The Friday Joke - Brian is mellowing

There is to be a vote of no confidence in the leader of Barnet Council, Richard Cornelius (Mr Mustard is perfectly OK with the man himself and is always trying to get him to play truant after meetings and come to the Greyhound for a pint - he would like to but is always very busy -  Mr Mustard often refers to him as the "leader" as he doesn't think he is much of one but must have some negotiating skills to have hung on despite so many debacles). Mr Mustard saw in the local paper that Corny is allowed to vote that he has confidence in himself and that struck Mr Mustard as most amusing as well as a bit sad and rather pragmatic.

The numbers are finely balanced with 32 Conservative councillors, 30 Labour & the Liberal-Democrat tour de force Jack Cohen. Now Mr Mustard doesn't presume to know which way Jack will vote and hasn't asked him but suppose for one moment he decides to vote that he doesn't have confidence in the Leader and that Corny wasn't allowed, or opted not to as a man of honour, vote, then there could with full attendance be 31 votes each way with the Mayor having the casting vote and we can guess that he would save Corny's skin as he was supported by his Leader in "LandlordGate". So as you can see ever vote is going to count and all it might take is one brave Conservative councillor to vote against, perhaps with another councillor who has ambitions to be deputy leader in support, and we are going to have a leadership contest. Such fun.

The newspaper article led to the following tweets (and there were other people who also tweeted) and although Brian has blocked Mr Mustard he couldn't resist commenting and instead of the rather "robust" comments he usually makes he mildly admonished Mr Mustard in the nicest way possible. Has Brian turned over a new leaf?

Will we see him next in Cafe Buzz with a bunch of flowers and a fulsome written apology and having his breakfast there every day as the start of his rehabilitation programme to re-enter politics (now you have taken a joke too far Mr Mustard and diverted into the realms of fantasy: Ed)

Have a good weekend all and don't take any chances with your parking as Mr Mustard is about to be exceptionally busy with a surfeit of work.

Mr Mustard

Big Brother Blue Bin Bugs in Barnet

Bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug...................

Credit for this story has to go to a former and a serving councillor, both of whom have or had reservations about the recently introduced blue bin system. Mr Mustard is sure that, like him, they understand the need for recycling but they also value openness and transparency.

The first mentioned, the former councillor, is Brian Coleman who mentioned the bins were bugged some months ago. Mr Mustard seems to think that it was in a tweet but as Brian has disabled his account that tweet is history and old ones are hard to find. Mr Mustard's memory is that Brian thought the offending bug was behind the label, which it could have been as there are some like the one below which could be hidden there

but it wasn't. Mr Mustard then thought that the QR code must identify the property so he scanned it and got taken to the council web page on Recycling.

Mr Mustard then turned to the Internet and found the answer. The RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) bug is hidden under the lip of the bin, like so

the bug is the black circle with the 4 round holes

 and if you would like a closer look at the bug on its own, here it is

so that is a plastic cup containing a little electronic device and then it is filled with epoxy resin which sets, which contains your address (and goodness knows what else, Mr Mustard will ask) and which enables the council to track how much recycling you put out each week as the bin lorry can read the RFID when it is within 10cm of it and the new bin lorries weigh the bins as they go.

These little devices screw out if you have a suitable tool which Mr Mustard doesn't but you will find that with a strong screwdriver and a little leverage (wear gloves and safety specs please) the bug will be lifted out of its little hidey hole.

Some time back Mr Mustard tweeted the council as to who owns the blue bins i.e. is it the council or the resident but he doesn't recall getting a reply. Almost certainly if you have to pay for a replacement it must be you. If replacements are free then the council can argue that the bins are theirs thus the bug also belongs to them (even though they buy everything with the money that tax payers give them) and so you shouldn't destroy the bug. Make a little home for it somewhere safe in the house.

The Internet warned Mr Mustard that bin lorries could be programmed to not lift a bin which doesn't contain a bug. A clever but devious extra check on residents. He had to wait until blue bin day to find that his bugless blue bin was lifted into the air and emptied as per usual.

Readers may well recall that we had to have new bin lorries when recycling was brought back in house (and now there is talk of moving it out again; change is expensive so Mr Mustard hopes that idea comes to nothing). This must have been so that ones enabled to read RFID chips were obtained. The specification for the bins included that they would have RFID capacity and this may be the extra technical feature that won the contract for SSI Schaefer.

Now to the second councillor, the serving one, Cllr Khatri. Mr Mustard went to the first meeting of the Performance and Contract Monitoring Committee on 11 June. Here is the video. You can see Lyn Bishop the Director of Streetscene on goodness knows how much a year (when in 2011 she was an Assistant Director she was paid £88,986 p.a.) at about 21m 45s into the film talking about a possible reward/recognition scheme in a year or so when there is enough data and at 29m 30s up to 35m Cllr Khatri giving the secret nature of the scheme a good kicking, the sound could be better so he says

"the council........being very underhand"

Performance and Contract Management Committee Wednesday 11th June Item 5- from The Barnet Bugle Ltd on Vimeo.

