Kicking you when you are down

Bailiffs are like the school bully, however, they can be stood up to.

Mr Mustard has so far seen the effects of four bailiffs in action. Their behaviour has not been pretty. They have a difficult job to do and don't do it very well at all. The bailiff who was in the wrong in clamping a Motability car was rude when unclamping when he should have been polite and apologetic.

Here is an example of a badly written bailiff's letter, bullying and a conflict of interest all in one A4 sheet.

click to enlarge

A badly written letter

Now in this case there were three warrants so the "s" of warrant(s) shouldn't be in parentheses. On the second line there is reference to "warrants" in the plural which would be wrong if there was only one warrant and this letter is evidently used in all circumstances. 

There is reference to client(s). Generally there will only be one client being collected for but it should be clear.

It isn't clear why the date of seizure of the vehicle is put in a larger font size or why a continental date format is used when a short form date format is used at the top of the letter.

The amount outstanding "as of today" cannot include an extra £30 a day. What NSL mean is please add £30 on for each extra day after the date of the letter up to the date of payment.

To prevent further enforcement action you could, in this case, file a form N244 for a personal hearing in front of a District Judge in your local County Court. The exhortation that "you must make a full payment" is to try and bully you into paying without considering your other options.

"Please call in to the call centre" must mean by telephone but Mr Mustard expects that when one of his friends says they will "call in" that he can expect a knock on the door not a phone call. A pity that the number of the call centre is not given. We are expected to guess that the telephone number at the top of the page is the one for the call centre? It is impossible to telephone the call centre at least 24 hours before payment unless you delay paying for 24 hours. The normal process would be that you decide, after a lot of thought, to pay and then you do so almost instantly. Thus you couldn't go back 24 hours to warn NSL / TASK that you are going to pay. In addition, the moment that you have paid you are entitled to the return of your vehicle. Councils that clamp and remove cars to a pound are expected to provide a round the clock service for their release.

Bullying

The reason this letter is a bullying one is that an out-of-time witness statement was filed with the Traffic Enforcement Centre ("TEC" - attached to Northampton County Court) and their decision on 7 November 13 was that the PCN would not be put back to the start of the process so that representations could be made. The Order of the TEC (essentially a Court) gave the applicant the option to file a form N244 for a local Court hearing within 14 days of service of the Order. Therefore nothing should have been done before 22 November 13. This bullying letter is 10 days premature, looks like an abuse of process and is the responsibility of Barnet Council who have a duty of care with regards to the behaviour of their bailiffs as it is the Council who are the creditor. The letter is designed to harass the recipient into paying up. 

If Mr Mustard sees another letter like this one, sent before time, he will start a complaint with the view to it reaching the Local Government Ombudsman.

Conflict of Interest

Barnet Council outsource its parking enforcement to NSL. It isn't clear from this letter who gave the instruction to proceed with enforcement but Mr Mustard has all of his money on NSL. So this means that NSL decided if their own bailiff Task Enforcement should proceed down a route which would lead to the car being auctioned off (it was worth something approaching £3,000 although seized cars somehow don't sell for their true value) and at that point Task (part of NSL) would bank their considerable fees. It simply cannot be right that the company that makes the decision profits from it. We are always being told that NSL don't make more money if they issue more PCN, well they do if the PCN end up for enforcement with the bailiff that they own. The Contract with NSL needs to be changed so that either Barnet Council make decisions affecting the bailiff (if they don't already and Mr Mustard hasn't seen that in the NSL contract) or NSL should be barred from giving warrants to Task.

Conclusion

The more closely Mr Mustard looks at parking enforcement the murkier it seems. Over the festive break he will decide what his plan is for 2014. It will probably include, amongst other things, the introduction of a voluntary charitable contribution for his personal assistance with a PCN appeal (but only for the 97% of cases that he wins) and talks for motorists, such as:

• How to park and not get a parking ticket
• The appeal process in outline and some standard arguments
• Dissecting the evidence pack prior to a PATAS hearing

If you have a group which would like Mr Mustard to educate them (for 20 to 30 minutes) do please get in touch at mrmustard@zoho.com

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Mr Toyota is innocent

Not the car of Mr Mustard's friend who is not called Mr Toyota

Here is the text of an email that Mr Mustard sent to his friends in the parking department to give them a sporting chance of doing the right thing before they read about it in the local papers.

Imagine you are Mr Toyota, step back in time to June 2013, you have an old but lovely car on your drive and you haven't heard of Mr Mustard and your life is normal. Suddenly everything changes. You are at work on 19 June 13 when your girlfriend telephones to say that a clamp has been applied to your car on your own drive. You telephone the bailiff to find that this is because you have an unpaid Barnet Council PCN from July 2011. This is the first that you have heard of it.

