St Albans City Council automation error

 

Mr Mustard was approached by Mr F who had parked at the above spot in the dark and missed the sign. This was on 17 March.

On 29 March Mr F made his own informal challenge which was rejected.

After the issue of the Notice to Owner the formal representations were made by Mr Mustard on 29 May. They were to the effect that the alleged contravention was stated too vaguely on the PCN as it was 'Parked in a parking place or area not designated for that class of vehicle' without specifying the class of vehicle i.e. Goods vehicle. The second limb of the representation was that signage was inadequate without specifying why so equally vague.

A response was not received.

Mr Mustard keeps an eye on every PCN which he manages and each week he goes on line and looks at what the balance is as that gives a clue to the stage the PCN has reached. In some cases, such as Haringey and TfL you get a chronology of the steps.

On 30 June Mr Mustard saw that the balance had gone from £35 the week before to £70 which told him that a Notice of Rejection had been issued and the 14 days which St Albans had allowed for payment at a discount had expired and so he knew the Notice of Rejection had been lost in the post or possibly even not printed. He then knew to watch and wait for the Charge Certificate to be issued at which point the balance would be £105 and then for the Order for Recovery to be issued which increases the balance by £11 being the Court Fee payable when the PCN gets registered as a debt at the TEC - the Traffic and Enforcement Centre. The balance did indeed rise to !16 and Mr Mustard saw this when he checked on 29 July.

The registration of the PCN as a debt can be revoked by the filing of a witness statement that the Notice of Rejection was not received and then you go back to £70 and the council should refer the PCN to the independent tribunal, in this case the Traffic Penalty Tribunal for outside London.

The witness statement was filed by email on 6 August well inside the deadline of 4pm on 3 September. St Albans would have been told of the witness statement being filed within a day or two.

On 11 August Mr Mustard checked the on line balance to see if it was yet back to £70 and it was still £116. For whatever reason he next checked on 13 August when rather than going backwards in the process the PCN had leapt forward

After filing a complaint and some toing and froing the PCN finally got cancelled as the sending of the PCN to a bailiff, at a time when the PCN should not have been, it not yet being 3 September, was a procedural impropriety which leads automatically to cancellation at the tribunal.

Mr Mustard wondered what had gone wrong and how many time so he logged an information request.

The answer is below:

It isn't clear from the answer whether or not the 18 PCNs will be cancelled or not, the reference to appropriate handling being in Mr Mustard's eyes inappropriate, cancellation being the only proper course of action.

Mr Mustard had made his complaint on Saturday 17 August. It seems that is what set the hare running as St Albans were on to their software supplier on the second working day afterwards.

Other information was provided as to what went wrong:

Councils, not just St Albans, rely very heavily on automated software processing to manage the huge numbers of PCNs that get issued, c. 10m a year in London for example but just tens of thousands in St Albans. The danger comes when automation goes wrong, as in this case. 

It is incredibly worrying for a motorist that a PCN which he is fighting perfectly correctly in line with the legal process gets escalated to a bailiff who has draconian powers to relieve the public of their worldly goods. There was no mention of offering any sort of compensation to Mr F, a goodwill gesture of sending him £35 would go a long way to make a council look good in the eyes of the public.

With AI's relentless infiltration into many areas of life this sort of error can only arise more often in the future.

The end.

Foot in mouth disease in Barnet

 

Many motorists like to put a wheel on the pavement (footway) when the road is narrow. That is car brain thinking as if the carriageway isn't wide enough for a fire engine to get through you just shouldn't stop there, & not make the pavement harder to navigate for a blind person or someone with a wheelchair or a pram.

Henry Road used to have Chez TonTon on the corner (sadly Eric has retired and no-one else took it over) but the car in this case was down the Lancaster Road end. Mr Mustard looked at the images online on the council computer and couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

Yes, a perfectly parked car, within a mm or two of the kerb stone. Still room to get through the middle of the carriageway.

The motorist, Mr P, couldn't believe it either and made his own challenge to Barnet Council expecting a swift cancellation and maybe, just maybe, a word of apology. He didn't get either. He got this.

What usually happens next is that Mr Mustard gets instructed, sends a complaint to the parking manager, the PCN gets cancelled, an apology is made and a black mark is added to the APCOA file. However, that was suddenly no longer necessary as Mr P had also submitted a separate complaint which was looked at a few days later and the PCN was then cancelled.

Mr Mustard wonders if you know better than he how the heck the PCN got issued in the first place. It is a bizarre blunder.

Mr Mustard also wonders what is going on in the back office that they can reject a 100% perfect (is that a tautology?) challenge. Has AI been let rip in order to save time and money, AI must be in PCN departments already as they are all about processing oodles of data very quickly, cheaply and hopefully accurately. Do ask the council if you are an AI expert as you will ask the best questions.

The traffic warden and the back office person both need a rollicking but they probably won't get one.

The traffic warden also took this photo which was of a sign in Lancaster Road, so around the corner, which isn't pertinent and may have caused the CEO to get muddled. Advice to CEOs, if you are muddled put your machine away and have a little rest.

The end. 

 

The perils of AI

 

Mr Mustard prefers real intelligence to artificial. He recently had cause to complain to St Albans City & District Council as they sent a PCN which was in the representation stage to bailiffs (Civil Enforcement Officers) a blunder of the first water.

When he went online to try and find an email address to send his complaint to which is a problem with many councils not providing an email address for such a purpose he did find the above page. Mr Mustard found himself agreeing with much of what St Albans had to say. Most AI produced text is too verbose but it is quite good at sticking facts in order, a task that Mr Mustard can manage for himself. Many motorists come to him and send an AI generated challenge which 90% of the time is of no use to Mr Mustard and he has to waste a lot of time reading it just in case.

Complaining to St Albans was harder than it should have been. Mr Mustard likes to communicate by email which councils try to avoid. The profferred online system is useless as you are strait jacketed by most systems into answering questions instead of setting things out as you wish. In addition it isn't possible to attach a document so Mr Mustard couldn't attach his client authority so his complaint is likely to get rejected for that reason. Mr Mustard posted that in.

His advice if you need to write as a council doesn't give you an email address is to write an email to them as if they have, send the email to yourself and then print it out and post it, no need to make it look like a traditional letter.

Don't put up with wrong things, complain.

Mr Mustard will write about the bailiff problem once he has found out how widespread a problem it was. 

The end. 

Tfl PCN - 6 pages is OTT

 

This is the first of six A4 pages that you need to read in full to make sure you don't need anything. This is a 2 cups of tea read. It will take some time to be sure that not only have you read it, but that you understand it.

It shouldn't say Blackwall Tunnel on the top, the scooter didn't go there, it is as relevant as saying Channel Tunnel.

You already have Mr Mustard's opinion that the consequences box should not be there, this is also not the place for a PR message about how marvellous the tunnel is. If it was marvellous there wouldn't be a charge for 2 wheeled vehicles which relieve congestion as there is one less car on the road.

An exhortation to 'pay your charge now' should not be there for two reasons. The first is that it isn't 'your' charge as you aren't at liberty to cancel it, it is TfL's charge, they are the ones who will try to punish you if you don't pay. In addition, that is a one-sided exhortation which assumes guilt, you should also be reminded to challenge the PCN now but TfL apparently don't want you to do that.

The Notice about Service isn't at all helpful. The Regulations have been changed to allow for these documents to be sent other than by first class post. Service is assumed to be two working days for first class and 4 working days for other classes. What this means is that the actual date of service will vary and therefore TfL should not have put a date of service on page 1 as they don't know what it was. That could fetter your rights as you might think you are too late to challenge and then go off and pay. Service is what is known as a 'rebuttable presumption' i.e. you can prove the assumption is not correct.

The privacy notice is just another thing to read which doesn't help you with the problem at all. It should be cut, everyone knows TfL get your data from DVLA.

The tear off slip is also longer than it needs to be. No need to tear it off as the rest of the page contains surplus wording. Better not to attach it as a cheque could get damaged and it won't fall out of a sealed envelope. No need to write the PCN ref on the back of the cheque, it is on the payment slip, don't do TfL's work for them, they scan everything anyway. The quickest and easiest way to pay isn't for your benefit, you choose what works best for you.

The only way to make representations should not be in writing. If you are disabled TfL are obliged to make due adjustment so that you can, if needs be, make a verbal representation which they record for you.

TfL are misrepresenting the law at para 1. It is:

(3) The grounds are—

(a)that the recipient—

(i)never was the registered keeper in relation to the vehicle in question;

and

(4) Where the ground mentioned in paragraph (3)(a)(ii) is relied on in any representations made under this regulation, those representations must include a statement of the name and address of the person to whom the vehicle was disposed of by the person making the representations (if that information is in his possession)

Mr Mustard has underlined for you an important exemption. If you bought or sold the vehicle from a man in the pub (which may be foolish but it happens) you don't have to run around proving for TfL who the keeper is, you simply have to show you were not the keeper at the relevant time. You may easily have been given a false name and address as that is what some dodgy traders do to avoid taxes and other liabilities.

Mr Mustard has looked up the Sensitive Casework Team who appear to deal with bereavements, is that the right place to go? Just notify DVLA online in the usual way. 

You are probably already sick of the PCN and we are only halfway.

Mr Mustard doesn't think this page even exists. The vast majority of challenges are almost certainly made online and the art of letter writing isn't yet dead so people could just write in or there could be a downloadable form. As ever with forms you need to decide to what extent you want to complete the boxes. Leave off your telephone number (why would you give one that isn't current?) and email (it doesn't say current email so is inconsistent) as these will be recorded and could be given to bailiffs later. If you send a letter you don't have to include the false statement confirmation but please do tell the truth. Mr Mustard doubts that more than a handful of people, if any, have ever been prosecuted.

TfL are a bit funny about company representation and were too lazy on a recent case to look up Companies House and see that the individual whose right to make representations that they queried is the sole director of the company so is naturally fully empowered. They spent longer writing two futile letters.

Mr Mustard thinks that with a bit of careful thought this four page PCN could become two pages.

Then we get the extra blurb which isn't part of the PCN and Mr Mustard would stick through the shredder. First, the really objectionable page:

This is the first you know of the alleged contravention. You have the legal right to contest it which seems to not count for much. Imagine your Council Tax bill arrived with the following warnings:

That is the equivalent leaflet. It is all true but extremely unlikely and an excessive and grossly bullying warning when your bill has only just arrived and the first instalment won't be due for 3 weeks. Mr Mustard thinks if that leaflet went out with the Council Tax bills this year the second poll tax riots would occur and the leaflet would not be used again.

Now, the final page of so-called Frequently Asked Questions which are made up by TfL:

The only new part of these FAQ is the How to Avoid PCNs which is, to be fair, useful. Everything else is within the PCN so the same information is provided with different wordings which is simply a recipe for confusion and is wasting the time of the public to wade through all this guff.

TfL should not fetter their discretion by saying they are unlikely to cancel for reason 'x' - they have to consider on its own merits each and every challenge that is made.

Mr Mustard hopes that wiser counsel prevails at TfL and they change the PCN and extra documents to something more succinct and necessary.

The end. 

TfL bully boys ?

 

This PCN is the first that Mr Mustard has seen with this new layout. If TfL find it improves the rate of payment you can be sure that other enforcement authorities in London will follow suit. To Mr Mustard's mind the red section is all wrong.

Certain information on a PCN is statutory and anything else can be added by TfL. The enforcement process items it must contain are the full price of the penalty and the 50% discounted price. It must also tell you that if you do not pay or make representations within 28 days of service (=receipt) that TfL may increase the balance by 50% and send you a charge certificate to that effect.

Given the parlous state of the payment system the PCN may not arrive very quickly and it could easily be 4,5 or 6 days before you receive it especially as first class post is no longer mandatory for this type of PCN (which is a backward step given the state of the Royal Mail). Therefore, TfL should not put a fixed date (2 October) within the PCN which could make you think you are out of time when you are still within it. Mr Mustard posted a Power of Attorney to his Solicitor recently that took 8 days to reach Godalming, by first class post. He could have cycled there and back in 2. Keep the envelope in which your PCN was sent if you want to ask Mr Mustard about the PCN.

What bothers Mr Mustard even more are the next two red sections for Debt Registration and Enforcement Agent (bailiff). No-one sensible ignores a PCN but the assumption should be that the recipient will choose to deal with it. This just looks like bullying to Mr Mustard. He needs to obtain the other 3 pages of the PCN and the 2 pages of notes before he can decide how unfair the whole thing is but his first reaction is that this is bang out of order.

If you disagree with the PCN make sure you fight it and do it now, don't be a last minute merchant.

More soon.

Just been sent the rest, look at this page. 

From the very start you are being threatened, this is completely unacceptable, you are allowed 28 days in which to act and take advice. Mr Mustard will be fighting this PCN (it has already been at the county court stage once and TfL have cheated so this should end up going away and nowhere near a bailiff) which the recipient of is happy about and will take his chances (Mr Mustard wins 90% of the time) which might cost him an extra £90 but he knows and accepts the low risk.

Yet more soon. 

Added 9 September: Enforcement authorities, such as TfL, are given powers that are discretionary. They have the power to progress your PCN through various stages but the legislation does not say they have to use those powers, each PCn should be considered on an individual basis. To so otherwise and automate progression is an abuse of power and fetters their discretion but all systems are automated to the maximum.

Many enforcement authorities take stock just before the Order for Recovery stage as they have to pay an £11 fee to the Court to proceed. If the motorist then signs a statutory declaration that, for example, the original postal PCN was not received, as in this case, TfL suffer a loss of £11 as the charge reverts to the 100% PCN value. 

If the proposed bailiff screens the PCNs proposed for registration at the TEC and decides they are unlikely to succeed then the authority may not bother to invest the £11 and the PCN will stay stuck where it is. Mr Mustard watches PCNs for a long time, as they sometimes come back to life, including one for Kensington & Chelsea on which the stage hasn't changed since he checked it on 31 December 2024, probably due to their cyber attack.

Suspect suspension

 

A resident, let's call him Mr G, received a PCN at this location on 10 July having observed that the works were complete. What really should happen is that to be helpful to the public the workers should be empowered to take down the sign once works are complete but that doesn't happen in Barnet.

Mr Mustard advised Mr G to ask some questions of the council as he thought the sign looked a bit amateur and not in line with the version authorised by the Secretary of State.

The questions and answers were as follows:

The photos have not been published. However, what appears to have happened is that a certain period of suspension was requested but a different one was advertised. The CEO (traffic warden) isn't to know that, they rely entirely on the erected sign and assume it will be correct and clearly that isn't always the case.

Separately Mr G received another response which quite fairly cancelled the PCN as it wasn't sustainable, the advertised suspension not being the authorised one. Mr Mustard has not known this happen before.

What this tells you is that it is worth asking to see all of the records about the suspension to make sure it was properly arranged as if it wasn't the council will cancel your PCN. Properly typed up 3 sided signs bearing reference numbers are likely to be correct (but could still be wrong) and dodgy looking handwritten signs are the most susceptible to challenge.

You can submit your questions by email to foi@barnet.gov.uk

The end.

 

 

 

Unusual process error in Barnet

 

The above is Claverley Villas in Finchley Central. It has a single yellow line restricted from 2 to 3pm to stop all day parking and local business people park on it a lot and maybe move to avoid the hour or just take a chance. One such local professional person spotted the warden at 2:05pm on 16 February got his keys and scarpered rapidly. A PCN was not placed on the car or in his hand.

Let us call him Mr Bolt. The next thing he knew of a PCN having been issued was the receipt of a Charge Certificate dated 27 April. He had not received a Notice to Owner.

It was open to the council to send a PCN in the post due to the driving away but it seems the 'traffic warden' (CEO) must have recorded it as served at the scene.

If you want to fight there is nothing to do with a Charge Certificate except to wait for the Order for Recovery. That arrived at the end of May. The door is opened at that point to filing a witness statement that the Notice to Owner (or postal PCN) was not received. A signed witness statement was duly filed on 29 May that a Notice to Owner was not received. 

The Traffic Enforcement centre cancels the Charge Certificate and authorises the council to serve a fresh Notice to Owner. It duly arrived dated 16 June 26. Mr Mustard looked at it and was confused. It alleged that the vehicle in question was parked in a restricted street (i.e. one with a yellow line) being Claverley Villas but on 6 March 2026 at 09:51

There were two errors there, the council had no photos taken on 6 March and it isn't a contravention to park on that single yellow at 09:51

Someone had used some fancy footwork at the council and got two different processes mixed together. Mr Mustard was pushing at an open door when he made the representation denying the date and time. Barnet Council rapidly caved in.

Funny stuff, detail, it has to be correct. This was a new error which Mr Mustard had not seen in his 17 years of fighting PCNs.