Thanks as ever to Dan Hope of the Barnet Bugle for filming which gives us bloggers a backup resource to check that we haven't scribbled something down wrongly. There is a plan to change the layout of this committee so that the officers do not have to disrespectfully turn their backs on the public in future.

So when asked why the bugs were fitted to the bins the answer was to start collecting data, to enable a process of education and to bring in a reward / recognition scheme in a year's time. Later on Mrs Bishop says data isn't being collected at the moment but Mr Mustard is not convinced of that as otherwise how can an incentive scheme (we are to get points apparently) be worked out. Mr Mustard also thinks it is wrong headed. He already recycles all he can. So let's measure it. He generates say 10kg of materials each week. He will get points to turn into,say, Argos vouchers (just like the traffic wardens aren't incentivised?) if he generates 15kg of recycled materials a week. The only way to do that is to consume more (hic) or when he is looking after the neighbours' cats to tip their blue bin into his! Neighbours already share bins to save on clutter so who will get rewarded? and more likely, will the person who appears not to recycle at all get a letter and threatened with prosecution. The stick has been much more common than the carrot in Barnet hitherto. Will the cost of administration work out more than the value of the data collected or the extra recycling that has been generated?

As you will see from the video, Cllr Khatri was unhappy that the public generally didn't know about the bugs being in the bins, that they can be weighed and recorded to their address (this won't work at all in flats who have communal bins nor for the people who have asked for bags instead as they have no front garden, and the bags won't be bugged) and he thinks that the council have been very underhand.

Mr Mustard agrees with you Cllr Khatri.

This is typical behaviour of a council and especially of Barnet Council. Let us remind ourselves what the Chief Operating Officer claimed in the Guardian on 22 October 2013 

"The default setting is open government"

When did the new recycling system with undisclosed bugs start?

14 October 2013.

Has Barnet Council been open on bin bugs?

Has it hell as like.

You know what to do if you don't want big brother in your bin, simply remove and keep the bug safe. You are only obliged to recycle, not to submit to intrusive and undisclosed monitoring. 

Please do recycle though.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Paying for parking took 59 minutes

The below is an edited version of a recent PATAS adjudication of a PCN issued to a motorist who parked in the Stanhope Road Car Park and did their best to follow the system, if you can call the way we have to pay a system.

There is no dispute as to the whereabouts of vehicle on the material date; namely at a location requiring the purchase of time to park and the display of a paid-for time voucher and/or facilitating the purchase of parking time by telephone payment.

The Enforcement Authority assert the absence of payment/display in respect of the said vehicle.

The Appellant denies liability for the ensuing Penalty Charge Notice on the basis of the prevailing circumstances as contained in her written representations, supported by mobile device screen-shots and Freedom of Information documentation.

The evidence upon which the Enforcement Authority rely to substantiate the assertion comprises the certified copy Penalty Charge Notice, extracts of governing Traffic Management Order provisions, and computer-generated notes made by the Civil Enforcement Officer together with photographic evidence: still frames revealing the said vehicle in situ, and the applicable signage notifying motorists of the restriction.

The Appellant indicated the full circumstances encountered at the location and clearly described the sequence of events to the Enforcement Authority from the outset, including forwarding copy mobile device screen-shots demonstrating the on-going exchange commenced  at 9.41 a.m. and resolved at 10.40 a.m.

The Penalty Charge Notice was issued during the currency of such payment transaction.

A motorist must be afforded sufficient reasonable time to comply with the requirements of a parking regime, whether that be attending at a voucher-dispensing machine, obtaining and completing a visitor's permit, or completing a telephone payment transaction.

I find the Appellant's evidence to be cogent and credible and I accept it in its entirety.

The points raised by the Appellant deserved proper consideration and due response, I therefore carefully examined the wording of both the Notice of Rejection itself, and the Case Summary to assist in my determination as to whether or not the Enforcement Authority had accorded requisite consideration as it is obliged so to do. 

I note an overt failure to adequately identify/rebut or retort to the Appellant's issues in the Notice of Rejection; a 'belief' that cancellation would be 'inappropriate' does not meet the criteria. Further I observe there to be a similar lacking of compliance of the same in the Case Summary, which infers that since the scenario did not come within an Appeal Ground it was not entertained.

I concluded that the Enforcement Authority had not discharged its fundamental duty under Regulation 5(2)(b) of the Civil Enforcement of Parking Contraventions (England) Representations & Appeals Regulations 2007 which I find to be a 'procedural impropriety' on the part of the Enforcement Authority.

Accordingly, this Appeal is allowed.  (thus the PCN was cancelled)

What a state of affairs when a motorist has to faff about for 59 minutes making payment in a Car Park where the minimum time you can pay for is 30 mins at a cost of 75p (per the council website) and where the business they wanted to transact might only have taken 15 minutes.

If this doesn't show that Pay By Phone is not the solution, when to insert real coins would have taken less than a minute, then what does?

What an omnishambles.

Well done to the motorist for sticking it out all the way to PATAS, Mr Mustard salutes you. NSL, acting as the council's agent, garner no credit for making the motorist go all the way to PATAS at Islington and for doing a poor job of answering the motorist's challenge.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Message for Brian Coleman from the real world

Here is a recent report from PATAS.

The Appellant attended in person together with a witness Mr B. Also in attendance was Ms. S, a BSL/English interpreter who interpreted for the Appellant and Mr B. The Authority did not attend and it was not represented.

The Appellant showed me her mobile phone which showed that on 28 October 2013, at around 11:59, she sought to register for payment by text. She received a text to say that she should send register by calling, going on line, or by texting her registration number to 65565. The Appellant used text. The next thing that happened was that a call was received. The Appellant has recorded an incomplete number +44330400.... The Appellant presumed that this was from Pay by Phone but as she could not conduct a transaction by phone she went to seek help and the PCN was issued during that time.

The Authority said that payment being made by text would never trigger a voice call. It drew my attention to the published pay by phone document. The Appellant did not say that she started to pay by text, nor had I suggested that she said that. I told the Authority that the Appellant said that she was trying to register by text so that she could make a payment by text. There is no information from the Pay and phone document to confirm that no voice calls would be sent under these circumstances, and the evidence tended to suggest that a voice call from a pay by phone number was registered on the Appellant's phone.

The Authority re-iterated that the Appellant should not have left her vehicle until she got a confirmation message. The Appellant and Mr B. cannot communicate by voice. They must therefore seek help if a voice call reaches her phone and that was what she did.

The Authority had taken the trouble to understand what I tried to ascertain from them. I am giving the Appellant the benefit of the doubt. I am allowing the appeal.

What a catalogue of errors.

Error 1 - removing cash parking meters

Brian's decision (Mr Mustard may refer to Councillor Brian Coleman as Brian but has never been introduced, oh how you now envy Mr Mustard!, but has merely nodded at him once when he was also in the public gallery at a committee meeting and some problem with parking got a mention, and he has of course seen the back of him, the one thing everyone wants? through the glass of the public gallery at Uxbridge Magistrates Court) to remove cash parking meters has evidently caused problems for the deaf. What Brian did was to make a decision that put administrative simplicity and expense before the needs of some of the disadvantaged in society, whose real world is much harder to cope with than his.

Error 2 - over zealous enforcement

If there was a longer period of observation (it doesn't have to be continuous, the traffic warden jots your details down and comes back later), of say 15 minutes, then the time it takes for anyone to go to a Paypoint shop (Mr Mustard was 6th in the queue at one in N Finchley this weekend and the first person seemed to be buying 1000 lottery tickets) or to a trader for a voucher or to find someone to help a deaf person, would reduce the number of tickets given out during the time it sometimes takes to pay or to get a visitor voucher from a resident.

Error 3 - NSL handling appeals badly

NSL have evidently failed to consider whether the motorist was actually deaf or not (and for PATAS it was easier because the deaf lady chose to attend in person) and they probably distrust ever letter they receive and, if so, are not properly considering representations as the legislation requires. They have relied upon a printed guide to PayByPhone which motorists don't carry about with them. NSL keep putting 50 page prints of the guide (android and iphone) into Evidence Packs they send to Mr Mustard which part he throws straight into the recycling because they are an irrelevance. They also signally failed to answer the actual question that the Adjudicator, always a lawyer who has done thousands of parking tickets Appeals, asked them. A schoolboy error.

It would be hard to find a worse combination than One Barnet outsourcing and Brian's historic unilateral money centred decision making.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

RAC report on excessive council parking surpluses

Barnet Council - figures from SPA reports

The RAC Foundation have produced a great report on council parking income, here.

They have used the figures found in official returns of income and expenditure but Mr Mustard thinks they show a misleading picture (don't blame the RAC) and so he has done a comparison to the figures shown in the SPA, the Special Parking Account, which he thinks shows a clearer, more accurate picture. The SPA excludes income from off-street car parks which for 12/13 was £444,000 & which was down on previous years, due in the opinion of Mr Mustard, to the removal of cash parking meters and the hiking of charges during the rein of Cllr Brian Coleman as the cabinet member with responsibility for parking (he would disagree of course! & the council committee report blames the recession).

