Appeal success figures crash

Readers may recall that Mr Mustard wrote about the fact that many appeals being taken to the third and final stage, an appeal to PATAS, were not being properly followed through. See this post from July.

Now we are only a week away from being 6 months into the contract with NSL and the teething troubles excuse is well and truly worn out. There is now no excuse for a parking firm not to be fully up to speed.

London Councils who run PATAS have put out the statistics for the year ended 31 March 2012, which you can find here. Ignore the spin about tickets being looked at more closely; the independent adjudicators make findings of fact.

Picking up the general figures first: 30,865 parking tickets cancelled out of 64,903 requests equals 48% cancelled.

Barnet's share of those were 841 parking tickets cancelled out of 1,322 requests which equals 64% cancelled. Barnet fared rather badly in the league table of London Boroughs. Only Tower Hamlets and Redbridge had marginally worse results. This suggests that Barnet have been following too mean a policy which we have certainly seen evidenced.

Since NSL took over the results have been in free fall. Here they are in a handy weekly digest.

Week	Motorist	Council
Starting	won	won
2 May	34	3
7 May	102	1
14 May	34	2
21 May	55	1
28 May	70	0
4 June	2	0
11 June	43	7
18 June	24	8
25 June	17	6
2 July	12	7
9 July	13	1
16 Jul	14	9
23 Jul	11	4
30 Jul	1	5
06 Aug	8	8
13 Aug	22	6
20 Aug	8	4
27 Aug	15	1
03 Sep	9	3
10 Sep	15	3
17 Sep	22	6
24 Sep	21	7
01 Oct	17	6
08 Oct	23	6
15 Oct	51	13
since NSL	406	36
Percentages	92%	8%

So the 64% has slipped to 92%. It makes Mr Mustard wonder if NSL management have simply decided not to bother about cases going to PATAS as they take up a lot of time and need someone who really understands parking to handle them and having got rid of the entire back office they are at somewhat of a loss?

What has this cost Barnet Council? The average parking ticket is worth £98. The cost of a PATAS appeal for Barnet Council is £46.73 so every PATAS loss costs £144.73

28% more of the cases than before the contract started are now being lost which so far in almost 6 months is 442 times 0.28 = 124 extra lost cases. At £144.73 a time that is £64,000 (to the nearest thousand) or £128,000 in a full year.

Wasn't this One Barnet contract going to save us £600,000 a year. It doesn't seem very likely to happen, now does it?

Mr Mustard does hope that these losses are being clawed back from NSL. When the next annual audit comes around Mr Mustard will be at the North London Business Park asking the difficult questions on behalf of all residents.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard