Why we need a parking Ombudsman - #1

 

Legislation is written on the basis that a body given a power will use it in a reasonable manner. The faceless bureaucrats and contractors who wield the power have stopped caring what the public thinks and will dish out a PCN for any trivial contravention.

This car with the roof bars is in contravention if he stopped because of a stationary vehicle. You, the reader, already think that sending a PCN through the post to the keeper of this car is rather excessive as they could have stopped further forward which is what leads to the escape from the PCN, they stopped before the stationary vehicle and good reasons amusingly accepted by the older adjudicators as good reasons to stop and thus cancel the PCN were to 'light your pipe', 'read a newspaper' or 'admire the view'.

Mr Mustard has made the representation that the driver chose to stop where they did and could have exited had they chosen to and that in any event the alleged contravention is 'de minimis non curate lex' i.e. too trivial a matter for the law to concern itself with. Time will tell if this ends up at the tribunal or not.

This sort of PCN, trying to pilfer £160 out of the pocket of the motorist, shouldn't see the light of day and many lease companies would just pay it and thus remove the possibility of challenge from the keeper. That is why we need an Ombudsman to use the powers they could be granted to stop this sort of thing before it starts, to remove the worst excesses of council behaviour as the council itself won't do so, it is too profitable.

The end.

Barnet Council - automation or automaton error ?

 

Closed signs at Hilton Avenue N12

Mr Mustard has some semi-regular 'clients' who do their best but because they drive all day for a living inevitably run into a PCN from time to time. Mr P, in this case, doesn't trust councils so when he entered Hilton Avenue from Woodhouse Avenue on 2 September 26 thinking that the schools had gone back so enforcement was likely, he stopped and photographed the greyed out signs to prove they were closed when he was there.

The PCN which he should not have got was dated 8 September. 

Mr Mustard visited the location on 10 September, when he was passing, and by then they were open.

 

What the signs show the camera footage reviewer is a coloured tab at the top of the sign, red when they are open and blue when they are closed. This should be checked before a PCN is issued. The tabs exist because the camera is located behind the signs.

On 11 September Mr Mustard challenged the PCN on the obvious grounds that the signs were not visible. When he checked the balance on line on 30 September it was zero.

Mr Mustard thought he would find out how many people were affected so he made an information request.

There are an awful lot of signs for Apcoa to get round. The benefiting schools could do it far more efficiently.

As you probably know the cctv camera footage is selected by a camera which can identify a movement within a certain area and then save about 15 seconds of footage for review by a human being later. It is possible for the whole process of requesting keeper details from DVLA, authorising and issuing a PCN and popping it in the post could all be done without human hand. What is meant to happen is that a human being looks at each clip and decides if a contravention has occurred or not and thus whether or not to authorise a PCN. In the council year to March 2025 Barnet Council issued just over 100,000 moving traffic PCNs so 2,000 or so a week to be watched.

Now Mr Mustard suspects that either automation has crept in and the human stage is sometimes skipped or that the person or persons who do this have turned into automatons and not checked the simple facts i.e. are the signs open or not.

Whichever is true, 20 unlawful PCNs were issued when there were no signs facing the drivers. Amazingly 10 of them were paid so that is either 10 inattentive people or 10 lease companies (or a mix) who just pay things and charge an admin fee without bothering to see what they are administering. Mr Mustard doesn't know when or why refunds got made but it might have been because of his request for information.

Drivers need to keep their eyes open so they don't get a PCN and once they do as errors do get made. 

The end. 

Islington Council - miserable money grubbers

 

A heating engineer arrived to do his work in a customer's home at 7:20am and paid £44.65 to park for the day. In the dark he mistook an E for a B and so paid for the wrong zone but the correct amount. We don't know if the street light was still on nor how much light it might cast from so high up, clearly not enough.

Inevitably a 'traffic warden' came along and issued a PCN for not paying as on his equipment he only searches for zone E payments.

Mr Mustard made both the informal challenge and the formal representations on the grounds of unjust enrichment and procedural unfairness. Islington Council are fighting the Appeal and their arguments include the following:

 and the relevant RingGo term is:

It is a simple fact that Islington Council chooses the payment provider, the motorist has no choice in the matter and no power being obliged to pay for parking the instant it occurs and not in a position to download the terms and try to renegotiate them if they are unfair, which they clearly are.

We aren't talking about a small sum here, £44 is 3 hours of the London Living Wage (£14.80 an hour).

Should Islington Council want to do the decent thing the PCN ref is IZ38531710.

The end (almost, hearing on 26 October). 

 

St Albans City Council automation error

 

Mr Mustard was approached by Mr F who had parked at the above spot in the dark and missed the sign. This was on 17 March.

On 29 March Mr F made his own informal challenge which was rejected.

After the issue of the Notice to Owner the formal representations were made by Mr Mustard on 29 May. They were to the effect that the alleged contravention was stated too vaguely on the PCN as it was 'Parked in a parking place or area not designated for that class of vehicle' without specifying the class of vehicle i.e. Goods vehicle. The second limb of the representation was that signage was inadequate without specifying why so equally vague.

A response was not received.

Mr Mustard keeps an eye on every PCN which he manages and each week he goes on line and looks at what the balance is as that gives a clue to the stage the PCN has reached. In some cases, such as Haringey and TfL you get a chronology of the steps.

On 30 June Mr Mustard saw that the balance had gone from £35 the week before to £70 which told him that a Notice of Rejection had been issued and the 14 days which St Albans had allowed for payment at a discount had expired and so he knew the Notice of Rejection had been lost in the post or possibly even not printed. He then knew to watch and wait for the Charge Certificate to be issued at which point the balance would be £105 and then for the Order for Recovery to be issued which increases the balance by £11 being the Court Fee payable when the PCN gets registered as a debt at the TEC - the Traffic and Enforcement Centre. The balance did indeed rise to !16 and Mr Mustard saw this when he checked on 29 July.

The registration of the PCN as a debt can be revoked by the filing of a witness statement that the Notice of Rejection was not received and then you go back to £70 and the council should refer the PCN to the independent tribunal, in this case the Traffic Penalty Tribunal for outside London.

The witness statement was filed by email on 6 August well inside the deadline of 4pm on 3 September. St Albans would have been told of the witness statement being filed within a day or two.

On 11 August Mr Mustard checked the on line balance to see if it was yet back to £70 and it was still £116. For whatever reason he next checked on 13 August when rather than going backwards in the process the PCN had leapt forward

After filing a complaint and some toing and froing the PCN finally got cancelled as the sending of the PCN to a bailiff, at a time when the PCN should not have been, it not yet being 3 September, was a procedural impropriety which leads automatically to cancellation at the tribunal.

Mr Mustard wondered what had gone wrong and how many time so he logged an information request.

The answer is below:

It isn't clear from the answer whether or not the 18 PCNs will be cancelled or not, the reference to appropriate handling being in Mr Mustard's eyes inappropriate, cancellation being the only proper course of action.

Mr Mustard had made his complaint on Saturday 17 August. It seems that is what set the hare running as St Albans were on to their software supplier on the second working day afterwards.

Other information was provided as to what went wrong:

Councils, not just St Albans, rely very heavily on automated software processing to manage the huge numbers of PCNs that get issued, c. 10m a year in London for example but just tens of thousands in St Albans. The danger comes when automation goes wrong, as in this case. 

It is incredibly worrying for a motorist that a PCN which he is fighting perfectly correctly in line with the legal process gets escalated to a bailiff who has draconian powers to relieve the public of their worldly goods. There was no mention of offering any sort of compensation to Mr F, a goodwill gesture of sending him £35 would go a long way to make a council look good in the eyes of the public.

With AI's relentless infiltration into many areas of life this sort of error can only arise more often in the future.

The end.