Newham Council are Cheats - #53

 

Well done Ms Reid you were a thorn (sorry) in the council's side.

This not being one of Mr Mustard's cases he doesn't know exactly where the car was parked but can hazard a rough guess from what google street view shows him.

The image above shows a bay without a sign. That makes it a free bay as the rules for every bay can be different and as the onus is on the council to erect and maintain adequate signage.

The next bay along has a sign but is separated by a disabled bay (which would be better with a sign and/or 'DISABLED' painted on the carriageway where it still can be seen after parking in that bay and by a section of pavement so the sign in this bay doesn't apply to the other bay or any other bay.

 There is no sign to say you can't park here, best for stretch limo owners.

 

 

Yet another location in Newham which has suffered from sign vandalism.

The PCN was unlawfully issued by the CEO, that is cheating.

The representations were clearly rejected by the back office, that too was cheating.

The tribunal is independent and free to the motorist, if your case is legally correct it should prevail.

The end. 

Hammersmith & Fulham Council - delay: avoidable & otherwise

 

On 30 June you lend your car to a friend to pop to the chemists for you and they drive this way as they are from overseas, don't know the area very well and have cognitive dissonance when it comes to open roads which aren't open. The blue must go left sign doesn't help.

On 10 July H&F issue a PCN by post. The motorist sends it to Mr Mustard.

On 26 July Mr Mustard makes the formal representations on line. He then watches and waits whilst checking the PCN value each week so he might know if something happens (not a foolproof system).

On 14 November H&F decide to reject the representation. There is a 56 day time limits for parking PCNs but not for moving traffic ones. The council need to act with reasonable expedition.

On 2 December Mr Mustard starts a tribunal Appeal, one of his points is the unreasonable delay (motorists never getting more than 28 days to do anything).

The tribunal set a hearing date of 13 May . At least 5 days before then it is the duty of H&F to provide the tribunal with all of the paperwork. There is a completely redacted email on 2 May about the case but the contents are top secret for some unknown and unfathomable reason.

On 4 May H&F produce the evidence pack. They have to serve it by post on Mr Mustard as he can legally insist on printed evidence.

On 5 May H&F manage to get it into the post.

Mr Mustard was working away from home and so only received it when he returned on Saturday 9 May after a 200 mile drive. Dealing with it had to wait for a short while.

On Monday 11 May he filed the skeleton argument which was certainly faster moving than H&F. What he didn't know about was the emailing going on about him at H&F which has only recently come to light & is a post-mortem of the hearing.

 

Mr Mustard has asked H&F to note that he is not and does not claim to be a solicitor. The complaint that he asks for a PCN to be cancelled if the evidence pack isn't sent to him but to the motorist is because the tribunal ask the Appellant (the motorist) to provide their proper address for service. Naturally and quite properly Mr Mustard uses his home address as most motorists are overwhelmed by 50-100 page evidence packs. That comment by H&F displays their ignorance of procedure and law.

It is wrong that Mr Mustard does not submit arguments. You have to tick a box stating the category of your argument in order to start an Appeal at the tribunal. He does add extra arguments if they arise from the evidence pack, he would be failing the motorist if he didn't. The law allows for that.

At the hearing an employee of H&F started by trying to get the skeleton argument struck out but the adjudicator was having none of it, it being clear it had been produced in very short order indeed. The delay by H&F however, was fatal to the PCN:

 

Finally, Mr Mustard does not look for loopholes as suggested. He looks for mistakes by councils and as H&F abundantly demonstrate, they make loads of them.

If and when he is sent the unredacted internal emails, there will be another blog. Doubtless the emails paint Mr Mustard in as black a light as the redacting ink. 

A costly bank statement

 

Mr Mustard had his attention drawn to this tribunal case by another expert. Both play with a straight bat with the tribunal as anything else would undermine your future credibility. Mr Mustard has accidentally said things which turned out not to be true and if that comes to light he puts his hand up during the hearing to admit he was wrong and to explain why or even in a later hearing with the same adjudicator. That is why his unsupported word as to facts can be accepted.

Not so in this case. One problem for the motorist is that if there were a league table of enforcement authorities and their diligence with PCNs Camden Council would generally be in the top 3.

The initial Appeal hearing did not go well for the motorist (often in the Court system an Appeal is against an earlier Court decision but in PCN circles it is an Appeal against the council's refusal to cancel).

The payment was thought of as a user error. The story could have stopped there with £160 to be paid. The motorist decided to ask for a 'Review'. These are rarely granted as that is how the system is designed because one hearing is proportionate to the penalty at issue. That hearing went badly for the motorist.

A back pedalling motorist isn't a good look. It looks like a narrow escape to me. Camden Council however, had done a lot of work and although costs are, by law, rarely awarded, they had put a lot of work in and wanted a contribution. There therefore had to be yet another hearing and the motorist was still keen to be heard:

The motorist's behaviour was found to be 'wholly unreasonable' which is one of the legal tests, frivolous or vexatious being the others.

Trying to hoodwink an adjudicator is pretty stupid, they do hundreds of PCN Appeals. They also have to be legally qualified and have been so for 5 years before they are eligible to become an adjudicator, they have doubtless assessed lots of evidence during their careers and won't easily be fooled. Just tell the truth and pay your PCN if you are bang to rights.

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 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. 

 

 

Newham Council are Cheats - #47

 

A thorough examination of the evidence by the Adjudicator but Newham Council was all at sea from the start. Every time an on street PCN is issued there should be a number of photographs which show the car registration and the car's position within a bay, the sign which applies and the car with the sign in context. The sign photo within the relevant bay doesn't exist in this case because the sign doesn't exist as the motorist affirmed.

Bog standard cheating by bog awful Newham Council.

The end. 

Newham Council are Cheats - #44

 

It is evident from google street view that this is a location where signs get damaged and by the evidence of this motorist removed altogther.

Fairly rourtine cheating by Newham Council. There was not a sign in the bay where the car was parked so the 'traffic warden' (CEO / officer) took a photograph of a sign in a different bay, one which unless you are informed by signage as to the rules may well have different ones.

Newham Council must know by now, this being one of dozens of cases Mr Mustard has written about that cpz signage does not set the restrictions for parking bays but only for unsigned yellow lines.

They removed the car to the pound so the traffic warden cheated, the back office cheated in rejecting perfect representations and in opposing the Appeal to the independent adjudicator who wasn't having any of it.

The end but not of cheating at Newham Council.

Hounslow Council - No comment = no penalties

 

Of a morning Mr Mustard makes himself a proper cup of tea, using leaves, and settles down to a quick perusal of the tribunal register for the previous day. When he sees an entry like the one above he is likely to click on one of the entries because it took a long time to decide and because of the multiplicity of PCN.

Mr Mustard is unfailingly polite to all adjudicators and given that Mr Teper is a former head of a Barrister's chambers and sat as a judge you aren't going to get anything dubious past him. Hounslow Council really got this wrong.

Hounslow Council were trying to obtain £3,200 from this lady. As she started 20 Appeals the council have had to pay out c.£600 in fees to the tribunal to hear the cases. Their stupidity and discourtesy in not responding to the tribunal and adjudicator has caused a massive loss to the borough.

This will be a useful decision to quote from in future multiple penalty cases (although not a precedent but merely legally persuasive). 

This is a location at which Mr Mustard has not been instructed although when he went online to view it he found it was near the former Brentford FC ground. This was the signage when the google street car went past

Mr Mustard doesn't have the images or video for the days in question. Whichever way the car came only one sign would be visible as they are angled. You also have to take in a cpz entry sign with standard hours and extra event day hours. By the time you have finished reading that you may miss the 'flying motorbike' sign.

Hopefully Hounslow Council will learn some manners for the future. Adjudicators don't forget much.

Newham Council are Cheats - #39

 

Bog standard cheating within Newham.

No sign = no notification of the restriction = no contravention which should equal no PCN.

Newham Council are Cheats - #38

 

It seems that the council didn't think to include photographs for the adjudicator of the wider context which per google street view, is as below:

If the council wish to treat this as a footpath then they need to add at a gate at this end to match the one at the other end:

You might think that it was a bold move to drive into there but if you look back at the first photograph there is a cul de sac sign which informs drivers that they won't be able to go far but does not ban entry and there is nothing which prohibits parking.

A PCN was not the solution to the perceived problem. 

Newham Council are Cheats - #30

 

'Traffic wardens' shouldn't be wandering onto private land to issue PCNs, that may be a trespass. 

Here is the location as it probably is today

The council's remit extends only as far as the fence line which, despite the absence of a fence, is the edge of the pavement, where the broadband cabinet is.

This is what it used to look like

The cheating never stops in Newham.

Newham Council are Cheats - #29

 

Another day, more routine cheating from Newham Council starting with their traffic warden and supported by the back office.

The signs have been a problem since at least 2022

The sign on the left is for a different bay than the sign on the right which is for the cars you can see.

In the above case the removal of the car to the car pound was unlawful, a shock to the motorist, a nuisance and probably a Human Rights breach. 

Cheating is still ongoing today.