How To Deal With Car Workshop Space Invaders

If you are you running out of space in your workshop because you are storing too much of your customers' unwanted property, read on to find out what you can do to solve the problem!

After a successful restoration or rebuild a customer might well ask you to hang on to some of the old replaced parts for them, just in case they may become useful sometime in future. If you have agreed to these requests more often than you should, then after a while these "space invaders" might begin to cause a problem for you. The issue is not just one of a lack of space, but the impact on your business financially. Too much clutter means less space for profitable work to be carried out. In addition, you will find yourself acting as an unpaid storage facility for your customers, who would much rather you look after their clutter than have to deal with it themselves.

If you have an agreement with your client which allows you to charge for storage and you apply such charges to any request to hang on to spare parts, then you might not have such a problem - you will be earning something for your trouble and requests for free storage will be deterred. If you do not have such an agreement with your customers you might want to review your terms and conditions to insert something suitable.

In any event, the law does provide some help.

The Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977 provides a means by which you can impose an obligation on your customers to collect their property, failing which you can take steps to sell the items. In practical terms, selling your customers' property is in most cases going to be a last resort, but the threat of a sale will hopefully spur your customers to come and take their property away. The guidance below applies to property held in storage only. If you are holding a customer's property because you have not been paid, then different rules apply, the main one being that if there is a dispute over payment of your invoices then you cannot sell the customer's property.

Step 1 - Impose an obligation to collect

To take advantage of the process you will need to be able to identify which bits belong to whom. If you can, for example, properly identify which engine parts etc belong to Mr X, then you first need to send a written notice to Mr X which sets out what items you are holding which you wish him to collect.

The notice can be given by letter and does no need to be an overly formal document. It will however need to give the following...