A parking ticket processing Masterclass by NSL

http://billiescraftroom.wordpress.com/

Hey, what's that you cry?

Mr Mustard is advertising a masterclass by NSL in parking ticket processing.

What is going on?

Well the reason is that it is a Masterclass in how to get everything wrong! Mr Mustard is new to parking ticket legislation but he is a fast learner and can read a set of rules as well as the next person - he does wonder if the NPO (Notice Processing Officers) at NSL Ltd have ever read, say, the The Civil Enforcement of Parking Contraventions (England) Representations and Appeals Regulations 2007 which are a fascinating read. Mr Mustard is a fan of technical detail and NSL / Barnet Council just want your money without you putting up a fight. So naturally the answer is to fight on technical grounds (metaphorically speaking only please, violence does not solve arguments).

Here is the chronology for the parking ticket issued to Miss Friern (not her real name)

Date	Item
03 May	Issue of Penalty Charge Notice – placed on car
29 May	Informal challenge submitted by email to parking@barnet.gov.uk
02 Jul	Notice to owner issued
04 Jul	Effective service of Notice to Owner
28 Jul	Formal representations to NSL at PO Box 4894 Worthing
31 Jul	Issue of Charge Certificate
10 Aug	Notice of rejection
16 Oct	Mr Mustard appointed
01 Nov	Mr Mustard writes to Parking Manager citing improprieties
07 Nov	PCN cancelled

We will look at each stage in turn.

3 May PCN. This was for parking across a dropped kerb. The kerb was only one stone wide. Here is a picture of the location.

The dropped kerb is up against the tree, it doesn't meet the level of the road so technically isn't even dropped properly and it doesn't line up with the natural route of the cycle lane and cyclists should dismount to cross the pavement. The dropped kerb doesn't line up with the pedestrian part of the walkway either as you can see from the blue sign that they should be to the right. Anyone could be forgiven for missing this slightly dropped kerb stone as there ought to be double yellow lines across it. In the same road about 50 yards away a dropped kerb, which is obvious, is marked with a single white line, which has no legal standing but at least it makes you stop and think.

The parking ticket wasn't really for that offence anyway. It was a politically motivated ticket. Miss Friern's car was quite close to the scout hut which acts as the polling station and was full of Anyone But Coleman posters and that is what caused telephone calls to be made and two traffic wardens to arrive and the PCN for something else was the incorrect product of their visit.

29 May. Miss Friern submitted a 6 page letter by email to parking@barnet.gov.uk setting out the flaws re the position of the crossover to nowhere and the lack of warning lines or signs and this was completely ignored. Mr Mustard read of a case this week at PATAS where the failure to properly attend to correspondence led to the independent Adjudicator cancelling the ticket. This is a procedural impropriety (guidance is that informal appeals should be dealt with in 14 days).

2 July. The Notice to Owner was issued.

This Notice does not comply with Regulation 19 of The Civil Enforcement of Parking Contraventions (England) General regulations 2007 and so that is a procedural impropriety which is sufficient reason to have your parking ticket cancelled.

28 July - Miss Friern sent her formal appeal in response to the Notice to Owner to the PO Box in Worthing where it is scanned and input by RR Donnelley onto the Civica software which Barnet Council own and NSL also use. This time she added a little to her case and sent 7 pages.

31 July - Either the system is not correctly configured to place cases on hold automatically when an appeal arrives or the scanning was in arrears as the formal representations were not taken account of and a Charge Certificate was issued which increased the amount due from £110 to £165. This was a further procedural impropriety. The Notice to Owner is treated as served 2 days after it is issued and a charge certificate cannot be issued for another 28 days after that so this one was issued a day early. The Charge Certificate was not received by Miss Friern which is a good way of getting motorists into hot water and deeper debt. Was it actually posted?

10 August - The formal representations were responded to. 7 pages were dismissed in a sentence which is hardly giving them any great consideration. 

The Rejection was not in accordance with Regulation 6 in that the rejection does not specifically mention the Charge Certificate or the possibility to appeal to an independent Adjudicator, in this case, PATAS who deal with all London based cases. The letter also refers to vehicles leaving and entering by the crossover. Refer to the first photograph above and you can see this is obviously not correct but of course a Croydon person won't know this. So we have at least two more procedural improprieties in the rejection letter.

