Free chances at PCN adjudication - London Tribunals

If you have a Notice of Rejection from a council in London and are unsure of your chances of winning at adjudication then the following statistics may help you make your mind up. Councils bluff all the time and reject challenges against PCNs which they know will lose if an adjudicator sees the arguments so also knowing that most people pay up like lambs the Councils have nothing to fear by rejecting your representation.

There is no cost for the public to go to London Tribunals and the council will have to pay £32 which they never see again. There is a very slim chance of costs being awarded against you if you are vexatious, frivolous or wholly unreasonable. In the year to 31 March 25 there were only 74 awards of costs against the public out of 42,907 Appeals which is 1 in 580 so very rare (as the legislation says they should be). The total awarded was £5,080 so an average of £68 per case.

If the council does not offer the 50% discount in the Notice of Rejection (there is no legal requirement for them to do so) and given that you do not have to pay a fee to go to Appeal at London Tribunals and as the chances of being made to pay costs is almost zero, why wouldn't you do it?

The fact is that many cases are won by default. Here are the statistics for the year 2024/25.

There is a 75% chance that Hillingdon will not contest your Appeal at London Tribunals and so they will have to cancel the PCN. That is therefore the borough that motorists should fight every time. There is only a 4% chance that Greenwich will throw in the towel so you do need a half decent case in that Borough. Overall there is a 26% chance, 1 PCN in 4, that after starting the Appeal you won't have to do anything else.

Looking at your overall chances of winning they are as follows:

You should certainly fight the top 8 authorities in the list every single time as your chances are better than 50/50 and you have a one in four chance against the best authority, Southwark, a borough that has a good team of officers dedicated to attending the tribunal hearings.

To save you time looking here is the alphabetical list.

The meek will not inherit the earth, they will meekly pay out for PCNs which they could beat.

The number of PCNs issued in the year 2024/25 in Greater London was 9,457,848 (thanks to a massive increase in the number of restrictions on driving down certain roads which are still invitingly left open to traffic movement and monitored by cameras) and so the 42,907 PCNs taken to Appeal at London Tribunals is a piffling 0.005% or only one in every 220 PCNs issued.

If the 45% beaten at Appeal is overall representative of whether a PCN was correct or not that is four million PCNs which aren't being over-turned which could be.

Stop giving up people, be like Mr Mustard, learn everything you can about the subject and get stuck in and fight. The more you fight the more you learn and the better you get.

The end. 

Newham Council are Cheats - #50

 

There has been an awful lot of building work in Westfield Avenue and because of this Mr Mustard can't find the exact location using google street view but wonders if it is the one shown in the below photograph

What we see here is a bay adjacent to two live traffic lanes edged with double yellow lines. As Mr Mustard wrote in a recent blog the double yellow lines apply to the bay in which the two cars are placed which appears by the shape to be designed for vehicles. The double yellow lines should not be there.

What Newham Council claimed in this tribunal case was that the location could be used for picking up and dropping off passengers. To do that one would have to stop on the footway, the driver might even have to leave his vehicle to find his passenger. Should Newham Council have wanted the space to be used for that purpose they should have marked out a bay and provided a sign with the relevant rules. Newham Council didn't provide any photographs of signs at the location about setting down: had they done so they would have proved the area was not footway.

Newham Council have got the lines wrong and provided a dubious explanation about the location, as well as designing an ambiguous layout, Mr Mustard thinks they are cheats.

The end. 

Newham Council are helpful - #1

 

The above image is the exit from Gallions Roundabout onto Royal Albert Way. It is quite near to London Docklands Airport and is only restricted (there is a poor image of the 'no entry' sign at the top left) from 10pm to 3am and that was because boy races used to blast up and down the road. Mr Mustard doesn't think this was the optimal solution or if that problem has gone away, as it might have, Mr Mustard goes along the roads very sedately so doesn't inhabit the car meeting world, then the restriction could be removed. 

The main problem with this restriction is that if you normally work days you will see instead a 40 mph limit sign as the sign is digital and so changes. It is also hard to change your mind when you have half exited the roundabout.

Anyway, a 'black cab' driver who Mr Mustard will call Mr White, given his cab colour, make the mistake of driving that way on a Saturday night. He duly received a PCN and challenged it. On 2 July 2025 a Notice of Rejection was generated but did not reach Mr White. The PCN process rumbled on and a Charge Certificate was next followed by an Order for Recovery. Mr White duly filed a sworn Statutory Declaration and the PCN was rowed back to £160.

Newham did what they should then do which was to send a copy of the Notice of Rejection which was not served and invite Mr White to either pay £80 (the 50% amount) or start an Appeal at London Tribunals.

Mr White decided to start an Appeal. He used the verification code he was given of 98G542 but didn't know that contains a hidden date of 2 July. 2+98 = 100 and G is the 7th letter of the alphabet and equals July, the 7th month, the 5 is for 2025, the 4 is the type of alleged contravention and the 2 is a check digit.

That led London Tribunals to reject the Appeal, made within 28 days of the renewed invitation to be thought to be out of time. Mr Mustard suspects that Newham Council hadn't put the tribunal on notice of an possible Appeal, as they should have done or the proper officer at the tribunal could have missed it.

Mr White queried the rejection with London Tribunals and they can't have studied the papers properly as they again rejected the Appeal as out of time. technically having been refused a review the opportunity to Appeal was at an end. At this point Mr Mustard was contacted by a cab drivers' umbrella body and Mr Mustard took over.

He set out a short chronology for the tribunal and explained that a failure to allow an Appeal to be fought would be a miscarriage of justice. The alternative if the tribunal said no a third time would be to start a judicial review but that would cost thousands and would be unfair. The advantage for Mr White is that Mr Mustard is well known at the tribunal for his exacting work and knowledge of the rules so if he says something is going wrong it probably is. To help the proper officer correct their decision he pointed out that Newham Council should have provided a new code, probably 89K512 and thus the tribunal could blame Newham Council and change their mind.

When Mr Mustard hits something going wrong in a blanket way he often emails parking managers. On this case he emailed the man who he thought was the parking manager of Newham Council but he was a manager of only one area which wasn't this one. However, he was a good sort, pointed out it wasn't his job but helpfully passed the email on to the generic email of the team that could help.

All this was going on over the Christmas and New Year festivities when things slow down a bit so Mr Mustard was a bit worried that the PCN might get sent to bailiffs but instead it took a sudden turn to the better.

All that Mr Mustard had asked for was for Newham Council to tell the tribunal that the Appeal was in time. Instead, they looked at the papers and cancelled the PCN. They wrote that there was an error in the 2 July Notice of Rejection. They didn't say what exactly. However, there was something curious which was in the Notice of Rejection. Newham Council wrote that black cabs were exempt from this restriction but Mr Mustard found that odd for two reasons. The first one is that they are not exempted in the traffic order and the second was that the exemption, if it exists, is not on the sign. The same letter also said there were no exemptions.

Mr Mustard doesn't start stupid arguments when things are going his way, he stopped the rot and told the tribunal they didn't need to open an Appeal after all, thus saving Newham Council c.£32.

Well done Newham Council, did the decent thing and saved themselves a lot of time fighting an Appeal based upon their own letter and signage being inadequate.

The end. 

  

Newham Council are Cheats - #49

 

In order to issue a PCN a Civil Enforcement Officer (CEO or traffic warden in old money) must have a belief that a contravention has occurred. If bay lines are worn below the point of substantial compliance then it is not possible to have that belief. Traffic wardens are meant to look at the lines and report them if they are unclear, they often don't, they just issue a PCN.

It is a fundamental principle of English law that you are innocent until proven guilty. Issuing a PCN reverses that situation as if you are innocent, as Mr James was, but you don't defend yourself by fighting the PCN, you become guilty by default. Administrative convenience has been allowed to trample over your human rights. 

Many visitors to Newham will know Broadway as it is bang in the middle of Stratford. Here is the location in question, as at September 25 a few months after the date of the alleged contravention.

Looking back on google street view there doesn't seem to be time when the lines were pristine.

There is a second problem for the council in that double yellow lines are usually held by adjudicators to apply from the centre of the carriageway across the pavement up to the building line so the council have created an inbuilt ambiguity by the double yellow lines which should not be alongside a pavement bay. 

The traffic warden cheated by issuing the PCN in the first place and all other staff followed him/her like unthinking sheep, we issued a PCN so it must be correct.

The end. 

Newham Council are Cheats - #48

 

Starting the year with some cheating by Newham Council. 

Barnet Council must be so pleased that Mr Musatrd's eye is elsewhere and that takes the pressure off them but as they don't routinely cheat, just get things a bit wrong sometimes then they don't appear in this blog do often. If Mr Mustard tells the Barnet manager, problems get fixed.

Newham is like the wild west even though it is in the east.

As every bay must have its own sign it is logical that it must also have its own suspension sign. In this case Newham Council clearly failed to erect a sign in each suspended bay and to issue a PCN in such a situation was flat out cheating.

We are up to #48 in this series, will we reach 100 by the end of 2026? Place your bets.

The end. 

Newham Council get their butt kicked

 

At first Mr Mustard thought that the driver had made the classic error of putting half the car on a single yellow and half on double yellows (nearly always a mistake, get your whole car within one type of bay or line) but then having looked at the road in question he found a spot which was as below.

 

 

Logically you can't have two different numbers of lines which apply to the same place in space as they have different rules and the motorist must have certainty. You will note that the adjudicator referred to 'ambiguity'.

Yellow lines are generally held by adjudicators to apply from the edge to the middle of the carriageway therefore they don't apply to the direction of traffic flow but across the road. 

Thus Newham Council should not have painted the double yellow lines along the sides of the built out island but only across the part nearest the gap left for traffic. This was a painting design error compounded by a lack of insight in the parking PCN back office.

The PCN should never have been issued, the representations should not have been rejected, the Appeal should not have been contested.

Will Mr Mustard still be writing about Newham Council not knowing what they are doing on 1 January 2027? 

Sadly, he probably will.

The end.