Barnet Council are 'surprising' (not a good thing)

Another random decision Mr Mustard fell over.

 

When a Solicitor expresses surprise it doesn't necessarily mean they are surprised. Legal people often employ withering under-statement to get one over their opponent in Court and this is what Mr Mustard thinks is happening here. Most of the time adjudicators don't make remarks about the viability of the case itself confining themselves to the factual rational of their decision.

Mr Mustard isn't sure which High Road this PCN was issued in (possibly East Finchley) so can't look at the bay markings for himself but clearly one bay ran into the other. 

What doesn't surprise Mr Mustard is that the council and their enforcement agents NSL could not see for themselves that the location layout was not clear enough. Traffic wardens are meant to check signs and lines before they issue a PCN so this 'ticket' was clearly wrong from the off. Rejecting perfectly good representations is a daily occurrence in the back office.

If we look at 2024 and representations rejected by Barnet Council Mr Mustard has taken 44 such cases to the tribunal. He has won on 38 occasions. The council should almost never lose, they need a radical overhaul.

The end.

Barking v Newham (Newham won).

 

Van starts to turn at about 7:52:42

Always fun to read the infighting between two traffic authorities to see who wins and why but many readers will think it is futile point scoring at a cost to the public purse.

This was the register entry from the independent adjudicator which caught Mr Mustard's eye.

Here, from the text of the decision, we can see what happened. One could be forgiven after stopping for failing to remember you passed a no u-turns sign a few minutes ago.

Mr Mustard obtained much of the file from Barking Council because it was caught under Freedom of Information as both parties are subject to FOI. Newham were pretty sure to lose at the tribunal because the restriction was well signed and the van did end up facing in the other direction. You might think it a bit unlucky to be caught at 7:53 a.m. but operators will be on duty if there is money to be made and computers don't sleep, they watch you go wrong 24 hours a day.

Here is what Newham's defence was 

'I did not perform a u-turn. The vehicle was stationary for 5 minutes. I then performed a legal 3 point turn. Under current legislation it's called a u-turn because you are able to turn your vehicle round to face the other way in one movement without using a three-point turn manoeuvre.'

That was a self serving interpretation of the mischief that the sign is intended to prevent. The flawed approach means that someone at Newham (it might be the driver or the council) has had to pay £130 to Barking of which c.£30 went on a tribunal fee. Still a hefty and simple net profit for them but Mr Mustard checked and it hasn't been paid.

Barking were on the case with the processing. The adjudication decision was made on 12 September and provided that email was chosen for communications the decision would have been served on Newham on 13 September. They then had 28 days to pay up, starting with 13 September as day 1. They didn't and on the 29th day Barking issued a charge certificate and put the bill up to £195 where it remains today.

Get the popcorn in, this may end up with a bailiff and the van will be hunted for to be clamped.

The good news for the public is that councils don't discriminate in whom they pursue, they will take anyone's money including another council's.

The end, for now.
 

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.