The bailiff demands £606 which you don't have at this moment.

That evening Mr Mustard comes to call at the suggestion of a mutual friend. He says the council are acting improperly but it will take more than that knowledge to get them to stop. He explains about the Witness Statement procedure although you are out of time because you didn't know about the PCN. You file forms TE7 & TE9 the next day.

On 20 June the bailiff comes back and removes the car by transporter.

The council file their evidence and ask that the Out of Time Witness Statement (which winds the PCN back to the beginning so that the PCN can be appealed) be refused.

The TEC (Traffic Enforcement Centre) is a sausage machine for PCN legal processing. They duly reject the Out of Time witness statement on 22 July 2013.

You have to buy another car as you can't run your business without one. You have people and equipment to ferry about.

On 3 August 13 you file the N244 form which says you want to argue your case in front of a District Judge at the Barnet County Court. You have to shell out a Court Fee of £80 which you'll never see again, even if you win. (Actually you could ask for costs but it is pushing your luck given that your car is at stake.) You get allocated a Court Date of 8 November 13. Your car will be rotting in the pound until then.

The 8 November arrives and you attend Court. The District Judge is unconvinced until you explain the complete lack of service of any document and then she grants the Order required. Your PCN will be rolled back to July 2011 and the bailiff will no longer be entitled to retain your car.

In the meantime having purchased another car you have no insurance for the impounded one, you have declared it as off road, the road fund licence has expired, the battery and tyres will be flat and it isn't legally drivable.

After a delay of 10 days the Court decision arrives. You speak to the council contact centre who tell you that doesn't mean that you are due to have your car back. You tell them the papers have a whiff of your story and you are inclined to spill the beans. You are put on hold for 5 minutes and magically now you can have your car back. You are sent on an email and telephone number chase round. The bailiff refuses to return your car. You have to go and get it. Where is it? Roydon in Essex, where else would it be?

Now you are hacked off. You have had the fright of your life when you car was clamped, you never received any paperwork prior to clamping nor the PCN itself, you have been without your car for 5 months, your girlfriend has been made ill with the stress, you have had to buy another car and you are £80 out of pocket on a £110 PCN and now the council expect you, Mr Toyota, to pay out to a car transport firm to get your own car back when you are totally innocent of any wrong-doing whatsoever.

That can't be equitable, surely?

Now happily Mr Mustard can report that the parking manager at Barnet Council pretty quickly came to the decision that the car should be returned to Mr Toyota free of charge (a goodwill gesture and not a precedent) and it is now back on the drive from which it was taken some 5 months ago. The fact that it was Mr Mustard who wrote probably helped.

The battery is flat as are 2 tyres, hopefully they will be OK once pumped up again. A bailiff has a duty of care for goods in their possession and Newlyn have clearly failed in that regard. They couldn't easily charge the battery without being in possession of the keys and a motorist is likely to be resistant to handing them over. However, it probably makes sense if in return the bailiff agrees to keep the battery charged and if you do end up losing the car a better price will be obtained for one that is in running order. There is absolutely no excuse for bailiffs not pumping up the tyres once a month. If vehicles are stored indoors they should be covered and if they are outdoors they should also be washed once a month especially if they are on an airport flight path or a quarry.

The price of innocence

So my question to all readers, and do please retweet this blog, is "can it be right that the bailiff removes your car and you have to go and get it back once your PCN is back at the first stage at which you can appeal it?"

You are now officially innocent. You have a PCN which you can appeal.

You have been deprived of your vehicle for 5 months. 

The car is in a pound 20 miles away.

You are already £80 out of pocket.

The bailiff wasn't wrong to take it as when he did as he had a valid warrant (actually in this case the warrant address was doubtful but we'll let that go) so we can't look to the bailiff for recompense.

However, the bailiff is only ever the servant of the council but is a mercenary who gets his pound of flesh (they usually take about a stone) from the motorist.

Surely the council should foot the cost of returning vehicles which they are no longer entitled to keep out of the super profits that the parking regime generates?

Mr Mustard couldn't find any case law on this and he thinks some might exist? If you know what should happen when your car is taken away and then you get the PCN put back to the beginning of the process i.e. should the car be returned or do you have to go to the pound to collect it, which might be 50 miles away? please email mrmustard@zoho.com

The one thing that Mr Mustard has realised out of this is that penalty for falling outside of the process is very severe indeed and completely disproportionate for whatever the trivial offence was in the first place.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard