The end.
Helping the mentally or physically ill, the elderly & the poor to fight Council PCNs. Writing about blunders, democracy and profligacy at Barnet Council.
The end.
A motorist received two letters, one of rejection and one of acceptance, of even date (an old phrase meaning the same date) in one of which the door to the tribunal was opened so he (very lazy to use the words 'Dear Sir/Madam' unless you can't make your mind up which you are) could continue to contest the PCN at the tribunal and on the other hand could forget all about it as no longer being the liable party (the vehicle had not been rented out).
Mr Mustard had an argument about the Traffic Order which had previously won at the tribunal so wasn't worried about the actual alleged contravention (all council letters about PCNs should refer to alleged contraventions until after a tribunal hearing confirms a PCN as valid, until then they are not set in stone although many councils treat them as sacrosanct and cast iron penalties and probably have a little cry when they have to cancel one).
Mr Mustard's client having been left befuddled by two letters dated 8 July 24, Mr Mustard started an Appeal to the tribunal on 15 July 24 on the basis of the contradictory responses and the council threw the towel in and cancelled the PCN on 24 July.
It was 10 years ago that Mr Mustard chatted to another regular representative at the tribunal, who he became friends with after seeing him each week at the tribunal, and expressed his surprise that councils kept lashing up the process. The consensus was that all errors ought to be corrected and those escape routes closed off from challenge but each time a route to success closes another one seems to open. Mr Mustard has come to the conclusion that the piecemeal way in which enforcement takes place and the extensive use of automation and lowly paid staff to process millions of PCNs on a conveyor belt are root causes. Long may it continue.
The end.
Errors jump off the page at Mr Mustard. The addition error above was obvious and so was how the error had occurred. Mr Mustard decided to find out how many times this had happened so he asked questions of the council.
For all PCN Orders for Recovery issued by the council since 1 April 2023 please provide me with a spreadsheet which lists the values of any sum indicated as payable on the Order for recovery which was not £204 or £129 (the expected amounts based upon unpaid PCNs which were issued for the standard amounts of £80 and £130).
You will gather than what I am looking for is any case in the current council year where the amount demanded is unexpected/unusual/wrong as it was in a case I dealt with recently.
The reply was a complete one.
There was only one batch of PCNs affected by this incorrect value; the PCNs were registered at TEC with the correct amount; the batch became stuck halfway through the process and before we were successfully able to create the Notice of Debt Registration batch there were two more attempts to resolve the matter which led to the adding up the 3 x £9.00 charge. Once this error was identified the PCNs were cancelled and any payments received were refunded accordingly.
Mr Mustard will reproduce below the spreadsheet he was sent. If your PCN is listed and you have not been repaid in full as per the council response, you need to contact the council for a refund.
512 PCNs at £204 (Mr Mustard presumes the council did not pay the fees to the Court three times) gives a maximum loss of £104,448 although the probable loss is likely to be lower, c £50,000 as lots of PCNs never get recovered.
Well done to Haringey Council for refunding in this situation. Mr Mustard doesn't know the trigger for that but doesn't need to be credited with being the driving force, even if he was.
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He made another error in not telling Mr Mustard when he moved, twice.
Mr Mustard kept a constant eye on the PCN, and made a subject access request so that he had the complete file, which culminated in this email being sent in as a complaint.
Mr Mustard knows that councils don't much like criticism but fair play to Havering, they took this one on the chin.
Of course, they may simply have realised the futility of trying to recover a PCN which Mr Mustard has completely under control and gone off to look for easier pickings.
The end.
A double decker bus weighs between 11 and 14 metric tonnes. Will you therefore play chicken with it when two lanes go into one and you might end up impaled on a traffic island and traffic light? No, nor would Mr Mustard.
Miss Careful (not her real name) came to Mr Mustard for help as she had been sent a PCN for stopping in a box junction. She did stop, but to avoid being squashed and possibly killed. Redbridge Council have a video of the way in which she crossed the box which clearly confirms the facts. In order to preserve secrecy Mr Mustard is just going to give you 5 stills from the cctv, in time order, from which you can see what happened.
Where is the car? You may well ask, masked by the bus. |
The car still isn't visible |
Now, finally you can see the car |
In this frame you can see that the car has sensibly given way to the bus |
Onwards we all go |
Mr Mustard made the representations as follows and set out the law to save the council the bother of looking it up:
Lots of representations get rejected for two reasons. The first is that the person considering the matter doesn't know what they are doing. The second is that many recipients of rejections worry about the discount, which Mr Mustard doesn't as he is aiming to pay nothing at all, and meekly pay up if knocked back. Mr Mustard is not meek.
An uninformed rejection duly arrived:
The exit probably was clear on entry but the cctv doesn't show it and it does clearly show bullying behaviour by the bus and that the stop was not caused by a stationary vehicle.
Mr Mustard ploughed on, much like the bus, an unstoppable force. He started an Appeal to the tribunal. Redbridge threw in the towel because they could see they were going to lose.
It shouldn't be like this.
The PCN should never have been sent. If the car was leased the PCN might have been paid by the lease company which would penalise an innocent driver.
The Notice of Rejection should never have been sent as it didn't impartially consider the facts.
The message for motorists is that if you think you are correct you should ignore the discount and continue to the tribunal stage where you will get a fair hearing from an adjudicator who does not seek to benefit from a refusal, as councils do.
The end.
Before you think from reading the title that Mr Mustard has lost his marbles he knows the words are in the wrong order, but then so were Enfield's on moving traffic PCNs listed at all these locations:
Mr Mustard thinks that the first two descriptions are near enough but not the rest. What would an honest broker have done? - yes, that's right, they would have cancelled every incorrect PCN and refunded everyone who had paid in error (which would include some lease companies who just pay everything and pass the charge on).
However, this is the world of PCNs in which honest brokers are hard to find. What did Enfield Council do? They quietly changed the descriptions and soldiered on. What did Mr Mustard do? He tore them off a strip in his skeleton argument at the tribunal. This map may help understand why being in The Crest cannot be a contravention (his client had gone wrong, in fact they had realised and reversed out but too late they were technically guilty).
Having spent a good amount of time producing the evidence pack Enfield did a very rare thing after receiving Mr Mustard's skeleton, they decided that rather than having all their dirty linen aired in front of an adjudicator and receiving an adverse decision they would avoid all of that and cancel the PCN which obviated the need for a tribunal hearing.
His second case, in Hamilton Crescent (as alleged but actually in Hazelwood Lane) never got as far as the tribunal. The council folded early.
If you had a PCN which you paid for any of the above locations from F0007 to F0017 then you should demand your money back if the location description on the PCN mirrors that in the first column.
You can email PCNs or use Facebook or Twitter (@EnfieldCouncil) or simply because the council don't give out an email address for complaints send your email instead to the head honcho for the Environment, Simon Pollock to encourage them to do so (explain why).
Mr Mustard will be looking to force refunds for everyone but lots of individual requests will help.
The end (for now).
Here is part of the timetable for the bus in question, a bit early for Mr Mustard
Here is part of the route at East India DLR
The Enforcement Authority's submissions at to why the vehicle was not a local bus were not of great assistance.
Centaur have 100 vehicles and clearly know what they are about.
Despite the comprehensive drubbing Tower Halmets let subsequent hearings go ahead when it would have been diplomatic and sensible to withdraw. There may yet be more.
Mr Mustard is neither for nor against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods as a sweeping generalisation. The planned purpose is laudable but the way in which they have eliminated in some places appears to be designed to extract the maximum amount of money from the motorist. If traffic isn't wanted in them then they should be blocked, either permanently by physically barriers or temporarily by rising bollards as are extensively used in, say, France whereby delivery lorries can gain access as required by using the intercom. Yes, they cost money but that shouldn't be the primary consideration. It does appear to be when a road is left invitingly open (for emergency services and permit holders) and there are no diversion signs to direct you to the legal route, instead a camera goes kerching at every error.
Mr Mustard looks at the environment and traffic tribunal (at London Tribunals) decisions most days and clicks on the detail of any case which might be of interest. When he saw 20 refusals for the same person yesterday he decided to take a look and here is what the adjudicator said.
Mr Mustard's client received an Order for Recovery and when Mr Mustard looked at it he could see that something had gone wrong and he had a good idea what it was.
Mr Mustard can add up and knew that 195 + 9 was not 222, but 204. He also knew that 195 +9 +9 +9 did = 222.
He asked Haringey under FOI to explain what had happened and how many people were affected. They answered fully without trying to wriggle.
There were 512 entries in the list, which is probably the maximum number agreed with the TEC for registration in one go. Haringey have to pay a fee of £4,608 to register these PCNs, many of which will get returned to an earlier stage once witness statements or statutory demands are filed, thus burning the £9.Having identified the error Haringey Council cancelled the PCN on which Mr Mustard was instructed and as you can read above they planned to refund everybody who paid the bogus amount. Interestingly in the file with which Mr Mustard was concerned there was a note to the contrary.
Rule 247 of the Highway Code explains this is an easier to find form, councils are fond of spouting from the Highway Code, Hackney Council staff need to actually read and understand it.
In 'claryfing the rules' the writer introduces irrelevant information about the elderly and disabled. The law does not say the driver must stay with the car, the High Court decided differently in the case of Makda in which a cab driver had to go looking for his passenger who it turned out was not to be found and whose PCN was cancelled by the Court.
Please don't start sentences with 'And', it makes you look like an illiterate, which you are. (I do make grammatical errors but not that one!)
Whether or not the PCN was 'correctly issued' which it was on the face of it, as soon as the facts are accepted that establish that the PCN was not warranted, in the event & unknown to the CEO (traffic warden), then it was no longer correctly issued and in any event whether it was thought to be correct at the time and date in question became irrelevant. This is the council self-justifying the actions of their CEO against whom the only complaint is that he/she should have waited 2-5 minutes in a street where there is a nursery and when the time is between 9am and 10am at which hour it is likely that children are being dropped off for the day.
The simple reasoning for cancelling the PCNs are that the evidence was overwhelming and that Mr Mustard is acting. Hackney Council know from his long history that Mr Mustard will also make formal representations against the Notice to Owner once issued and if those representations are rejected he will start a tribunal Appeal. That Appeal will cost Hackney Council c.£30 which they will never see again and 99.9% of well documented Appeals like this one will be won.
Adjudicators decisions don't set a Precedent (with a capital P, as in a legal precedent) so council decisions certainly don't, but councils should be consistent. All documented cases of dropping off at a time when the nursery is opening (or picking up at closing time) should lead to a cancellation.
When Hackney Council write of 'future contraventions of this nature' they can't be referring to this case as THERE WASN'T A CONTRAVENTION. Please excuse my shouty behaviour. The staff who write letters about PCNs really need to get one thing straight about a PCN, it refers to an 'alleged' contravention, by law, as in this case:
There are some that Mr Mustard knows about:
42 Bow Road
Video
What Mr Mustard has witnessed from TfL is a reluctance to let the public see real detail about the cameras they use. There have been PCN Appeals which have cast doubt upon the certification or approval of various cameras and TfL's approach to this is to try and avoid providing any details of the actual camera used as part of a certified system and there is therefore no way of knowing if they are using the actual equipment which has been certified as a whole with the individual detail hidden away in a technical construction file.
If they, or other enforcement authorities, aren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't be worried about the public seeing that.
Trying to hide the locations of cameras is a bit silly, stand on the street corner, look up and there they are.
Whilst we are here, please stop vandalising cameras, it is a pure waste of money.
What is interesting to note is that the discount is always offered again (unless there is a second template for rejecting at 100% which seems possible).
The paragraph about not paying and appealing at the same time is not legally correct. The Appeal will always be against 100% of the PCN. If you pay and file an Appeal, perhaps to be heard on the papers because you are going on a round the world cruise and so wouldn't want to miss the payment date, the Adjudicator will automatically order a refund if you win. What you can't do is make an Appeal and pay 50% in full settlement. Having your cake and eating it isn't allowed.
The unique appeal verification code isn't actually unique, it identifies a date and a type of PCN. Lots of people get sent the same code on the same day. If you lose your code you can get help to Appeal on line here. You can also start an Appeal by letter without needing a code.
Councils love to frighten motorists. When they write about an extra fee for registering the PCN as a debt at the County Court (which doesn't incidentally appear on your credit record) they are hoping you will think it is large. They are referring to the princely sum of £9. Also because of previous bad behaviour by bailiffs their fees are now set by law. £75 for notifying you they have a warrant they will enforce. £235 for any number of home visits. So, not a blank cheque to charge their 'own costs and fees'; only the fees set by law (still best avoided though).
The line 'it will then be too late to appeal further' is designed to put your off from doing anything but pay up. It is unfair. It is technically correct that if you miss a deadline you can be liable by default and that councils may disregard any representations made out of time but if something has gone wrong, such as you were in hospital or in prison for a short while, the council should give what you have to say some thought. The system is not intended to punish the innocent, although it often does.
It is a common error to write back to the council if you don't like what they say and by that means to time yourself out of an Appeal. Don't do it. Just start an Appeal as there is a one in 4 or 5 chance that the council will give up at that stage anyway.
The end.
Mr Mustard did think, for a brief period, that once the conglomerate was stripped back to a much simpler corporate structure, running such lovely repeat business as the Red Route, ULEZ and Congestion Charge charging schemes and processing the hundreds of thousands of PCNs that capita might we worth a punt.
Whilst Capita negotiated themselves a marvellous deal with Barnet Council, which gave them lots of juicy billing for extras, it looks like TfL are better at negotiating.
One thing that Capita have to do is to present the case for the prosecution (so to speak) for TfL when a motorist takes his PCN to Appeal. Mr Mustard bumps into them occasionally and this is a summary sheet of the evidence which TfL (or any other enforcement authority) have to produce for the adjudicator which includes the evidence of both parties.
If Capita are being similarly lowly paid for other services under this contract, they don't appear to be making money.
Mr Mustard will put his savings into something a bit more blue chip and a lot less risky.
The end (and possibly not far off for Capita?).
p.s. Please don't park this close to junctions.