It is a statutory requirement that formal representations are carried out by a Barnet Council employee. Why does Mr Mustard have his doubts that actually happens?

What wasn't known was whether or not bailiffs had been instructed as they could have been in the remaining time. Mr Mustard got on the case and all credit to the Parking Manager, a temp working for Barnet Council (Mr Mustard has asked when we might be able to have our own proper permanent employee rather than a succession of consultants and/or temps) he knows a blunder (in fact the case is a travesty of good practice) when he sees it and within days he had cancelled the parking ticket.

The question Mr Mustard asks is how many invalid tickets are being wrongly pursued by NSL (Barnet Council really ought to audit their records and cancel defective parking tickets but they won't because they would rather shut their eyes and take the money) because most people haven't got the time or the patience to wade through parking law? He has.

As an example of monitoring of an outsourced contract this parking ticket highlights the problems that the council faces. An in-house operation can be easily visited by management, auditors or councillors. An office block in Croydon is not quite so easy to monitor. NSL are also meant to be experts in this area; parking ticket enforcement. They have recruited staff who only earn about two thirds of what the Barnet ones did. That is how One Barnet savings are made.

Worse service for less money.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Put Council Tax up - a petition

Options 2 & 3 resonate with Mr Mustard

Oh dear poor Richard Cornelius, yet another email into his inbox from Mr Mustard. Richard gets at least one a week from Mr Mustard and many get put onto the too difficult pile. Others, like this one following on from the fantastically full One Barnet Question Time, don't call for a reply:

Dear Cllr Cornelius

On Thursday evening John Dix ( Mr Reasonable ) suggested you look again at increasing the level of council tax. I agree with him. Holding down council tax artificially by cutting services to the less well off so that you can score political points does not strike me as prudent or proper. Every other bill for my house has gone up with or above inflation as have food, vehicle costs etc. You are disadvantaging the public purse if you carry on as you are. By all means don't increase council tax if that can be achieved by dint of in-house efficiency savings, but don't do it and then cut services.

I note that in a report on business planning presented to cabinet on 20 February 2012 that residents were reported as not fundamentally opposed to the raising of council tax (Page 86 of 320).

If council tax was increased by, say, 2.5% on my band E property (and please forgive me for not understanding how the complicated grant system works as I think there are some government clawbacks but don't know the details - it is the principle that interests me - you can get officers to work on the fine details as to how much of an increase could be made without penalty) then I would pay a mere extra £43 a year (less than the cost of a cup of coffee a week, isn't that what Cllr Brian Coleman said to justify the £40 to £100 CPZ permit charge increase? - i.e. insignificant) and an extra income of around £4m p.a. would accrue to the council (£153,385,750 * 2.5% - In fact over a decade the attached spreadsheet (now below) shows you could have an extra £44m coming in.) This would go a long way to making the savings currently being guessed at for One Barnet of £111m.

You could reverse some of the more unpopular cuts e.g. re-open Friern Barnet library and put the charges for the elderly and disadvantaged back to where they were and row back on some of the Council Tax Support cuts. You could become less dependent on the parking income, which is rather dangerously built into the budget, and put the permit charges back to what they were and scrap the unpopular private events in parks scheme etc.

The above are obvious examples purely intended to give you the flavour of what could be done with more money.

Quite simply you would give yourself some time & wriggle room to implement more popular & useful policies, scrap One Barnet as it currently stands and instead look properly in full detail at each department in turn and cost the in-house option.

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

 

£
Year	Start of year	+Inflation	Extra income
		at 2.5%	(cumulative)
1	159,385,750	163,370,394	3,984,644
2	163,370,394	167,454,654	8,068,904
3	167,454,654	171,641,020	12,255,270
4	171,641,020	175,932,045	16,546,295
5	175,932,045	180,330,347	20,944,597
6	180,330,347	184,838,605	25,452,855
7	184,838,605	189,459,570	30,073,820
8	189,459,570	194,196,060	34,810,310
9	194,196,060	199,050,961	39,665,211
10	199,050,961	204,027,235	44,641,485

Mr Mustard sent this email to every councillor as he likes them all to know how he is thinking and otherwise how would they and he blind copied it to a few of the usual suspects. One of his friends suggested a petition and that she would support it. Mr Mustard decided to take up the suggestion and you can find the petition here. 

