Helping the mentally or physically ill, the elderly & the poor to fight Council PCNs.
Writing about blunders, democracy and profligacy at Barnet Council.
Showing posts with label barking and dagenham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barking and dagenham. Show all posts
The Secretary of State publishes Statutory Guidance to enforcement authorities as to how to exercise their powers when it comes to parking PCNs. The same requirement does not exist for moving traffic and bus lane PCNs but any half decent authority would also develop policies for responding to challenges against those types of PCN.
As you can read above, enforcement authorities, councils basically, 'should' formulate and publish their policies on the exercise of discretion.
'Should' means exactly what it says. It expresses a strong assertion or command rather than a wish. The SoS should have said 'must' to avoid any doubt.
Mr Mustard decided that it would be useful if he had those policies so could better help motorists who had fallen into error but who might be 'let off' in certain circumstances. Accordingly, he emailed all 33 enforcement authorities in London on 9 September and is going to blog the responses one at a time in alphabetical order. Some are commendably comprehensive and others are lamentably non-existent.
Barking & Dagenham start the alphabet and their reply is hopeless.
Mr Mustard knew that there weren't centrally organised policies about discretion as that wouldn't be the exercise of discretion but a dictatorship and the DfT would not say an enforcement authority should do something it had already done itself! There isn't a London Council code of practice on the use of discretion.
He sent a reply, he does not expect to hear anything else.
A bad start, it does get better but there are other hopeless cases at the end. He'll give those authorities a little time to pull their socks up and send a complaint to the Secretary of State at the end of all the laggards.
Someone who knows someone who knows Mr Mustard phoned him up. Mr Mustard's response is always the same, show him the paperwork. That was duly delivered, an evidence pack following a witness statement that representations had been made and a Notice of Rejection had not been received. That was problem number one, before we can even talk about the sign, the procedural hurdle.
When you make a witness statement on the ground that a Notice of Rejection was not received the council can either send you a copy and invite you to pay or make an Appeal to the tribunal (restoring you to where you would have been) or they simply refer the file to an adjudicator at the tribunal for directions. It's a bit bonkers but the tribunal send you a letter asking you to prove you made representations and if you don't respond to that letter they make a decision that the PCN is payable because you did not reply and yet when you look at what the council, Barking and Dagenham in this case, sent to the tribunal, it included both the representations and the Notice of Rejection so the tribunal are asking you a question they know the answer to and penalising you if you don't reply.
When Mr Mustard looked at the evidence pack he saw straight away what had gone wrong. Instead of the keeper of the car making the representations her grandson had done them. That was because she does not speak very good English it being her second language. The grandson's English is well up to scratch. He made the representations in his name (he happens to be an insured driver with Motability but isn't the keeper as that is the disabled person). Motability cars are noted at the DVLA by putting 04441 after the name of the person whose car it is. Now what should have happened is that the council should have pointed out they were in the wrong name and asked for confirmation they were on behalf of the keeper and confirmed that with her signature. They had acted promptly, on day 5 so there were still 23 days in which they could have been done again.
However, in this case, perhaps because the address was the same, the council instead issued a Notice of Rejection in the wrong name. Bingo, said Mr Mustard to himself. He had saved five previous tribunal decisions which all find that action to be wrong. Here is the earliest of them
Mr Mustard has submitted this decision to the tribunal along with proof of the representations and is hopeful that the Direction will be either that there will be a hearing or that the PCN is cancelled. There is a slim possibility of rejection if the adjudicator is not persuaded by the prior decisions as they are not precedents.
On twitter Mr Mustard invited you to say if the time limit for a blue badge holder was 10 or 20 minutes or without limit. You should have been offered 3 hours as well.
The car was observed twice, 25 minutes apart. A PCN was issued for being parked for longer than permitted, a blue badge and clock were on display but a good photograph of them was not taken.
This is what the driver made as representations, twice, to Barking & Dagenham Council:
'I have checked online and on the disabled parking booklet where I can park and it states that even if there is a time limit for the bay, it does not include blue badge holders'.
The council's formal Notice of Rejection contained the following:
That official response makes no sense.
A blue badge holder gets 3 hours on a single or double yellow line provided that loading is not banned (and that will be indicated by short yellow marks across the kerb and a sign if the marks are single ones not double - which apply for 24 hours a day). Thus a time limit of 3 hours in the bay would be logical but is not correct.
If you said 10 minutes you would be wrong. Officially you can only stay 10 minutes but there is now a period of overstay of 10 minutes in a bay if you were previously legally parked, and whether it is a pay bay or a free bay and there is a traffic management order in place, and during that time you cannot be given a PCN (as an adjudicator told me, it is still a contravention, just one you cannot get a PCN for).
Here is a tribunal decision which confirms the extra 10 minutes at this very spot and which tells us how trigger happy they are at Barking and Dagenham and that they didn't know the law as they made the motorist go to Appeal
If you said a blue badge holder could park for an unlimited time you were correct. This is because of this law.
which says that traffic management orders ('TMO') written under S45 or S46 must exempt blue badge holders from payment, a time limit on length of stay or return.
Was the Barking & Dagenham TMO made under one of those sections Mr Mustard hears you ask. Well, Mr Mustard doesn't know for certain because instead of putting the on street Axe Street TMO into the evidence pack for the tribunal the council put the TMO for the off street car park at Axe Street service road instead so they haven't proved to the tribunal that they have the right to issue a PCN at that location in the first place. Those are the sort of blunders which happen all the time and help Mr Mustard obtain a high success rate.
However, the correct map based TMO was drawn up by the same company as produced Barnet's and the boilerplate for the Barnet TMO starts like this
and Mr Mustard would be surprised if the Barking & Dagenham TMO did not start in the same vein.
Mr Mustard went through all the tribunal decisions at this location in the hope of finding one which confirmed his point of view, he only found one that said the opposite:
but Mr Mustard thinks that is a defective decision, and would not have been made if he had been the representative, for two reasons:
a - the extra 10 minutes, &
b - the blue badge
for both of which he would have put the relevant law in front of the adjudicator who should have known of them in any event, but they decide cases upon the evidence in front of them so incorrect decisions get made (sometimes in favour of the motorist).
So in the not very humble opinion of Mr Mustard he is right and the council and one adjudicator are wrong.
Mr Mustard is humble enough though to think he may have told blue badge holders who stayed for more than 25 minutes in these very common part time loading cum free parking bays to pay up when they were ticketed and had the blue badge on display.
If he did, he certainly won't again. Blue badge holders, please put your blue badge and clock out when you park in these. If you get a PCN Mr Mustard will fight it for you. Please don't park in them for 6 hours as that defeats the purpose of generating rapid turnover of vehicles in town centres and it will lead to the council changing the rules to put a time limit on blue badge parking, it would in all fairness be longer than 15 minutes as blue badge holders are not as mobile.
Remember that a 15 minute bay is actually a 25 minute bay for everyone, but not 26! No need to stress if there is a small queue for your takeaway coffee.
If councils like Barking and Dagenham were not so focused on making as much revenue as they can from parking PCN it is possible that someone with a heart or common sense or a sense of civic duty would have made due adjustment for a blue badge holder, who are disabled by definition, or that they might have taken seriously the politely presented argument of the motorist and asked a more senior colleague or researched the law or even asked the motorist to give them the on line link they had found or asked to see the booklet which had been referred to. They didn't though as their raison d'etre is revenue at all cost.
The world should not be like this.
Mr Mustard will let you know the outcome, whether he prevails or not.
Did you ever think that the council did not properly consider your representations and that the response was a template one? Well, in Barking & Dagenham Council that is certainly true as the PCN which was challenged was for a supposed bus lane contravention and the representations likewise but the response wrongly states that the motorist was parked on the footpath.
Mr Mustard will be handing in the Appeal form to London Tribunals tomorrow. He will give the council a chance to save £30 and cancel today once they have been pointed at this blog.
Incidentally the bus lane in question isn't properly signed, it is a notorious one.
Yours frugally
Mr Mustard
p.s. If the bus lane is empty as you approach, check the sign. Check it anyway every time as it might be reserved for buses at that moment but an empty bus lane is often a clue that it is in operation or that no car driver dare drive in it anyway just in case (which is when Mr Mustard can be found making good progress on the road). Watch out though in Baker St, W1. You need to be Sherlock Holmes to spot the times becoming more restrictive halfway down.
Update 3 August 2017 The council wisely decided not to contest the Appeal at the tribunal but to cancel the PCN instead.
Back in November 16 Mr Mustard made a complaint to Barking & Dagenham Council about their use of an Outstanding Payment Reminder, a document outside of the statutorily defined process for PCNs. The complaint was 'disagreed' but as the response didn't actually deal with any of Mr Mustard's substantive points he asked for a review. B&D lost, mis-filed or ignored most correspondence to the point at which, more than 6 months after he started down the complaints process Mr Mustard tweeted the Chief Executive, who was formally pretty senior at Barnet and so their paths had crossed, in the nicest possible way, before. As was entirely predictable a Senior Complaints Investigator then hastened to respond to Mr Mustard on 7 June. The complaint response included the following paragraph:
The Chief Executive should have marked their card in complaints but doesn't seem to have done so.
On 12 June Mr Mustard wrote:
Thank you for your response. I would be pleased to see a copy of the revised 'pre-debt reminder' (Outstanding payment reminder) once it has been decided upon.
On 13 June B&D wrote back:
I write further to my email of 12 June 2017 as officers have completed a review of the pre-debt registration letter. Officers have told me they do not plan to make any changes to the pre-debt registration letter as our legal requirement to notify a motorist of any further right of appeal is satisfied in previous correspondence.
So in 24 hours we have gone from a letter being 'reviewed' to nothing having changed. They think they are in 'Yes, Minister' at Barking & Dagenham. They aren't.
Did they really think that Mr Mustard would stand for being fobbed off? There is more action to come on this matter.
Should a council say they are going to review a letter, the complaints about which have been known to them for 6 months, when their clear intention was to do nothing at all? That is not the standard of consideration Mr Mustard expects from public servants although low behavioural morals do appear to be standard in parking.
Yesterday Mr Mustard and his co-director were puzzled by the ridiculously difficult processes which exist at Barking & Dagenham and Barnet councils when it comes to the simple task of buying visitor vouchers.
In the Barking case the prospective purchaser is 88 years old and has never touched a computer keyboard and although pretty with it she is happy with her life as it is and doesn't need a new challenge. Of course, she needs vouchers if she isn't going to be isolated by having no visitors. Barking have CPZs which are nowhere near the town centre but whose hours extend late into the evening for no obvious reason (@publicnaylor the Chief Executive has been contacted about it but did not respond although he is probably busy having just started in Barking).
This is what the website says
so having clicked on the link for Visitor Vouchers you would expect to be taken to a form to complete with your address and credit card details. Not so. You get a pdf form which opens, which you have to print out (which rather assumes everyone has a printer at home) complete and then post to the council with a cheque. Many people no longer have cheque books. You can go to the one-stop shop in the library to do this but they won't process the form and give you the Vouchers, they will merely print out the form for you to complete and pass it on. Councils are restricting choice to one method which they find the most convenient rather than providing a number of methods to suit their many residents, young and old. The tail should not wag the dog.
Might Mr Mustard mention at this stage that Barking & Dagenham Council has many services which are run by a joint venture with old friends Agilisys who are neither agile or systematic if this process (one presumes it is provided by them as it is IT) is the yardstick. Mr Mustard thought that one of the justifications for such a venture was the supposedly cutting edge technology they provide.
Transformation can leave you worse off than before
About as sharp as a beachball.
Then on to Barnet, where permit renewals are done by Crapita.
Visitor vouchers can be purchased on line (and by phone). The bit that caught Mr Mustard's eye was the requirement to set an expiry date 3 year's hence. Being Mr Mustard he tried to bend the system and get future dated vouchers, that failed with a maximum 7 days forward dating being allowed. He then tried to short date his vouchers and was allowed to steal a year of validity from himself, viz:
Mr Mustard knew this was not council policy, as he and others had been over this particular matter with councillors and parking management, so he tweeted the Chief Executive but the tweet seems to have gone into a black hole. He also contacted parking management who responded that Crapita's system has to have an expiry date. The expiry date of their contract can't come soon enough.
So the council sign up for 10 years with Crapita because ruling councillors think they are the answer to all their prayers and we get clunky software foisted upon us, probably because they have already written it for another council which does use expiry dates, and is not tailored to our specific needs. Mr Mustard will henceforth refer to software from capita as Crapware. Doubtless Crapita will argue that you can just ignore the expiry date, it isn't printed on the front of the vouchers and no harm is done but it sows doubt in the mind of the person, probably causes people to order fewer vouchers more often so they don't get stuck with ones which have "expired" (except they haven't) causes phone calls to the call centre and makes think people think that Barnet Council are an incompetent bunch of t*ssers which doubtless ruling councillors would prefer not to be the case (add own joke here).
Councillors need to actually experience what residents do in order to find out for themselves how Crapita things are. They won't because they won't want to know the answer. Crapita could probably press the nuclear button and councillors would say that lessons have been learned and it won't happen again going forward. They would lose too much face to admit what a disaster the outsourcing is.
Buy how ever many visitor vouchers you need and don't worry residents, they do not expire, whatever the council website tells you to the contrary.
The above paragraph is from a decision of the Information Commissioner not to release information about who carried out the evaluation of the Invitation to Submit Outline Solutions for the Development and Regulatory Services tender. This is information which every resident of Barnet ought to be told - who is deciding, the act of doing all the donkey work, who, what and how will be outsourced. It is possible for Mr Mustard to appeal to a tribunal but that would be to take a lot of his time away from the blog so he isn't likely to do so.
You do have to laugh at the way the council writes as "information provided under the FOIA" is of course information that is properly available. You can be sure that Barnet Council haven't given Mr Mustard anything he isn't 101% entitled to see. If if doubt, they say no with a capital N.
Note that people "felt" they have "been stalked". Has Mr Mustard been following staff to work, sitting outside the gym they exercise at, taking long range paparazzi pictures of them on holiday on the beach, sending anonymous hate mail or love notes to them at home?
(oh, he did post Brian Coleman an email to his home but only because he said he didn't want to receive round robin emails - hence the personal one just to him with a signed post-it note - did Mr Mustard misunderstand? Brian is not an employee, and he is of course big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Brian can write about Mr Mustard in his own somewhat turgid blog now - bling bling)
no, of course he didn't. What did Mr Mustard do? Well he simply did what everyone else does when he sees a name, he puts it into google which gives you results from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other places and he puts the information together to see what sort of an employee we have been blessed or burdened with.
Funnily enough Mr Mustard's alter ego, a debt collector, gets friend requests on LinkedIn & Facebook from debtors who owe money. He turns them down. Twitter followers he usually allows.
Whoever wrote that somewhat embellished account to the ICO didn't know that a different governance officer had previously checked out Mr Mustard on google and Mr Mustard will bet everything he owns that at least one (a safe bet, but probably dozens) of council staff have googled him and his alter ego. Remember Barnet Council that all bloggers have tracking software installed, know the ISP address of the council's computers and know what search terms you use to land on the blog. You also forget that when a posting was written about Dogstar a member of staff at Barnet Homes saw it as he duty to tell them, thus encouraging them to check out Mr Mustard (except it isn't cyberstalking, it is just curiosity)
Now today Mr Mustard read Roger's blog about the Friern Barnet library squatters, here. He noticed that the Barnet Council representative was called Heather Wills. Mr Mustard had not heard of her so he googled her, oh yes he did. Off you go and do it and see what you can find out and then compare to Mr Mustard's findings.
First stop, Barnet Council website, put her name in the search box and get this page of a report showing that she has inherited a disastrous Library project.
Next stop google. That leads you first to LinkedIn where 4 pages of blurb show you that Heather is not shy & retiring and surely won't mind the extra publicity here. She is the "Libraries Strategy Programme Manager (interim)" and has been since February 12. It is funny because customer services and libraries have been bolted together and to "save money" one of the Heads of Department posts has been left unfilled, see this blog. The interim post is not in the establishment list for Libraries and we can be sure that the cost of this will be more than the post left vacant. Not exactly complete or honest then the DPR was it?
Previously Heather was the Divisional Director Corporate Policy and Public Affairs and the Head of Community Cohesion and Equalities at Barking & Dagenham Council where there is a joint venture between the council and, wait for it, Agilisys. What a coincidence that she should move from one Agilisys linked company to another.
Prior to that she was the Idea Stores Programme Director at Tower Hamlets Council where one of her achievements was
- 4 ground-breaking library and adult education service built and opened to the public.
