The Secretary of State publishes Statutory Guidance to enforcement authorities as to how to exercise their powers when it comes to parking PCNs. The same requirement does not exist for moving traffic and bus lane PCNs but any half decent authority would also develop policies for responding to challenges against those types of PCN.
As you can read above, enforcement authorities, councils basically, 'should' formulate and publish their policies on the exercise of discretion.
'Should' means exactly what it says. It expresses a strong assertion or command rather than a wish. The SoS should have said 'must' to avoid any doubt.
Mr Mustard decided that it would be useful if he had those policies so could better help motorists who had fallen into error but who might be 'let off' in certain circumstances. Accordingly, he emailed all 33 enforcement authorities in London on 9 September and is going to blog the responses one at a time in alphabetical order. Some are commendably comprehensive and others are lamentably non-existent.
Barking & Dagenham start the alphabet and their reply is hopeless.
Mr Mustard knew that there weren't centrally organised policies about discretion as that wouldn't be the exercise of discretion but a dictatorship and the DfT would not say an enforcement authority should do something it had already done itself! There isn't a London Council code of practice on the use of discretion.
He sent a reply, he does not expect to hear anything else.
A bad start, it does get better but there are other hopeless cases at the end. He'll give those authorities a little time to pull their socks up and send a complaint to the Secretary of State at the end of all the laggards.
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