If you agree with the petition please sign it and tell your friends. 

If you don't agree please add your comments at the bottom. 

If you neither agree nor disagree you probably aren't reading this blog!

By using the Gopetition service rather than the one on the council website the council cannot send you any messages telling you why they are right as they did to the people who signed the library petition, including Mr Mustard, which annoyed him considerably. Not a smart move by the council to repeat all the old arguments that had been aired before people decided to sign the library petitionin the first place.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

One Barnet - a cartoon explanation

Yesterday evening at the One Barnet Question Time meeting Mr Mustard had the great pleasure to meet Azi Khatiri, the lady who made this cartoon.

The voiceover is by Mr Reasonable. He is a man of many talents.

Second Sight - a film on Sunday 11th November

BMJ - the-karen-woo-award - Lucy Mathen

Update at 12:55 Friday 9th November

Oh Mr Mustard we are totally oversubscribed.....cannot have any more people turning up at Screen on the Green in Islington! perhaps tell people that they should look at our website for further screenings? see Movie Premiere page...also donations welcome anytime!

Thanks for you support

Lucy

---

Mr Mustard is pleased to help the Second Sight charity by advertising their forthcoming film. Lucy Mathen is a good friend of his good friend and he hopes to meet Lucy one day as she is a self-evidently a wonderful person and works tirelessly for this charity.

FILM: JUNCTION FOR HAVING FUN

An extra-ordinary tale of how a chance game of football with village girls completely transformed a forgotten corner of rural India and the eye hospital at the centre of the community.

at The Screen on the Green Everyman cinema, Islington, London N1

on Sunday November 11 between 10.30am and 1pm

There will be a Q and A session afterwards with the film-makers.

This is a fund-raising event for SECOND SIGHT the charity many of you have been supporting for years and some of you have supported only since hearing about the Football connection with our work!

Please come willing to give generously. Or if you cannot make it send along someone (you, reading this blog, that is who Lucy means) who might enjoy this Feel Good Film of the Year...and part with their money in return!

Every £15 raised will cure a blind adult
Every £20 raised will fund the cataract operation of a blind child

Not a penny will be taken out for admin or salaries. That, you remember, is the Second Sight way!

Please RSVP to email lucymathen@yahoo.com

Best wishes

Lucy
Junction for Having Fun info.doc

Mr Mustard hopes that your diary permits you to go along.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

3 cheers for Uncle Eric

The Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP

Eric Pickles acts to limit Town Hall chief's golden goodbyes

(Mr Mustard thinks that should be "chiefs' golden goodbyes" as it is referring to umliple pay-offs, not the payoff of one chief, but give that Uncle Eric is going to save us a packet at Barnet Council he isn't going to quibble for once)

A legal minefield that can pressure councils into handing out bumper pay-offs to chief executives they want to dismiss is to be scrapped, Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles announced today.

Slow and costly bureaucracy that requires councils to appoint an independent person, usually a Queen's Counsel, to review dismissal and disciplinary cases for Chief Executives is to be changed. The Isles of Scilly Council has recently suspended its Chief Executive pending one of these investigations.

Councils seeking to dismiss a chief executive for misconduct or poor performance often pay out inflated lump sums to avoid the cost of taking this bureaucratic route. Mr Pickles intends to remove this expensive roadblock, which does not exist in other parts of Government or the private sector.

Local Government estimate the review process can cost between £100,000 and £250,000 in legal fees not counting independent investigation costs and salary for the suspended officer. One case cost £420,000 and took 16 months to adjudicate. Ministers believe decisions by full Council ensure proper democratic accountability, without the need for a centrally dictated process.

The post of Chief Executive is not set in statute, which means there are no central barriers to remove the role. It only takes a simple democratic decision by the council. Several councils have done this in the past year. The statutory Head of Paid Service role can be done by another senior officer.

