For years council staff could tell the public anything they liked about a PCN and the public would accept it was true and meekly pay their PCN. There were a small number of PCN experts but they were spread quite thinly. Nowadays, with the explosion in PCN numbers the number of experts has also grown and they help each other to learn and share knowledge. Thus, council staff are regularly tested and in rare cases councils are having to appoint barristers to fight us at the tribunal as we have uncovered fundamental flaws in the legitimacy of their PCNs.
Why, with the increased scrutiny, council (or possibly outsourced provider) staff, opposed in a tribunal case by an expert with an eye for detail, think they can tell a whopping great lie in a witness statement is a mystery. Here is the statement. Mr Mustard has redacted the officer's name as this case may be sent to the council's fraud department. ('Officer' just means member of staff).
Mr Mustard had watched the footage, the camera didn't move which suggested a fixed installation and he also didn't think staff would be poring over cctv at gone 5.30pm on Christmas Eve so he asked what sort of camera was in use.
So there we have it. A Witness statement which is patently untrue and leaves the witness open to prosecution. Mr Mustard will now ask the motorist (whose Appeal was decided on the grounds that the PCN was invalid so the witness statement wasn't considered) if he wishes to report the officer to the Fraud department. The council take fraud by residents sufficiently seriously to put it in their policy, will they equally investigate fraud by their own staff?
The end.
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