Barking & Dagenham Council - setting the dogs on the innocent

 

Demonstration by a military guard dog

Mr G, not his real name, was sent a PCN (for £130 on 30 November for an alleged moving traffic contravention) which was not received.

He knew this as he was sent a £195 charge certificate on 4 January 2025.

Mr Mustard told him that the next document would be an Order for Recovery which would offer him 21 days in which to file a Statutory Declaration that the PCN was not received and then be sent a fresh one.

This is a process which is enshrined in law. Rather than follow the law Barking & Dagenham Council (henceforth 'BaD council') sent the below letter which is enough to shake your fillings loose (and Mr G is prone to panic pay at the best of times):

By not following procedure BaD council make Mr Mustard look like he doesn't know the rules. He was straight onto this having had a chat with Mr G to calm his nerves. He emailed the complaints department at BaD council and copied in the parking department.

Mr Mustard looks forward to receiving a reply and apology but somehow doubts there will be much in the way of contrition.

There are three possibilities when it comes to an Order for Recovery which enable you to rewind the process to an earlier stage or be granted a tribunal hearing. There are tick boxes on the Statutory Declaration.

It isn't often the case that option 3 would apply as the tribunal are very efficient and most Appeals are started on line these days.

Option 1 is what applies to Mr G.

Option 2 happens frequently. You make representations to the council and their response either doesn't happen or get's lost in the post.

These are your democratic rights in this situation. A council cannot take these legal rights away from you.

If you get one of these illegal letters from BaD council please do not pay if you have a justificable ground to swear a Statutory Declaration. Use Mr Mustard's complaint letter as a base for your own complaint. Send it to complaints@lbbd.gov.uk and copy it to parking@lbbd.gov.uk

The end, for now.

(Mr Mustard will make enquiries of the council as to how many times they have sent this letter out in a sample month).

 

 

Barnet Council's PCN bailiffs not properly scrutinised

Here is a report by the Local Government Ombudsman. The first 15 paragraphs have been omitted as they don't add anything useful to the story.

The decision catalogues a litany of errors. It seems to Mr Mustard that NSL, contracted to provide back office services to Barnet Council, aren't properly supervising bailiffs employed by Marstons and yet decisions taken by NSL affect the income up stream. Perhaps this is because NSL now belongs to Marstons. You can't properly supervise your bosses if you want to keep your job. Perhaps Marstons shouldn't be appointed by any council which already employs NSL? or vice versa.

In addition, Barnet Council haven't covered themselves in glory either. They aren't properly supervising NSL or managing their own internal processes. The trouble is that very few cases reach the Ombudsman, not because everything is perfect, but because most people give up the fight once their car is clamped, whether legally or otherwise, as depriving a person of their possessions is a very powerful action. This will not be the only case where bailiffs have exceeded their authority, Mr Mustard sees it all the time.

What is really needed is a panel of independent persons who can consider all complaints without having an interest in the PCN revenue and by that method the council could improve its procedures and reputation.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Met Police £20 a day: Newlyn Bailiffs £40 a day - Why?

Have assumed these are plus vat

So the Met Police charge you £20 a day (£24 if vat is payable) to store your car (very safely Mr Mustard imagines) if they have to look after it for you following, say, it being stolen and recovered.

A Newlyn bailiff, who takes your car off your driveway whilst you are on holiday, charges £40 a day + vat to store it. They can only recover what is reasonably incurred? They charge £40 a day + vat. Is it reasonable to charge twice what the police would charge you? Mr Mustard thinks not.

Is it reasonable to charge £40+ vat a day in August 14 when the Newlyn charge in July 13 (on the  Mr Toyota file) was £30 + vat a day? Mr Mustard doesn't think so. This excessive increase may be related to a government imposed scale of fees in April 14

Is it reasonable to charge £40 a day + vat when Heathrow airport charge £20 a day? Mr Mustard doesn't think so.

booked in advance will be cheaper, these are the airport's own charges.

Are Barnet Council failing to properly supervise the bailiffs that they have let NSL appoint without obtaining a copy of the contract? Mr Mustard thinks so.

Are Barnet Council breaching the duty of care that they have as regards the actions of their bailiffs? Mr Mustard thinks so. He has a number of current complaints which are not being responded to, they must have been put on the too difficult pile.

Mr Mustard thinks he is going to have to arrange a high level meeting with the council about bailiffs as, on every file he touches, the bailiff has not acted properly in one way or another.

There is a good / awful story about to break in the Barnet Times.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Bailiffs

The use of bailiffs to collect council tax has been in the news this week with the Citizens Advice service worried about the speed at which they are resorted to, charges being made for visits that never took place and councils not keeping any data about the actions of the bailiffs (in respect of whose behaviour they have a duty of care).

Mr Mustard usually gets involved with parking tickets before bailiffs are instructed and much prefers to keep it that way. He has however helped a few people and the following table gives you an idea of how the penalty for a simply traffic contravention (which may not even have taken place but any failure to follow the proper procedure means that you end up guilty) can increase to a disproportionate amount.

	Original	Value of	Bailiff	Bailiff	Extra paid	Notes
#	PCN £	Warrant £	Claim £		or claimed £
1	110	172	1,571	Newlyn	1,227	Car put on low loader to force payment
2	110	172				on the day the motorist returned from USA
3	130	202	431	Newlyn	229	visit stage (max 3)
4	110	172	389	Newlyn	217	visit stage (max 3)
5	110	172	185	Task	13	Initial letter
6	110	172	389	Newlyn	217	visit stage (max 3)
7	110	172	389	Newlyn	217	visit stage (max 3)
8	60	97	110	Task	13	Initial letter
9	110	172	623	Newlyn	451	visit stage (max 3) Overcharge
10	60	97	110	Task	13	Initial letter
11	110	172	185	Task	13	Initial letter
12	110	172	1,164	Newlyn	992	Vehicle taken to car pound
13	110	172	1,181	Newlyn	740	Vehicle taken to car pound
14	110	172
15	60	97
16	110	172	457	Newlyn	285	visit stage (max 3)

Amounts in black bold type were actually paid (before Mr Mustard was involved).

Amounts in blue were not paid and many of the PCN were subsequently cancelled due to illegal behaviour by the bailiff.

Amounts in red were not paid (save for a without prejudice settlement of £100 in the £740 case) and the vehicles were both recovered from the pound.

Although all the residents were in Barnet these cases includes ones for Camden and Harrow councils.

Bailiffs don't have to send the a warning letter before they visit but if they do it will cost you £11.20 + vat. If you owe the debt, pay it at this point.

After that you can be charged £28 + vat for debts under £100 (a £60 PCN will have become £97). For debts over £100 the bailiff charges should be 28% of the first £200 and 5.5% of the balance. Schedule 1 of The Enforcement of Road Traffic Debts (Certificated Bailiffs) Regulations 1993 states that aggregate costs and charges for attending to levy distress and for actually levying distress should not be more than 3 times the above amounts. On a £110 PCN, the debt due to the council rises to £172 so maximum charges should be £144.48 + vat (= £173.38).

In addition, Mr Mustard has seen clamping fees and vehicle removal fees and cancelled towing fees which is how you end up owing an extra £451 (or more). Once your car is removed an extra £30 a night or so will be added for storage.

It is clear that on file #9 that Newlyn were asking for more money than they were due to receive at a time when they had not yet (illegally) clamped the vehicle (which belonged to Motability).

Dealing with bailiffs who have your car in a clamp or a pound is very difficult. Please do what you can to avoid this situation by responding properly to all PCN paperwork.

The government are slowly getting round to bailiff legislation; not a moment too soon.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Mr Mustard was sad (but is OK now)

At the end of September Mr Mustard was sad. A lady phoned, early one evening, whose car had been taken by the bailiff on behalf of Barnet Council when she was outside the health centre with her toddler (not yet 2) and her disabled grandmother as, having just moved flat, she didn't have the £450 that the bailiff demanded otherwise he would remove her car. When dealing with bailiffs time is of the essence and Mr Mustard was on his way out to a meeting and was also at the hospital the next morning for a procedure and so he just couldn't help. Instead he passed the caller on to a bailiff advice line.

The lady, we'll call her Miss Ford, had 3 parking tickets from 2012 that she didn't know about for two reasons. The first was that she wasn't driving the car at the relevant times; her sister, now living abroad, was the driver and hadn't given her the parking tickets (always assuming she did get them as a lot do go missing). The second reason was that she lived in a block of flats each of which had its own letterbox but the postman used to leave the post in the communal hall. Sadly, the main street door was not locked and so anyone could steal the post which also happens a lot to facilitate identity theft.

So just like my other recent bailiff case, of Mr Toyota, the first that Miss Ford knew was when she had the shock of coming out of the health centre and seeing her car with a clamp on it. She had to call a minicab to get home.

Now there is a procedure within the legislation which is meant to provide justice in situations like this one. The motorist files a witness statement within 28 days of receiving the Order for Recovery. If you don't get the Order for Recovery then you file a witness statement out of time and explain why you are late in applying which must be the reason why you didn't get the various council documents. The flaw in this procedure is that the council can oppose it and they appear to routinely oppose such applications pretending that all is right with the world when it obviously wasn't (the use of bailiffs for PCN is a subject on which Mr Mustard plans to write in detail with his recommendations to the Chief Operating Officer). The application is considered by Court staff at the Traffic Enforcement Centre (TEC) attached to Northampton County Court. It is a sausage machine for churning out PCN related matters which otherwise all the local county courts would have to deal with. It would be better if each local county court did handle applications for its area as then local knowledge would build up and a more considered approach could be taken.

If the Out of Time witness statement is rejected, and this takes 4 to 6 weeks to process, during which time your car is stuck in the car pound, then you can ask for the matter to be considered by your local County Court. You can have a paper based decision (a bad idea as you can't influence an undecided judge) but a far better idea is to pay £80 and have an audience with a District Judge. The previous case, of Mr Toyota, took 3 months to get in front of the judge and during this time your car remains stuck in the car pound. If you convince the judge to allow your witness statement out of time the PCN is rolled back to the start so that you can make representations, or the case is referred to PATAS, and your car is released. If you don't convince the judge then you need to settle the £1,000+ bailiff bill or your vehicle will be sold and probably for less than it is worth on the open market.

In the case of Miss Ford the council (NSL) opposed the Out of Time witness statement on the grounds that they had sent everything to the address shown on the vehicle log book even though they knew of the postal delivery difficulties. They simply wanted to keep the enormous advantage they had over a by then 7 months pregnant lady. There was no compassion, sympathy or empathy in the internal emails Mr Mustard has seen; it was, per the council / NSL, all her own fault that she didn't get her post, post which she wasn't expecting to receive and she received all her bills by email so a letter was a rare event. The TEC duly refused the application. That was when Mr Mustard became involved as he had finished with his hospital visits.

He studied the 3 PCN. Let us call them 1, 2 & 3. He had 14 days in which to file the application to be heard in the local county court although he was minded to do a deal to have certainty and to save time and court fees.

PCN 1:

Pre dated December 12 so had invalid wording.

The locus of High Rd (FN) was too vague a description as Miss Ford wouldn't know where in the High Rd due to her not being present when the PCN was handed to the driver.

PCN 2:

Pre dated December 12 so had invalid wording.

The Charge Certificate was issued 26 days after the Notice to Owner whereas 28 days is the minimum clear period.

PCN 3:

Pre dated December 12 so had invalid wording.

There was a delay of 9 months between the Charge Certificate and the Order for recovery whereas there should not be more than 6 months.

Mr Mustard's main concern was to get the car back so despite Barnet Council being procedurally incorrect on all cases a settlement deal was offered of £110 (the value of one PCN) in return for the return of the car and the closure of all 3 files.

The counter-offer received was that the council agreed to unequivocally cancel PCN1 & PCN2 if a reduced fee of £450 was paid for PCN3 which they felt was OK. Now Mr Mustard had written 3 pages of detailed argument about:

• the PCN
• about service of documents
• about statements of truth
• about the bailiff himself
• about the attitude of staff, and
• about how vulnerable individuals should be treated

and got a page and a half in response.

One vital piece of information received in the reply was about the service of the Charge Certificate and Mr Mustard was told (full marks for honesty to the parking client side person involved) that it had been returned undelivered by the Royal Mail.

That was the smoking gun. That document being returned meant that the council (acting by their agents NSL) were not entitled to issue the Order for Recovery and weren't entitled to instruct a bailiff to seize the car. Oh dear.

Why did Mr Mustard ask this question? It was because he had put the 3 council witness statements (actually signed by an NSL employee whose identity Mr Mustard has chosen to redact as he must be junior and that is the deal Mr Mustard has with the Chief Operating Officer) side by side and noticed a sentence that wasn't there. Here they are:

to mislead by omission (bit obvious though)

So Mr Mustard wrote again to the parking client side of Barnet Council and copied in the Chief Operating Officer in the undoubted belief that he wouldn't be impressed with the council (NSL) cheating and pointed out that the Notice Processing Officer would have a hard time in front of the District Judge and that regulation 22 of the General Regulations 2007 had been breached. Although Mr Mustard could now demand the return of the car for nothing he would stick with his £110 without prejudice offer. It only took a little over 24 hours for this to be accepted and it has been paid so the pregnant lady (now 8 months) can collect her car and once again start taking her disabled grandmother to weekly medical appointments. Mr Mustard's sadness receded.

What does it show us though?

There is a Notice Processing Officer at NSL who is not doing the right thing.

The parking client side at the council can't properly monitor NSL's behaviour at a distance.

The parking client side are honest.

Misdemeanours like this have the potential to ruin the reputation of the council and they would have been a long time recovering if they had sold this car off.

The NSL contract needs a through auditing as to whether they follow the PCN process properly.

If NSL own the bailiff involved, TASK in this case, which they do, then the temptation to say no to everything to make more money for NSL must be enormous.

Once the council / NSL have you backed into a corner they don't want to let you out even if right is on your side (this episode has taken Mr Mustard two months to the day to resolve during which time a pregnant innocent lady has suffered without the use of her car).

It's all about the money.

The use of bailiffs to collect PCN is a big stick for a little problem.

Outsourcing carries huge risks and parking is the last service that should have been outsourced.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Free bailiff training - Motability vehicles - do not clamp them

how Invalid Carriages used to be - no choice, this was it.

Eligibility: 

The Motability Scheme enables disabled people to lease a new car, scooter or powered wheelchair by exchanging their Government funded mobility allowance . 

If you receive either the Higher Rate Mobility Component of Disability Living Allowance (HRMC DLA), the Enhanced Rate of the Mobility Component of Personal Independence Payment (ERMC PIP) , the War Pensioners’ Mobility Supplement (WPMS) or the Armed Forces Independence Payment (AFIP) you may be eligible to join the Motability Scheme.

DVLA

Now when a person with a motability car gets a parking ticket PCN the V5 will come back showing the name Motability, care of the name and address of the disabled person. A Motability car is leased for 3 years (5 years if specially adapted) and never belongs to the motorist so it cannot be seized in payment of their debt. In order to send you a Notice to Owner the council asks the DVLA for the registered keeper details so they know from the off that the car in question is a Motability car. When the bailiff starts work the first thing they do is a HPI check to see if the vehicle is on hire purchase etc and to check who is the current registered keeper. This will throw up the name of Motability and this tells the bailiff that he/she must not clamp the car.

The bailiff

The bailiff's vehicle will be fitted with ANPR equipment. This means that as they are driving to see a debtor the ANPR will alert them to any vehicle they pass which has an outstanding debt on it which their firm has been instructed to collect. Today the car of a friend of Mr Mustard was parked in the Lodge Lane Car Park. 

She has picked up a right assortment of parking tickets which due to a misunderstanding of the process she has not properly appealed. Thus invalid parking tickets e.g. one for being parked more than 50cm from the kerb when the whole car was not so parked, turn into a debt that cannot be contested. Her oldest parking ticket is from December 2010 and it is an abuse of process for the council to continue to chase it but the council don't agree. The ombudsman will have to eventually get involved as Mr Mustard has lodged a complaint on behalf of another motorist in respect of a July 2011 parking ticket and the clamping and subsequent removal of a car. The decision will affect all old parking tickets which should have been written off.

A bailiff clamped her car in the Lodge Lane Car Park. He claimed he could even though he was told it was a Motability car. Mr Mustard got on the blower. The Parking Process Manager didn't answer (lunch time). The Parking Manager's number came up as unobtainable, apparently it does that if he hasn't logged in, how useless a phone system is that? Next call was to the Streetscene Director who was in a meeting (he had two more senior levels of management to go to after that). A helpful lady answered who tracked down the Parking Process Manager (PPM) who promised to call Mr Mustard - the telephone has not yet sounded but doubtless there are loads of other complaints to sort out.

By the time Mr Mustard had made 3 calls for his distressed friend, who inevitably was on battery low and needed to get to an appointment for some medical treatment, the bailiff had spoken to his office and returned and mixed in with some rudeness he removed the clamp. This action looks like a calculated act to bully a disabled pensioner on benefits into paying up. Barnet council are responsible for the bailiff's actions and will be held accountable.

This PCN was the subject of a long email on 11 August about old parking tickets and he was promised a response within a week of 28 August. Perhaps if the response had been sent this August 2011 PCN might have been cancelled and the council could have avoided this bad publicity.

Next

Mr Mustard will hopefully get his call from the PPM, they are on good terms as they often have to correspond!

A formal complaint will be made to the council.

A Form 4 will be filed at the County Court which issued the bailiff's licence and Mr Mustard expects that the judge will not be amused.

Prevention

If you have a Motability car and an outstanding PCN sent to bailiffs for some reason, Mr Mustard suggests putting a note in the windscreen of your car saying "This car belongs to Motability, clamp it at your peril".

Bailiffs take note

Every time you step out of line and Mr Mustard becomes involved Form 4 will be completed and you will be explaining yourself to a judge. Don't say you have not been warned. Do your job within the confines of the law please.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Surely not?

Mr Mustard is still trying to get answers from Barnet Council under the Audit Commission Act which allows as follows:

If you wish to inspect the council's accounts, which are to be audited and any books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts relating to them, arrangements will be made for you to view them within the council's premises.

We are of course dealing with the year to 31 March 13.

Mr Mustard is struggling to get answers.

He has asked to see the contracts for bailiffs for parking tickets. He is told "legal say no" but no further explanation is yet forthcoming. The Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP has been informed.

He has asked to see the actual KPI for NSL's parking enforcement contract. The holy grail will turn up before those are issued. Do they exist?

He has been told there was no bailiff income at Barnet Council, in respect of PCN, between 1 April 12 and 31 March 2013.

If this is true then it is an utter disgrace that Barnet Council failed to properly collect parking ticket revenue that was properly owing. However, Mr Mustard does not think it is true.

Please settle the question by sending Mr Mustard proof that you paid a bailiff for a parking ticket from Barnet Council between 1 April 12 and 31 March 13. Send proof of payment to mrmustard@zoho.com Thank you.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Breakdown in the Bus Lane

Executive summary:

Residents in CPZ's have to pay for the incompetence of Barnet Council.

The reasoning:

Mr Mustard has been thinking about parking ticket collection rates. He wondered how Barnet Council were doing in this area. He decided to send for certain figures for the year ended 31 March 2011 as it is a year that can be considered as over as "debts die of old age" is a saying in his industry and by now over 99% of everything that is going to be resolved for that year has been. Here are the figures:

Penalty Charge Notices (PCN) in 2010/11	Parking	Bus Lane	Notes
The total number of PCN’s issued	99,982	24,183
The number paid	72,766	15,567
Percentage paid %	73%	64%	1
The number sent to bailiffs	16,723	0	2
The number paid after bailiff intervention	2,508	0	3
Bailiff success rate %	15%	n/a
The number cancelled for any reason	17,880	1,849
Cancellation rate %	18%	8%	4
The number still being chased for payment	3,000	4,872	5
Unresolved rate %	3%	20%	6

Notes:

1. The percentage of bus lane tickets paid ought to be higher than for parking offences as mistakes in bus lane tickets should be rare and as the reasons for a valid appeal are more limited.

