who committed the offence. Just seems to me that its easier for your leasing company to pay it and bill you knowing they'll get their money back in any case and have no risk whatsoever of suffering any penalty, if no driver is identified then I think its down to the registered keeper. A good reason to keep driver/vehicle details up to date especially for pool cars. A company provided vehicle, if being used on that companies business when an offence is committed such as parking/insurance/testing offences then the company could also be a user and can be liable with the driver.
The 3 liabilities here are using, causing and permitting, the driver always uses, as does the company if the vehicle is being used on company business, causing use is where there is a known offence being committed but the company for whatever reason gets you to drive and permit is where you know a vehicle is defective, inform the driver but you still allow them to drive it.
Not a detailed explanation as there are so many variables but it gives a general idea.
An example of using/causing, believe it or not, was an unmarked Police vehicle driving down the hard shoulder of the M25 in heavy traffic to get to Heathrow to catch a flight. When stopped the Chief Inspector driving 2 senior officers to the airport who would have missed their flights had he not done so - official business trip to America - gave the reply after caution " I am not the most senior officer in this vehicle".
Basically he was doing what he was because he was ordered to do so, he was using, the driver always does, but the force were also using as it was on their business and the senior officers had also 'caused' him to 'use' it by ordering him to do something which was an offence.
Its way more complicated than that and youd need to read up on it to get a full understanding of the liabilities and what offences they can relate to but in some cases the company who lease the vehicle can also have a liablity for offences committed by their drivers.

This leasing company cant pay that many though, to cough up all those fines and wait to be reimbursed doesn't seem like a good way to control their cash flow - better in my bank than yours so to speak.

From time to time my company receives parking tickets when an employee driving a company vehicle contravenes a regulation, for example parks on a double yellow line. All my companies vehicles are fleet vehicles and are not owned by our company. What normally happens is this, the violation is sent to the fleet company who pay the fine straight away and then pass on the fine to our company. Our company then pass this to the relevant Manager (i.e me). The Manager has to inform head office of who was driving the vehicle and the fine is deducted out of the employees wages (obviously the employee is notified of this first, and has the option to pay monthly if he/she does not wish to pay in one lump). However my problem is this, what if the employee wants to appeal the violation? The right to appeal has been taken away by the leasing company because they have paid the fine straight away. If you wish to appeal you must not pay the fine because payment of a fine is deemed as acceptance of guilt by the council or whoever has sent the fine. This is not a problem if a ticket has been issued and stuck on the window because the driver is aware of the violation and can appeal. But in the modern era a lot of these alleged violations are caught on camera and the driver of the vehicle is not aware of the violation until it has already been paid by the leasing company, by which time it is too late to appeal. My question is this are the leasing company acting in a proper manner by just paying the fine without first offering our company and it's drivers the right to appeal? Or by at least informing of us of the contravention before paying it. When I challenged the leasing company they said that they receive so many tickets it's not possible to do anything else other than just pay them otherwise they run the risk of incurring extra charges. These extra charges would then be passed onto my company and then the driver. But surely every individual has the right to appeal a ticket? Just like we all have the right to have a trial if we are charged with a criminal offence. This seems like the leasing company are acting as judge and jury here which to me seems wrong. Should I challenge this with the people at the top of my organisation? I'm not trying to upset everybody, I just want to stick up for my staff who have come forward with this argument in the first place. I'd be interested to hear other views on this matter