Mr Pickles has also today written to the Local Government Association to urge them to take steps to improve their performance management of senior posts. Better management can make it easier to tackle performance issues quicker.

Eric Pickles said:

"A Town Hall chief executive costs a lot of money, but if they are simply not up to the job, councillors must be able to get rid of them quick smart without having to throw away thousands in parachute pay-offs.

"It is ridiculous that councils feel forced to give bumper pay offs to dismiss inadequate chief executives simply to avoid these unnecessary golden goodbye reviews from expensive lawyers.

"Scrapping this bizarre bureaucratic ritual will save taxpayers money and put the decision firmly back in democratically elected hands."

The Localism Act requires councils to publish their pay policies so that local remuneration arrangements - particularly for chief officers - are out in the open and provide value for money for local taxpayers. The associated guidance states councils should vote on pay deals over £100,000.

Mr Pickles announced he intends to toughen up the guidance before councils publish their pay policies for next year. For example, if smaller councils do not pay staff above £100,000 they should consider setting a lower vote threshold. Ministers will reserve the right to regulate should councils not act on it.

It also states that councils should also publicly justify any big bonuses; above inflation pay rises; hiring staff already in receipt of public sector retirement or severance money; and avoid any perceptions of minimising tax payments.

With a public worried about the cost of living and all parts of the public sector looking to make deficit savings, Ministers believe these steps will show taxpayers that value for money is being fully considered for top paid staff.

Notes to editors

1. The post of chief executive is not statutory. Councils are not required to have a chief executive. The Local Government and Housing Act 1989 allow regulations to require councils to adopt standing orders relating to staff. The Local Authorities (Standing Orders) (England) Regulations 2001 state that the full council must approve any decision to dismiss the head of paid service. The regulations state that "the authority must appoint a designated independent person" to investigate proposals for disciplinary action against the Chief Executive, Monitoring Officer or Chief Finance Officer because of misconduct, disciplinary issues or poor performance and that "no steps… are to be taken before a report is made" by that independent person" and "a local authority must pay reasonable remuneration to a designated independent person appointed by the authority and any costs incurred by him in, or in connection with, the discharge of his functions under this regulation." Ministers intend to amend the regulations so that all references to the independent person process are removed. There will be a consultation (no more than 4 week) before the changes are made in Parliament.

2. Pay evidence: Recent analysis by the trade press (external link - £) showed that salaries for newly appointed chief executives between January and June 2012 were on average 11 per cent less than before, which broadly reflects the trend since May 2010. 81 chief executives have moved post since July 2010. In addition Local Government Association figures (external link - pdf) suggest that, in 2009, the combined pay bill for chief officers and chief executives was £629.3m. An earlier 2008 survey by Local Government Employers (external link) revealed that the Chief Executive pay bill was £50.4m. The Hutton Review of Fair Pay in the public sector (external link) found top managers in local government had seen larger increases in pay than the lowest paid in their workforces and the pay ratios between local authority chief executives and the lowest paid in local councils have grown in the last ten years. Around 800 local government employees were in the top 1 per cent of all earners (earning over £117,523).

3. The Government has already taken action on excessive pay practices. The Code of Recommended Practice for Local Authorities on Data Transparency in September 2011 requires councils to publish data on senior salaries and the structure of their workforce. This includes:

• senior employee salaries, names (with the option for individuals to refuse to consent for their name to be published), job descriptions, responsibilities, budgets and numbers of staff. 'Senior employee salaries' is defined as all salaries which are above £58,200 and above (irrespective of post), which is the Senior Civil Service minimum pay band. Budgets should include the overall salary cost of staff reporting to each senior employee;
• an organisational chart of the staff structure of the local authority including salary bands and details of currently vacant posts;
• the 'pay multiple' - the ratio between the highest paid salary and the median average salary of the whole of the authority's workforce;

4. An Audit Commission report, By Mutual Agreement (external link) which looked into severance payments to council chief executives in 2010 found that the designated independent person system has placed local authorities, as the employer, at a great disadvantage with the average length of time for investigation being one whole year. It estimated a minimum legal cost to a council of £100,000, excluding the cost of the investigation, preparing the case and briefing lawyers. Salary costs for a suspended chief executive also have to be met by the council.

