Targeting the disabled in Redbridge

Another decision which Mr Mustard stumbled upon

 

Mr Mustard had forgotten that organisations can have a blue badge. It is entirely sensible as if you have a minibus with, say, a dozen spaces for wheelchairs and/or the disabled, picking up and dropping people off all day, having to display new personal blue badges for each journey, it would be an administrative burden that would be likely to go wrong.

 

Redbridge Council have given this social enterprise a burden they didn't need or deserve and two people had to use time to attend the tribunal which they could have better used to further their work with the disabled. Mr Mustard notes that the council didn't send a representative to argue their case, that may have been because they knew they looked bad or that they didn't have any proof of wrongdoing.

 

Mr Mustard notes two things:

 

1    The adjudicator was clearly satisfied that the badge was not being misused (and councils often throw out accusations with no proof whatsoever).

2    Oakmont aren't hiding away. They have asked for a meeting to discuss the matter and Redbridge Council has failed to meet them.

 

Councils that continue to behave badly will continue to feature in this blog. There isn't a shortage, the only problem is Mr Mustard doesn't have enough spare time to blog them all.

The end.

Barnet Council play with loaded dice

Another random tribunal decision which Mr Mustard fell over:

It seems that the council are assuming that all drivers are built like tanks and can easily lift and carry 20kg. Mr Mustard couldn't do that easily, he would have done two trips. What does 10kg look like?

24 cans of a soft drink

A car tyre

This could more easily be carried as it has an easy to grip rim and can be carried just off the ground.

8 bottles of wine (750ml)

The adjudicator would have had in mind two key cases on the tribunal website regarding loading. The older one is Jane Packer Flowers and a more recent one is Bosworth & Other v LB Tower Hamlets. These are publicly available and councils can therefore read them as easily as the public can. Here are some of the useful principles that the adjudicators provided to help everyone know how they think:

Given the size of the load in this case and that it was an evidenced commercial delivery the motorist should not have been forced to the tribunal in this case. The message for other readers is to never be put off by a council's response if you think it was wrong. This decision is a subjective one, Mr Mustard thinks Barnet Council were massively offside but others may adjudge otherwise.

The council should also have had regard to its own traffic order, which contains the following exemption:

 and 'goods' are widely described as follows:

although adjudicators will probably use the less wide principles they have decided upon and require one off deliveries to be bulky or heavy.

Mr Mustard hopes this will help his readers to know when they might fall within the definition of loading (or if it might be better to pay to park for 5 minutes which is effectively 15 as you get 10 extra minutes during which you should not be given a PCN) or whether they should deliver by some other method (bus, cycle, walk with a trolley etc). Mr Mustard's neighbour is a delivery driver and he bumped into him on the tube last week. Rather than take his huge van to Tottenham Court Road to deliver a 4 foot long roll of material about 6 inches think and an item which was in a carrier bag for another customer (overall weight less than 10kg) he picked up his freedom pass and had a more relaxing tube journey and did his job less time than had he driven. Food for thought.

The end.

Happy New Year from Barnet Council

Mr Mustard reads random decisions on the parking PCN tribunal website. When he saw one was for 1 January 24 he took a look.

 

This is the road in question

As it is within a controlled parking zone, for which you pass zone entry signs as you exit the A5, the single yellow sign is 400m away around a corner and the hours are 9:30am to 4:30pm on Mondays to Saturdays (including bank holidays).

 

Thus the single yellow was in force but Mr Mustard suspects that many motorists wouldn't understand (time to learn which you are doing now).

 

What the adjudicator could have allowed on, if the motorist had raised it as an argument, is that because of the obvious inference that it is ok to park outside of the zig zag hours, is that the single yellow should have its own sign in accordance with guidance.

The role of the adjudicator is to decide upon the arguments placed in front of them although they will sometimes pick up council errors of their own volition.

 

That is the reason why every motorist should learn all they can about PCNs as with Mr Mustard's help this PCN might have been defeated.

 

Mr Mustard decided to ask Barnet Council a few questions about PCNs issued on 1 January as it isn't a day when there is likely to be much requirement for traffic management, with many motorists beached on the sofa watching the TV, and so he expected numbers to be lower (spoiler alert, they weren't).

Here are the questions and the response:

Mr Mustard was grateful for the hint that the Open Data portal had been brought up to date as it had not been updated for years (the income part is still two years behind).

Mr Mustard then extracted the data for himself, and broke it down by contravention type:

What we see is that for traffic wardens, 1 January is just another day, they can fill their non-existent quota of tickets (giving out zero PCNs during an 8 hour shift would probably lead to the sack after a difficult conversation with your supervisor) by focussing on specific contraventions.

In order to make up for not being able to issue PCNs to cars parked in residents bays and pay to park locations the daily amount of PCNs is made up by people making innocent errors on single yellow lines on a day when it doesn't really matter. You know what to do on bank holidays, park in residents and pay-to-park bays and car parks.

The end.

Redbridge red route income

Mr Mustard blogged last month about the plight of private hire drivers on the red route in Cranbrook Road which is under the control of Redbridge Council rather than TfL.

He decided to see how much money Redbridge were making at this location and the answer is 'quite a lot'

Don't help Redbridge raise even more money, do not stop on a red route, wherever it is.

The end.