2. Here is the real reason why the percentage of bus lane tickets paid is lower than for parking tickets. It is because none at all were sent to bailiffs. This means that in 2010/11 you could simply ignore a bus lane ticket and you would have not been prompted to pay by a bailiff arriving on your doorstep.

3. The bailiff enforcement system is not an effective one if they only collect 15% of what they are asked to collect. It also begs the question as to how good the quality of the issued parking tickets were.

4. More than 1 in every 5 tickets for alleged parking offences were cancelled. This also makes one question the quality of the tickets issued. What a huge amount of pointless administration. If the quality was increased to 99%, perhaps by employing better paid and trained traffic wardens, the back office administration parking team could have been reduced by 20%. 

Even for bus lane tickets a cancellation rate of 1 in 13 tickets is pretty poor.

5. Mr Mustard finds the still being chased number of 3,000 to be a conveniently round number. He was not told that it was an estimate. There is a 1 in a 1000 chance that is is the truth. 

For bus lanes 1 in 5 tickets are still supposedly live. Mr Mustard thinks that they are only being chased in theory and it's just that no senior manager has had the guts to write them off.

Why?

Why have no bus lane tickets been sent off for bailiff collection? The story that came Mr Mustard's way was that it was the implementation of a new and incomplete Civica CE system, so file that, if true, under senior management failure.

The financial loss to us CPZ residents.

If the collection rate for Bus Lane tickets had been as high as for parking then the number of tickets paid would have been 17,600 which is an extra 2,033 tickets recovered.

In 2010/11 bus lane tickets were £120 and if unpaid they went up to £180 so the revenue lost is £365,940, or £366,000 to the nearest thousand.

In the report to Cabinet Resources Committee on 14 December 2011 the outsourcing of Parking had an untroubled passage to an Agreed vote. The attached report said that NSL were expected to provide the following increases in income 

2012/13  £59,000

2013/14 £121,000

2014/15 £186,000

which by one of those rare co-incidences amounts to £366,000

If NSL do nothing other than routinely put bus lane contraventions through the entire collection cycle, rather than stopping part-way, they will collect in one year the extra income needed across three years and thus look fantastic simply by doing an average job. One Barnet will be marked down as a roaring success when in fact it was due to an internal administrative failure or a management decision that the income was depressed.

Instead of Mr Mustard's "blogger bus" CPZ permit rising in cost from £40 to £100 it could have risen instead to the more reasonable sum of £65 (there being about 10,000 permits in issue which could have been increased by about £35 less - rounding £366,000 divided by 10,000 downwards) or Visitor Vouchers could have been pegged at £1.

Think about that councillors. If you had paid more attention in CRC and asked some searching questions and if you knew more about the resources of the council that you make rapid decisions about, then you wouldn't have residents and businesses up in arms about parking and your seat looking rather wobbly.

Here is a snippet copied from the Mrs Angry's Broken Barnet blog (and she is very angry at the moment about being described in a most unladylike fashion along with the rest of the public gallery - in an ungentlemanly fashion for some of them)

Hugh (Rayner) made a very interesting observation. If contracts do fail, he said, with absolute seriousness, the bloggers will know before we do. Would it be possible to ensure that they, the councillors, are informed when contracts are about to fail?

Mrs Angry laughed to herself.

Don't worry, Hugh: We'll tip you the wink.

Not only do we know about impending One Barnet failures Hugh, we already know more than most councillors and Directors and Assistant Directors about current administration failures. 

Have a think about this one and go and buy yourself a fine tooth comb for future meetings of the committee that you chair. Throw away the clock you watch and just have more meetings that last longer and are more rigorous.

Might some serious scrutiny have uncovered this before a blogger did so?

Does anyone at the council, whether Officer or Councillor, feel even the tiniest little bit ashamed or embarrassed to be shown up in this way?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard