Newham Council are cheats - #52

 

Platinum are a company whose registered office backs onto Nursery Lane and so the explanation as to why their car was on a single yellow line is perfectly plausible. 

Now if we look at the location, it is a narrow cul-de-sac and so because of the numerous comings and goings that will doubtless take place from neighbouring properties this isn't a place at which you can leave a vehicle parked for more than a minute or two.

Newham Council may have breathed a sigh of relief that this series of cheats blogs had come to an end earlier in the year but that was only because Mr Mustard had bigger fish to fry in real life. He is now on top of his work again and so has time for public awareness campaigns. This series will only eventually stop when the council start to behave with the utmost probity. 

You might also be wondering, as is Mr Mustard why there aren't double yellow lines on both sides of the lane and no loading marks as any parked vehicle will cause an obstruction. Only Newham Council in their 'wisdom' can answer that question.

This looks like the sort of PCN that Mr Mustard calls a hit-and-run one as a 'traffic warden' (CEO) seems to drop out of the sky, issues a PCN and scarpers like a kid playing knock down ginger. The complaint in this case is that the CEO operated at a distance and only approached the car after having printed out the PCN. There is nothing unlawful about that even though the public may regard it as unsporting or even cheating. If a CEO can read your number plate from 100m and has a belief that you are in contravention he can record the necessary information and then slap the PCN on the vehicle and leave and it is entirely lawful. 

There doesn't have to be a single photograph but here there wasn't a photograph of a sign and as they are often missing or defaced (especially in Newham) then should a motorist put a council to proof at adjudication a council will be in difficulty. They can rely on library signs although they mustn't be too old. Often google street view is relied upon and Mr Mustard has driven virtually down this lane and not found a single sign.

Mr Mustard suspected that this is a location inside a controlled parking zone and after going for another virtual drive away from the location along Upton Lane he found some dated images of CPZ entry signs (and some temporary Event signs) which tell you the rules for unsigned single yellow lines which you might meet further along your journey. Those zone entry signs are at least a quarter of a mile away around a couple of turns which the public will likely regard as a cheating system (many drivers don't understand this point, Mr Mustard doubts it forms part of the driving test or training, please tell him if he is wrong).

There is a lot to take in on those signs whilst moving and repeater signage would be useful but that would make the entry signs obsolete. Mr Mustard's view is that it would be a more compliant world without cpzs. Of course, if the car had been out on hire and was then moved by a Platinum driver who came to work on the train, he/she wouldn't have been on notice of the restriction in any event.

The end.

Barnet Council double lash up

 

Mr R was a bit surprised to receive the above PCN when he parked in a location he knew well, on a single yellow line but outside the restricted times, and thought he could sort it out himself given that it was an obvious error.

Mr R made his own informal challenge and was, to his even greater surprise, rejected. At that point he came to Mr Mustard. Here is the absolute load of tosh which was the rejection letter and the usual generous offer to accept £80 for a penalty that is not due (why would you pay that?):

 Here is the car in question and the bay sign.

You can just see a hint of a single yellow line in front of the car.

Next is an image from google street view which clearly shows the vehicle was to the left of the sign and the disabled bay is to the right. The photos taken by the CEO ('traffic warden'), whether by accident or design, didn't include any which showed the painted legend 'DISABLED' on the carriageway.

Here is an older google image which also makes the situation clear. These images can of course be looked at by back office staff of the council (or its contractor APCOA).

All of the parking restrictions in the borough of Barnet are recorded on a map based system which is freely available to the public here and this shows exactly where the disabled bay is located. A traffic warden in doubt could equally look at that and it ought to be on his hand held equipment based upon the co-ordinates of where he is standing at that time.

Note that the rejection letter states that the car was parked outside no. 10 and clearly the disabled bay is outside no. 12

The problem was quickly fixed by Mr Mustard logging the formal representations and sending two complaints to the parking manager who, to his credit, always responds pretty quickly and usually agrees with Mr Mustard. What other choice did he have here? The two complaints were about the actions of both the CEO and the back office and the PCN was cancelled a week later. For a nervous type this could all have been too much and Mr Mustard knows that completely wrong PCNs do get paid by people who can't afford to pay 100% if they are wrong, who think the council must be correct despite the evidence of their own eyes, or whose knees buckle at the slightest hint of trouble. Mr Mustard isn't one of those types.

The two big questions about this PCN are:

1. How the heck did the CEO get this wrong ? 

2. Does the back office reject all informal challenges without looking at the facts as they know many people will give up at that stage ?

Is there cynical behaviour inside the council PCN factories ? You decide.

The end. 

 

 

 

Hammersmith & Fulham Council - delay: avoidable & otherwise

 

On 30 June you lend your car to a friend to pop to the chemists for you and they drive this way as they are from overseas, don't know the area very well and have cognitive dissonance when it comes to open roads which aren't open. The blue must go left sign doesn't help.

On 10 July H&F issue a PCN by post. The motorist sends it to Mr Mustard.

On 26 July Mr Mustard makes the formal representations on line. He then watches and waits whilst checking the PCN value each week so he might know if something happens (not a foolproof system).

On 14 November H&F decide to reject the representation. There is a 56 day time limits for parking PCNs but not for moving traffic ones. The council need to act with reasonable expedition.

On 2 December Mr Mustard starts a tribunal Appeal, one of his points is the unreasonable delay (motorists never getting more than 28 days to do anything).

The tribunal set a hearing date of 13 May . At least 5 days before then it is the duty of H&F to provide the tribunal with all of the paperwork. There is a completely redacted email on 2 May about the case but the contents are top secret for some unknown and unfathomable reason.

On 4 May H&F produce the evidence pack. They have to serve it by post on Mr Mustard as he can legally insist on printed evidence.

On 5 May H&F manage to get it into the post.

Mr Mustard was working away from home and so only received it when he returned on Saturday 9 May after a 200 mile drive. Dealing with it had to wait for a short while.

On Monday 11 May he filed the skeleton argument which was certainly faster moving than H&F. What he didn't know about was the emailing going on about him at H&F which has only recently come to light & is a post-mortem of the hearing.

 

Mr Mustard has asked H&F to note that he is not and does not claim to be a solicitor. The complaint that he asks for a PCN to be cancelled if the evidence pack isn't sent to him but to the motorist is because the tribunal ask the Appellant (the motorist) to provide their proper address for service. Naturally and quite properly Mr Mustard uses his home address as most motorists are overwhelmed by 50-100 page evidence packs. That comment by H&F displays their ignorance of procedure and law.

It is wrong that Mr Mustard does not submit arguments. You have to tick a box stating the category of your argument in order to start an Appeal at the tribunal. He does add extra arguments if they arise from the evidence pack, he would be failing the motorist if he didn't. The law allows for that.

At the hearing an employee of H&F started by trying to get the skeleton argument struck out but the adjudicator was having none of it, it being clear it had been produced in very short order indeed. The delay by H&F however, was fatal to the PCN:

 

Finally, Mr Mustard does not look for loopholes as suggested. He looks for mistakes by councils and as H&F abundantly demonstrate, they make loads of them.

If and when he is sent the unredacted internal emails, there will be another blog. Doubtless the emails paint Mr Mustard in as black a light as the redacting ink. 

Hammersmith & Fulham Council: following Mr M for ages

 

Following on from an interesting PCN tribunal hearing in May 2026 which tried to paint Mr Mustard in a bad light, Mr Mustard asked to see all emails which mentioned him, in the parking department, from 1 January 2025. He didn't expect there to be any from 2025 as he doesn't fight many H&F Council PCNs, he has records of 12 in 9 years. Here is the PCN in question.

That location description should be much simpler, who knows that CANw stands for Clean Air Neighbourhood west? (not many people). 

Why did Mr Mustard 'complain' about the signage? as it was turned away and couldn't therefore be seen by a driver.

Of course he will 'complain' (make representations about inadequacy) about the signage if it is invisible to drivers and leads then into error. He would not be representing his client very well if he didn't do so.

What H&F forgot whilst poking at Mr Mustard's behaviour is that there is a legal duty on them to erect and maintain adequate signage. 

They need to put their own house in order before they write sniffy internal emails about Mr Mustard who barely bothers H&F.

More to follow on this topic later given that an unredacted copy of the email has been requested, reasons for the redactions not having been given.

(Mr Mustard is not and has never claimed to be a 'lawyer' in the legally qualified sense of the word.  Elsewhere H&F described him as a 'solicitor' and he has objected to both descriptions being in their records which should only contain accurate data).

Hammersmith & Fulham Council: bluff then fold

 

Scaffolding lorry stationary in a yellow box

Sorry about the poor quality image, Mr Mustard didn't grab a full sized one before the PCN was cancelled and he can't then access photos.

The driver clearly made an error and was in contravention. He could and should have changed lane and had he planned a bit further ahead he could have exited in lane 1 but Mr Mustard deals with PCNs which are due to such errors and has to make the best of them.

In this case the alleged contravention took place on 18 March 26. For 'moving traffic' contraventions like this one (even though ironically the lorry isn't moving) a council must serve (not just send) the first PCN within 28 days (there may be more than one PCN if a vehicle is hired, this one is owned). The PCN was dated 15 April and in the absence of other evidence about delivery was deemed served on 17 April, which was day 31.

H&F failed to issue the PCN in legal time. Mr Mustard handles all the PCNs for this small scaffolding company who wouldn't cope without help. He looked at the dates and smiled. He then made the formal representations. Mr Mustard took his own advice and kept it brief:

Now you might hope that the local authority, whose duty it is to respond to the representations which were made, would simply cancel at this point. They didn't. They decided that sophistry was the way to go:

Here is the substance of the reply which does not counter the legal point:

 

That unsophisticated non-reply gave Mr Mustard a second basis on which to argue, a complete failure to consider the representation which was made, it considered one which the council found easier to reject (had the PCN been in time Mr Mustard would have advised the scaffolding company to pay at 50%).  

He nearly had a third one as the representation was made on 28 April and not rejected until 24 July and Mr Mustard recently won a case based upon a delay at H&F of more than 3 months (there is no legal time limit for moving traffic PCN rejections) being procedurally unfair - a point which exercised an employee at H&F and about which a blog will appear soon.

H&F did offer the 50% reduction which they weren't legally required to do and which many councils don't now offer as they think they will make more money that way. It has very little effect on Mr Mustard's strategy which is to go to the tribunal 99% of the time. Again he kept the grounds brief:

The Appeal was started on 27 July. The tribunal processed it on 28 July and H&F would have been notified of it on 29 July.

On 29 July H&F wrote to the scaffolding company.

Total denial, however, is still in full swing. The vehicle was 100% in contravention but miracle of miracles H&F have decided to use their discretion to cancel. They don't say why and the without prejudice statement is absolute nonsense, H&F are trying to say that there was a contravention but they are forgiving it with no clear reason as to why, it wouldn't be that they 100% understand they have broken the law and don't want to commit that to paper, would it, surely not?

Now as it happens the council employee (or 'officer' if you like the grand titles that councils seem to favour) was in the tribunal hearing in May (voice only they were both attending without turning on the video feed) at which they launched an attack on the methodology employed by Mr Mustard to fight PCNs at the tribunal alleging, in effect, ambush and 'looking for loopholes' - Mr Mustard struggled to not laugh at that, a blog for another day. It got them nowhere and didn't even warrant a mention in the decision. 

There is no need for councils to think of Mr Mustard as the enemy (and some don't, they have an open dialogue from which both sides benefit). He fights less than 300 PCNs a year and in London there are about 9,000,000 being issued annually. Calm down dear is his advice. If councils simply follow the law and make no errors Mr Mustard will lose, easy enough surely?

The end but not as more H&F stories to follow. 

Nationwide - well done

 

Mr Mustard took a walk the other day and started by going along the High Street in High Barnet. We are probably all used to the site of defibrillators on our streets now but there was a new box mounted on the wall outside the Nationwide. It was a bleed control kit. Now sad though it is that we need a bleed control kit available to us, it could be useful after a vehicle crash or a fall rather than after an act of violence.

Mr Mustard just wanted to say well done to the Nationwide Building Society for the plan to put both of these outside every one of their 605 stores which will be done by the end of the year.

A costly bank statement

 

Mr Mustard had his attention drawn to this tribunal case by another expert. Both play with a straight bat with the tribunal as anything else would undermine your future credibility. Mr Mustard has accidentally said things which turned out not to be true and if that comes to light he puts his hand up during the hearing to admit he was wrong and to explain why or even in a later hearing with the same adjudicator. That is why his unsupported word as to facts can be accepted.

Not so in this case. One problem for the motorist is that if there were a league table of enforcement authorities and their diligence with PCNs Camden Council would generally be in the top 3.

The initial Appeal hearing did not go well for the motorist (often in the Court system an Appeal is against an earlier Court decision but in PCN circles it is an Appeal against the council's refusal to cancel).

The payment was thought of as a user error. The story could have stopped there with £160 to be paid. The motorist decided to ask for a 'Review'. These are rarely granted as that is how the system is designed because one hearing is proportionate to the penalty at issue. That hearing went badly for the motorist.

A back pedalling motorist isn't a good look. It looks like a narrow escape to me. Camden Council however, had done a lot of work and although costs are, by law, rarely awarded, they had put a lot of work in and wanted a contribution. There therefore had to be yet another hearing and the motorist was still keen to be heard:

The motorist's behaviour was found to be 'wholly unreasonable' which is one of the legal tests, frivolous or vexatious being the others.

Trying to hoodwink an adjudicator is pretty stupid, they do hundreds of PCN Appeals. They also have to be legally qualified and have been so for 5 years before they are eligible to become an adjudicator, they have doubtless assessed lots of evidence during their careers and won't easily be fooled. Just tell the truth and pay your PCN if you are bang to rights.

The end.