5 March 2021

Brent Council - blathering irrelevance

 

The above car was rented out and when the hire was over it was left with one wheel on perfect double yellow lines (perhaps it was dark upon parking?). The owner didn't know how the car had been left until a couple of weeks later it not being hired out in the meantime. The car had accumulated six PCNs, the first one in time was paid and the other five were challenged using the following words:




It would be hard to write a more succinct or clear challenge, wrote Mr Mustard not at all modestly. Back came multiple identical rejections:

Careful consideration? - not apparent.

The paragraph starting 'A PCN was issued' - is irrelevant.

The first six lines of the next paragraph are also irrelevant.

The bold type or emphasis would not be necessary if the irrelevant material wasn't there. This is just lazy cut and paste.

The argument put forward was not 'mitigation' but a head on challenge to the lawfulness of any PCN after the first one.

An 'appropriate response' has not been sent as the question of 'continuous contravention' has not been mentioned or possibly even thought about.

If Brent Council send the same non-reply at the next stage, the Notices to Owner, against which identical challenges will be made, it will be off to the tribunal which has previously considered this argument presented by Mr Mustard and agreed with him and here is one such decision (not a precedent but likely to be persuasive)


Yours frugally

Mr Mustard



4 comments:

  1. The law or this adjudicator really is an ass on this. The judgment is such that if I leave my car for 3 days on single yellows and get three PCNs there is no continuous contravention, so all the PCNs are correctly issued, but if on double-yellows only a single PCN applies and PCNs 2 & 3 must be cancelled !

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  2. Only at the informal rejection stage.

    Brent get another go to get it right but how many motorists would know and if they don't would pay on the assumption the local authority must know the law.

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  3. So people can leave a car on a double yellow line (say, outside a train station) when they go on holiday for two weeks and only pay one PCN? Sounds like cheap parking to me.

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  4. Not cheap if you get towed to the pound with a £40 a night storage charge. May be lower than airport parking though? Not worth all the hassle.

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I now moderate comments in the light of the Delfi case. Due to the current high incidence of spam I have had to turn word verification on.