PCNs in 2020 - PCNs cancelled once a tribunal Appeal was started

Mr Mustard calls this the towel throwing stage. You won't find that in the PCN Regulations.

What happens is that the enforcement authority, like say Barnet Council, have rejected the formal representations and served a Notice of Rejection. That opens the tribunal door to start an Appeal within 28 days. Mr Mustard starts most of his on line but for TfL they have to be sent by post which is a slight pain.

It seems to Mr Mustard that we are engaged on a game of bluff as having rejected the formal representations and without Mr Mustard adding any new arguments he suddenly finds an enforcement authority throwing in the towel, or getting cold feet, and filing a DNC form which is a notification to the tribunal that they 'Do not Contest' the Appeal and so it will be allowed automatically and the PCN will be cancelled. It does look cynical though for an enforcement authority to reject formal representations and then throw in the towel at the tribunal with the same argument being advanced. A game of bluff perhaps? but Mr Mustard doesn't bluff.

The fee for a tribunal case is about £30 and has to be paid by the enforcement authority even if they throw the towel in on day one. That is £900 burnt in fees instead of accepting Mr Mustard's representations at the formal stage.

Here is a list of the the grounds advanced by Mr Mustard in tribunal cases on which the towel was thrown in during 2020.

19 of these cases were for Barnet, 4 in Harrow, 2 for TfL and one each for Brent, Enfield, Haringey, Newham and Hackney.

It is nearly always the case that Mr Mustard will fight a PCN to the very end as he usually has something solid in the way of an argument. He could still have lost some of the cases if the enforcement authority had created an evidence pack, anything from 30 to 100 pages each time which must take between an hour and 3 hours to prepare.

Why enforcement authorities throw in the towel is a mystery to Mr Mustard but given that the Barnet contract is a fixed price if the contractor NSL doesn't produce the evidence pack they save time and thus money as they can employ fewer staff. Some of the time the case is abandoned because the enforcement authority know they are going to lose, other times because they are too busy in the back office and some are probably abandoned because the enforcement authority knows they are in for some robust argument at the hearing and/or they may not want a weakness in their paperwork to be set in stone by an adverse tribunal decision.

Today the towel was thrown in on a case just 90 minutes before the hearing after Mr Mustard had objected to an adjournment being granted. That will be a blog post quite soon.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard