The council believes....

Here is a still photo taken from the cctv cameras which point at Rodborough Road in Golders Green into which you are not allowed to turn right from Finchley Road (you also can't turn right now out of Rodborough Road into Finchley Road, in fact, more emphatically, you must turn left so don't do the dog leg straight on to go to Sainsburys, that will be £130 on your grocery bill).

Here is what it looks like from a vehicle on the approach.

For a 'no right turn' the statutory placement of the sign is on the left opposite the junction (as near as practicable to that point) which Mr Mustard thinks should be opposite the 'no entry' bollard on that convenient lamp post. Barnet Council have put it a little further up the road which means the motorist is less likely to see it. Also, as it is past the junction it is intended for it might be advance warning of the next road being a no right turn, how would a driver know?

You can just make out, in the lower image, a reinforcing sign just after the junction, on the right hand side. This has been twisted, as it often has, and has featured in tribunal decisions as being turned away and as being after the junction so not adequate as indicating the location of the banned turn.

Now if you go back to the top picture what do you see, a white van with a cage which appears to be full of green sacks. Who uses green sacks Mr Mustard hears you ask? why Barnet Council of course. So what we have here is a Barnet street scene van (most probably) illegally parked on pedestrian crossing zig zags, a contravention so bad it is one of the few that the Met Police can still take action for, and that means that the 'no right turn' sign on the left will be much harder to see and only for a very short time. The test of signage is whether or not it is adequate. Mr Mustard doesn't think this is.

If you then cast your eyes to the right to find the non-statutory backup sign, between the bin and the black van, you can see that the sign can't be seen, no red and white circles in shot.

The way that these banned turns are monitored is by computer controlled cameras. They have been programmed to watch the traffic 24 hours a day and select from the footage some small sections which show when the computer thinks a contravention has been committed. An employee, probably of NSL, probably sat in an office in Dingwall, is then meant to review the footage and decide if the computer has correctly chosen an event which equals a contravention. Mr Mustard suspects that the process of watching one short clip after another for hours on end completely erodes whatever concentration or thinking ability the probably lowly paid employee has and they end up blindly ticking yes to every piece of footage.

In this case no thought was given to the fact that the right hand side sign was twisted (it isn't a legal requirement so that can be put to one side although if it is there it should be the correct way round) but even less thought, always assuming the illegally parked van was even noticed, was given to the visibility and adequacy of the sign on the left hand side of the road.

The law states that the PCN must state what contravention 'The grounds on which the council....believe that the penalty charge is payable with respect to the vehicle'. That belief cannot in all conscience be in the mind of the council on this particular occasion.

Should you receive a PCN at this location during the hours of darkness then you have a rock solid defence. The maximum speed on this road is 30mph which means that this particular sign must be illuminated during the hours of darkness. oddly, the sign on the right which is a sign that doesn't need to be there, is illuminated. The sign on the left which does need to be there, but a bit further forward, isn't illuminated. 

Mr Mustard thinks the council don't think hard enough about adequate and fair sign placements but just bang them up on the easiest poles which come to hand.

The PCN itself will be fought through the usual channels.

Mr Mustard