DVLA - terrible at data management

Mr Mustard made a Freedom of Information request to DVLA. He did this because a lady, let us call her Jayne, purchased a used car, and posted in the V5C with her complete and accurate address. Mr Mustard has a copy of what was sent to DVLA. Somehow her car got registered to a non-existent address in Mansfield, a town she has no connection with and has never visited.

Let us suppose the motorist lived at 4 Shakespeare Court, 111 Woodville Road, Barnet EN5 4LX (Mr Mustard's former address by way of illustration as he can't use the actual one for Jayne).

Using the Royal Mail postcode checker we can see the following:

Mr Mustard surmises that because the flats had a block name which precedes the street number, blocks don't come up when you search using the DVLA's method. Staff also can't be expected to know every location. There are 1.3 million postcodes and goodness knows how many blocks of flats.

Searching by road name alone brings up the correct address as the fifth choice. An under strain or slapdash DVLA employee might select the wrong one.

It is only by inputting the complete postcode, a maximum of 8 digits, that you can be sure of getting the correct locale.

The system that the DVLA are employing is more likely to end up in error with their partial matching method, which looks to have a huge flaw within in.

Mr Mustard is going to ask a follow up question to test his hypothesis.

In Jayne's case, she correctly wrote on the form an address in London N2, which is a flat in a block which block has a street number. Somehow, perhaps because of the name of the block, her car was registered in Mansfield.

What is worse is that it was registered at an address which doesn't even exist. Using a different address as an example. If the physical address used was 12 Regina Court, West End Lane the postcode used was for 12 Regina Court Lane which did exist but still wasn't Jayne's address and gave the postman a delivery problem.

The first she knew of the PCNs was when the bailiff knocked on her actual front door and demanded £2,000 at the risk of having her car removed and so she paid up even though she had received nothing at all in the post. It has taken Mr Mustard 3 months to ascertain the cause of the problem, which is one he hadn't ever seen before. He much prefers to keep PCNs out of the hands of bailiffs. It isn't clear that the bailiff had a valid warrant as it may have still had the out of date (and obviously invalid) Mansfield address on it. That is a blog for another day.

Some of you might have noticed that you had purchased a car but not received the 'logbook' from DVLA a month later, others wouldn't. As you don't need it unless you travel abroad or decide to sell your vehicle Mr Mustard thinks the non arrival is an entirely understandable oversight. If you buy a used car, make a note for a month later to chase up the missing registration document ('logbook').

Having watched much of the Post Office Horizon Inquiry Mr Mustard is no longer shocked by the incompetence at high levels in large organisations but DVLA's data processing disaster method is of the same ilk. He has seen complaints on the internet in which a resident complains that an unknown person has registered a vehicle at their address. The suspected rogue clearly isn't always a scam artist but could be the DVLA.

The end, for now.

Baywatch

A motorist has come to me who parked here and missed the low level sign which was behind a tree and received a PCN for parking in a permit bay without a permit.

I looked at Barnet Council's photos and here is the showreel.

A traffic warden (CEO) is meant to check that signs and lines are adequate before issuing a PCN. This one clearly didn't as there aren't clear lines, faded lines or even lines at all. The answer here is that the CEO should have reported the missing lines & not given a driver a problem, an undeserved PCN. Mr Mustard will lodge a complaint about them. You should do the same if this happens to you.

The end.

Newham Council - not staffed by Knights of the Road

This story concerns a road near the Tate and Lyle factory, not all that far from the Thames Barrier.  It is a rather industrial area sandwiched between the river and docks.

It could do with a weekly wash.

The sign that was there in 2020 was nowhere to be seen two years later. Local workers will naturally and legally take advantage of free parking. It seems that signs at this location disappear or are vandalised quite often. The council's solution is to put new signs up, send a traffic warden or two down there straightaway, issue PCNs and then tow en masse. Naughty, as they should wait a day before enforcing, but an adjudicator had their measure.

This is Mr Goring's only entry in the PCN Appeal register so we can be fairly sure he is a victim not a sign stealer.

Mr Mustard doesn't know why he read this particular decision on 22 August but he did and it piqued his interest so he sent Newham Council some questions.

Very sensibly, the response was provided by way of a table which Mr Mustard has rearranged into PCN time order.

Look at that efficiency, 6 PCNs issued in 12 minutes. One traffic warden could do that but more likely there were 2 or 3. Removals also at pace. There must have been two lorries as there were removals 4 and 5 minutes apart.

The second PCN is that of Mr Goring. Two other people made representations but then didn't fight the rejection at the tribunal. If they had, they might have got their money back. 

Four motorists didn't even bother to try and challenge their PCNs. If all seven had gone to the tribunal three or four at least would have won. There was no risk of having to pay further monies. If you are towed you pay the 50% in order to release your vehicle, which freezes the PCN and you also pay £200 for the tow. If ever you are towed you must make representations as they are a free throw of the dice (unless you are monumentally stupid or selfish and parked on a zebra crossing).

Assuming everyone recovered their vehicles on the same day, so didn't pay £40 for overnight storage, Newham Council raked in £265 * 6 = £1,590

This is what parking has become. An immoral machine for sucking money out of the wallets and purses of innocent people. We need an independent external body to police the behaviour of councils and contractors and to force them to behave in a proper manner.

This ridiculous logo was on the bottom of the council's letter:

Best start building Newham Council as you are patently and obviously unfair.

The end.