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.

Station Parade - Willesden - Unlawful use of cctv

 

Miss B stopped in the taxi bay in mid March 2026. Mr Mustard does not approve of that, not even for a minute. The sign says 'No stopping' so 2 seconds is enough to commit a contravention.

Had Miss B been issued with a PCN by a 'traffic warden' on foot he might have told her that he is too busy with work to assist (which is true, he still has over £5m to collect on his latest work assignment so arguing over your £160/£80 PCN is not a good use of his time at present) but Brent Council sent a PCN by post relying on cctv. Mr Mustard knew that was unlawful and so he acted.

Mr Mustard did three things:

1. He made formal representations against the PCN on 25 March 26. 

2. He made an Information request to find out how long and how much this had been going on.

3. He sent an email to the monitoring officer, the council official who is responsible for ensuring the council follow the law.

#1 For this type of PCN a council must reject representations within 56 days or they have accepted them by default. Mr Mustard checked the on line balance every week or so. On 12 May it was still £80 and the finishing line was fast approaching. On 21 May, day 56, the balance had been set to £zero. Hurrah. Brent did write to Miss B saying they had missed the deadline but that was a tactical move, to not admit they had erred in the first place.

#2. The information was supplied on time.

 

As the error was spotted so quickly by Mr Mustard no PCN had reached the tribunal or a bailiff. 

On the face of it that is only about 3 people a week getting caught, pretty good compliance on the whole. However, the cctv only started on 6 March and ceased on 3 April so that was about 6 motorists a day getting caught. If you are not in a proper London black cab stay out of these bays, they are not for you.

#3. Nothing had come back from this official by mid-June but they may have been off sick, the out of office response not being 100% clear. Someone else should be covering. Mr Mustard was wondering about an email to the Chief Executive when the explanation arrived on 19 June.

This is an excellent response. The council could have acted slightly quicker as Mr Mustard pointed out the grave error on 23 March. Putting that aside the council have still moved reasonably swiftly and most things in councils aren't rapid. They agree with the legal analysis, they have stopped acting unlawfully, they have cancelled all unpaid PCNs and they have refunded all payments received (some of which will be from lease or short term hire companies and those companies should pass on the refund to the client and cancel the administration fee). You cannot ask for much more than that.

Well done Brent Council (they don't like Mr Mustard much as he keeps putting them to the sword at the tribunal but Mr Mustard doesn't care) thank you for your corrective actions.

Miss B had donated to the North London Hospice at the beginning.

The end.