Ealing Council - believing anything to save time and/or money

Here is a car committing a contravention whilst bearing cloned numberplates

 For the displayed numberplate DVLA provided the following data 

Mr Mustard make some enquiries of Ealing Council in order to see the extent to which they make sure they are sending a PCN to the keeper of the vehicle seen in their cctv.

 

What we can see from this is that between receiving the DVLA data and issuing the PCN there is no sanity check to make sure that the car in view is at least a grey Mini (It could still be a clone as a dodgy Mini owner will try to use the numberplate of another Mini but that would be reasonable behaviour by the council).

There are two reasons why Ealing Council should be checking the reasonableness of DVLA provided data. The first one is the legal basis. The legislation says this about the contents of a PCN

To meet this requirement the council must believe that the vehicle captured by their camera is the one for which they have obtained DVLA data and clearly that is not the case here.

Secondly, as pointed out by one of Mr Mustard's careful readers, the KADOE (Keeper at date of event contact with DVLA) requires that a check be carried out. The standard wording from an old contract follows

Ealing Council have inadequate audit processes in place and need to up their game. From now on Mr Mustard is going to report every obviously cloned car to DVLA when a council has not noticed the bleeding obvious and therefore breached their contract.

The end.