FOI Club - meeting #2 - 12 November 2012

Just to get your attention for a moment

Link to this event

A month has already passed since the inaugural FOI club.

The second one will take place at 7.30pm on Monday, 12 November 2012 at the White Lion P.H., St. Albans Rd, Barnet, EN5 4LA

(They serve food of an evening Dan)

Mr Mustard looks forward to seeing you there.

For the avoidance of doubt, we will be talking about FOI during the hour which the FOI club officially runs for, but talk about what you like afterwards when people who don't have another meeting to rush off to tend to hang around for a social chat.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Town Hall Council Tax Dodgers

The normal sort of council tax dodger

Just when you think things in Barnet can't get any stranger, they do. For a public body Barnet Council have a strange attitude towards contributing their fair dues to society.

1782 - Rating Consultant

So Barnet Council, the local branch of government, is applying to reduce the burden of how much it has to pay to contribute to central government, and is paying a private company to achieve that aim.The agreed fee is £700 if no saving is made and up to £29,000 if loads of savings are made, the potential savings are mentioned in a table which is referred to in the DPR but is not there. 

How do DPR keep getting issued that are incorrect? At least 8 staff and/or Town Hall Tax Dodgers are noted in this report. Is it time you all started reading reports properly?

Here are the values for rating purposes:

NLBP	m²	Rateable	Value
		value £	per m² £
2	4,020	565,000	141
2	2,512	335,000	133
3	6,446	900,000	140
4	2,122	244,000	115
4	10,843	1,300,000	120

Mr Mustard isn't a rating valuation expert but does wonder why that particular building is being appealed as the rating per square metre is the lowest of blocks 2,3 & 4 so on a crude measure the scope for reduction seems to be limited.

Mr Mustard also notes that the report was contributed to by Jonathan "John" Arnold the "Interim Transition Manager". How many here today gone tomorrow carcass pickers with no great allegiance to Barnet are we expected to support? (This is not a dig at the latest arrival John Arnold in particular but at the whole pack of interim hyenas with which we are saddled).

Paragraph 3.2 implies that the council don't have expertise in this area of rating valuations. In fact the paragraph is a bit naughty in that it says they don't have a specialist consultant but then why would they have? This ignore the 6 principal valuers listed in the staff establishment at 31 March 12 and the Senior Valuer they report to and the Borough Valuer who is part of the new 49 strong One Barnet senior management team.

It also overlooks the fact that the report author, John Arnold worked for 10 years in the Valuation Office who are responsible for property values, where he wasn't the tea boy but a valuer. Do we really need this consultant?

Odd, the authority at paragraph 10.1 appears to be wider than at 3.4. Mr Mustard is watching to make sure that no more work is dished out other than this one appeal without proper process being followed.

Now let us look at the effect of this appeal.

Up to 2012/13 business rates are handed over in their entirety to central Government so if this appeal is successful that means local government (Barnet Council) will give less money to Central Government less up to £29,000 paid out to an Estates company. How does this help the country. It just means that the time will be taken up of local government staff, the Valuation Office, and the Treasury. Any marginal lowering that could be made of council tax will have to be balanced by an increase in some other tax such as income tax plus up to an extra £29,000.

From 2013/14 Barnet Council will keep the council tax that it collects. So by reducing the council tax that it pays on a council building it moves less money from the left pocket to the right one. Mr Mustard can't see where this saves money.

If Barnet Council vacate the building the owners, Comer, will get 3 months rate free period and then pay 50% of the normal rate. Comer will save money because of the council's actions and it is Barnet Council who will have paid the fee which enabled it to collect less business rate on building 4. Seems bonkers to Mr Mustard. Comer should be paying some or all of the fee?

If and when someone else signs a lease in the future then they, as occupier, will be liable for the full business rate. They will pay less to the council if the council funded appeal is successful. Assuming the building stands for another 100 years, not unusual for a building, the council will lose far more in the long run.

This seems so nuts, and such a public servant job creation strategy, that Mr Mustard thinks he has missed the point somewhere. Where is the hidden bonus? 

Do please tell Mr Mustard if you know.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard