Newham Council - a world record PCN demand?

You won't believe your eyes.

If you have a £130 PCN you can end up with the value being increased by 50% and you then receive a Charge Certificate.

Mr Mustard, who rather likes numbers, knows that if you add 50% to £130, the answer, using only his own brain power, is £195. Newham Council have huge computer systems which help them to make a packet out of PCN

which make £130 + 50% come to £8,795 which is a tad more than 50%, 500% or even 5,000% extra. Time to wind the elastic band up a little tighter in the council computer?

Mr Mustard thinks you might like to see the Charge Certificate, but not if you open an envelope over your cornflakes, having innocently forgotten to pay a PCN yourself?

apologies for the poor image quality

Can you imagine how the lady who opened the envelope to be confronted by this Charge Certificate felt? Even Mr Mustard would have been shaken to his very core. (He has virtually held the hand of the affected party and told them not to worry, which is easy for him as his name is not in the frame).

There has obviously been a diabolical error somewhere and the test now for Newham Council is what they do about this gargantuan error. The very least is a fulsome grovelling apology from the Parking Manager, the cancellation of any other PCN that happen to be knocking about for the same vehicle (only one as far as Mr Mustard is aware) a bunch of flowers (no, not for Mr Mustard, silly) and a lifetime's supply of free visitor vouchers.

Are Newham Council big enough or will they blame some faceless unnamed pen-pusher and quietly cancel this PCN and otherwise keep schtum? We are judged less by our mistakes than how we deal with them. Here is an opportunity to show the world what Newham Council are made of; sugar & spice?

Surely the PCN value field could have been set to trigger a warning if it exceeded a set maximum?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Update 18 June 15: The Newham payment system is now showing £457 which is a vast improvement on the previous figure but is still wrong. A council can only issue one Charge Certificate and so having issued a defective one they have no action open to them other than hitting the cancel button (unless they want to explain themselves to the Ombudsman in due course).