Bailiffs Have Clamped Your Car
Ensure the wheel clamp is properly secured, as some clamps can be easily removed by unravelling the chain from the wheel without causing damage or tampering with the lock. If the clamp is not securely fastened, the vehicle is not 'immobilised.'
You may be a victim of a bailiff with an ANPR camera.
If your vehicle is on hire-purchase, or leased . Get an injunction.
Paragraph 13(1)(a) and (b) of Schedule 12 of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 explicitly requires bailiffs to "secure the goods" or "immobilise" them in order to take control of them.
Simply placing a piece of metal against the wheel does not satisfy this legal requirement of securing the goods.
Your options are:
- The debt is someone else's, make an Third party claim
- If the vehicle is on finance, HP or leased, apply for an emergency injunction
- If you didn't know about the traffic penalty, appeal the penalty which suspends the enforcement
- If you moved recently, and the address on the warrant is wrong, apply for a detailed assessment hearing and suspend the enforcement
- If money has already been taken, do a fee recovery and a claim for damages
- If the vehicle is clamped on private land that is not where you live or trade, apply for an emergency injunction.
- Cutting off the wheel-clamp
- Deploy Pay & Reclaim
- See if the debt, or the enforcement is unlawful
- See whether you have grounds to stop the action
- Let the bailiff take the vehicle, then deploy pay & reclaim at the compound and claim damages
- Let the bailiff take the vehicle and send the V5 to DVLA the vehicle has been scrapped
If your vehicle is parked on a public highway and is neither on hire purchase nor leased, be aware that the bailiff will arrange for a tow truck to remove it after two hours of immobilisation.
To ascertain whether your vehicle is on a highway, you may refer to a definition of a highway.
It's crucial to create a detailed video and take clear photographs to document the condition of your vehicle. If the vehicle is taken to a compound, damage is almost inevitable, and the bailiff is liable for the care of controlled goods.
However, you must provide evidence that the damage occurred after the bailiff took control of the vehicle. Bailiffs and enforcement agents often attempt to evade liability with spurious defences.
Bailiffs are required to wear body-worn cameras, so their recordings must corroborate yours when establishing the time and extent of the damage.
If there is a discrepancy, if the bailiff refuses to bring his body camera recordings into court, the bailiff's defence is likely to fail.
Injecting super-glue into the wheel-clamp lock.
Resist the urge to play the prankster by injecting super glue into the wheel-clamp lock to jam it.
While it might be amusing to imagine hapless bailiffs struggling with a sticky situation, this trick has been pulled before. In one notorious case, a vehicle was illegally clamped on a highway, and the debtor secured an injunction to make the bailiffs remove it.
When the bailiffs arrived, ready to release the clamp, they found the lock glued shut—a moment that was caught on camera and turned into a viral YouTube prank video featuring rogue bailiffs desperately trying with bolt cutters to cut through their handiwork.