Don't go getting ideas Heather about opening 4 libraries in Barnet. In this borough they get closed.
The goods news is that she has been a senior librarian and has an MBA and is a Bachelor of Library Science from the University of Wales (a 1st, no less). She will still have to do what councillors want which is closing libraries.
Oh, one of her listed specialities is "Libraries & heritage". No need to mention the heritage part in Barnet, Heather, as one museum is closed and its contents being auctioned off and the other one will be closed as soon as the council can work out how to do so.
Heather was flavour of the month in 2005 when she was at Tower Hamlets and was visited by the Commons Committee for Culture, Media and Sport. You can find the report on the Internet and her are some little snippets.
Ms Miranda McKearney, from the Reading Agency, argued persuasively that libraries’ role should be about reading, as an activity, rather than a focus on books themselves as physical objects for lending. She said “To me their role in encouraging reading is about…active intervention at key life stages in a way that connects to policy and helps build the kind of society that we want”. Ms Wills, from the Idea Store programme in Tower Hamlets, agreed saying “at the top of my list [would be] a contribution to ‘life-long learning’ in its widest sense” from support for the under-fives to adult evening classes.
Do you suppose that Heather would love to hear from Friern Barnet residents about how they would like to have reading groups in the Friern Barnet library building? You can email her at heather.wills@barnet.gov.uk (assuming the usual mail format applies).
Heather gets a mention in "The Network Newsletter: tackling social exclusion in libraries, museums, archives and galleries" issue 33, June 04 in respect of an LGUI briefing "The latest issue contains a short piece by Heather Wills, Tower Hamlets’s Idea Store Programme Director, on how the setting up of Idea Stores has turned round library usage – “The Idea Store has very quickly become the place to be for the local community.”Readers will rapidly link to the problem of exclusion of the less mobile of Friern Barnet who cannot easily get to Tally Ho.
Heather appeared again in Parliament, here, in January 2010, when she was a witness on the matter of Preventing Violent Extremism. That "expertise" won't be needed in Friern Barnet either where the library occupiers are peaceful, they offered Mrs Angry a cup of tea which she declined (she would probably have accepted a glass of Sauvignon) and where local residents simply want their library back, which is hardly an extreme act.
No twitter account could be found. If you know otherwise do let Mr Mustard know.
Oh dear Facebook is such a giveaway especially now the new privacy settings are such a complicated mess tending towards openness and transparency. Mr Mustard is on it but minimises the information he puts on there. One of Heather's friends on Facebook is one Bill Murphy, the AD of Customer Services and Libraries. Now Bill was at Barking & Dagenham from 2007 to 2010 which overlaps with Heather's time there. Perhaps Agilisys isn't the reason why Heather has suddenly landed in Barnet (and the job she has now seems lower status than the one she had at B&D) but Bill is. This world of interims is far too small and cosy for Mr Mustard's liking.
The other thing about Heather is why, if she is a Libraries Strategy Programme Manager she is running off to Friern Barnet Library to deal with its occupation by Dave, Phoenix and friends from Camden. That doesn't sound to me like the sort of blue sky thinking she would be involved in, more the act of a line manager with a problem. This again smacks of her being an employee who should be on PAYE.
Heather gets a credit in a film in B&D (no, not that sort of film) and here it is. She does not appear, the credit is in the text at the bottom.
Might Mr Mustard suggest a sequel that you could fund in One Barnet. The Marvel of Sticky End (as there is no One Barnet plan B and no other outcome is possible).
It is late and Mr Mustard doesn't really want to know any more about Heather Wills; she isn't that interesting except that Mr Mustard, along with every other Barnet resident, has to pay an inordinate sum for her to strut her stuff in Barnet, possibly PAYE free.
Finally, a little gem. Heather was quoted in the Guardian on 11 July 2004. You can read all about it on the link but lets just see what heather said:
This is the result of a poll of residents, whose biggest complaint about
the old libraries were that they weren't conveniently located. 'People
wanted them to be in the high street, where they could pop in while
shopping,' says Heather Wills, who is in charge of the programme.
So Heather, to Friern Barnet, there is as you know an (almost) empty building in the heart of the community next to the British Legion and near the shops. Best start planning for the grand reopening. Mr Mustard is sure that local residents could put a play on for you.
