Automated unlawfulness - Redbridge Council

Here is a recent tribunal decision about a PCN

Councils make enormous use of automation to keep their industrial quantities of PCNs on track, or in this case to run it into the buffers. This is not as rare as you might think. A Notice of Rejection informs the recipient that unless payment or an Appeal is made within the period of 28 days beginning with the date of service of the Notice of Rejection that a Charge Certificate may be served. Thus the public know what should happen but probably don't realise the effect of the council failing. Actual service is the date when the Notice drops through your letterbox and deemed service is 2 working days after the Notice was actually posted (which may not be the date on the Notice if councils are slapdash or something went wrong). The state of postal deliveries is well known at present, they could be better.

In this case the Notice of Rejection was, it appears, posted on 17 June.

That was a Monday.

In the absence of evidence about actual service it was deemed served on Wednesday 19 June.

That date, 19 June counts as day 1.

Thus day 28 will be a Tuesday and the motorist had up until midnight on Tuesday 16 July to start an in time Appeal (adjudicators have discretion to accept late appeals if there is an acceptable to them reason).

An Appeal was started on 14 July but would take one or two days to be registered (the tribunal are usually very efficient) and so just as they were about to be told about the Appeal, which freezes further processing until 28 days after the hearing decision has been served, Redbridge Council had, two days too early, already issued a Charge Certificate. Although they can't serve a charge certificate the mere issuing of it early would count against them as the council don't yet have the right to serve.

If this happens to you always point it out to the adjudicator and produce the Charge Certificate you were sent as that is absolute proof of it. That should then be the end of your PCN. You can quote the above decision number as being legally persuasive (adjudication decisions are not precedents).

How could a Notice of Rejection be issued in error? Mr Mustard hears you ask. 

Of course it should never happen. There are various scenarios which include the next progression date being manually wrongly set, the wrong next progression status being applied or the software having the wrong number of numbers set for the next stage. This happened in Islington not long ago and as that is a council which listens to Mr Mustard he suggested they add a few more days to the standstill interval in the automatic process in a certain situation and they agreed. Win, win. Mr Mustard doesn't have the same good relationship with Redbridge who are near the bottom of the table, in his opinion, when it comes to the parking process and complying with the law.

In summary, don't be mugged by a council, learn everything you can about PCNs and you will save money.

The end.