Barnet Council parking surpluses

Year	RAC £	SPA £
09/10	2,904,000	2,744,694
10/11	1,307,000	2.088.340
11/12	-156,000	5,708,039
12/13	unknown	7,193,142

What is clear from this table is that the way in which parking income and expenditure is reported leads to lower reported surpluses overall than are actually the case. The RAC say Barnet Council's costs doubled over 2 years which is not shown in the SPA figures, which apart from the year of getting ready to out-source, with attendant costs, shows costs are steadily reducing.

Year	Costs £
09/10	6,751,712
10/11	6,271,885
11/12	6,567,971
12/13	4,661,253

One thing is clear; Barnet Council is making excessive surpluses from parking and the effects are visible in empty High Streets and this is a policy they have been following since 09/10 to steadily increase the surplus from parking which, in effect, subsidises council tax.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Footnote: Mr Mustard wonders if the reason for the loss in the RAC's figures in 11/12 is because c. 450 parking meters were thrown on the scrap heap and the depreciated capitalised cost remaining on the books had to be written off. If there were 450 meters at an average installation cost of say £5,000 were written off on a straight line basis over, say, 4 years then the Accounts would have taken a one-off hit of £1,125,000. Mr Mustard can't ask the council as they are refusing to ask his perfectly reasonable questions on parking. You can ask.

Open letter from the Barnet Bloggers

Were Barnet's Tory councillors secretly whipped? 
Barnet bloggers call for an investigation.

At Barnet Council’s full council meeting on 16 July, Councillor Brian Coleman alleged that Barnet’s Conservative members are ‘entirely whipped’ when attending scrutiny and other Council meetings, including those dealing with the highly controversial One Barnet privatisation programme.

According to the Council’s constitution, any whipping arrangements must be declared, but we believe that no such declarations have been made at any of the relevant recent meetings. Such actions would be in breach of the constitution and therefore unlawful.

If Councillor Coleman’s allegations are true, this clearly has very serious implications and casts into doubt the legality of many of the highly significant decisions which have been taken by the current administration, most importantly the decision to grant two massive contracts to Capita and Capita Symonds in the outsourcing of a large number of our local council services.

We therefore call on the Leader of the council, Councillor Richard Cornelius, to instigate an immediate and independent public inquiry into the claims made by his former colleague, and we also ask that the authority’s external auditors at Grant Thornton should as a matter of public interest hold an urgent inquiry into the allegations. Residents need to know whether decisions have been made legally and whether Tory councillors have acted constitutionally.

Signed:

Derek Dishman
John Dix
Vicki Morris
Theresa Musgrove
Roger Tichborne

19 July 2013

Verrus - PayByPhone - Not a bargain

You go abroad for a few days and you come home to an unexpectantly high bill or you let your child have your iPad and suddenly you owe £thousands; that is just like getting Verrus to supply a cash free service for parking (cash free not cost free).

Let us wind back to Cllr Brian Coleman's delegated powers report of August 2011, DPR 1375, entitled "Cashless Parking July 2011" which is reproduced for you here in all of its glory (gory?)

1375 - Cashless Parking July 2011 by MisterMustard

What gems did this DPR contain?

para 3.2 - ‘Pay by Phone’ or ‘Cashless’ technology is inexpensive to set up and administer.

para 5.1 - Estimated costs for the necessary signage work would be approximately £160,000

para 5.2 - In addition, the removal of machines including making good the footway would entail civil works estimated in the region of £80,000

para 5.4 Savings

	(£) Cost / (Savings ) Full Year
Pay by Phone fees (additional cost)	£80,000
Pay and display maintenance costs	-£200,000
Pay and display running costs	-£20,000
Cash collection costs	-£220,000
Staffing costs (E&O)	-£100,000
Totals	-£460,000

So moving to PayByPhone was meant to save bundles.

Para 8.10 - To date pay by phone transactions account for nearly 50% of all pay-at-time-of-parking transactions (Mr Mustard might just have to check this statement for veracity).

Let us see what we saved. Here are the PayByPhone costs for the year to March 13

Date	Invoice	Month	PbP on £	PbP off £	Paypoint £
11/07/2012	12958	May	26,504.52
09/08/2012	13325	June		2,706.74
09/08/2012	13326	June	21,114.32
09/08/2012	13327	July	23,146.21
09/08/2012	13328	July		2,926.98
17/09/2012	13755	Aug	20,094.95	2,623.79
30/09/2012	14046	Sept	22,671.82
30/09/2012	14047	Sept		3,013.97
08/11/2012	14521	June			188.15
08/11/2012	14521	Sept			302.36
08/11/2012	14521	July			305.60
08/11/2012	14521	Aug			308.60
13/11/2012	14572	Oct	24,178.39	3,426.97	358.76
10/12/2012	14917	Nov	24,847.25	3,406.22	448.66
11/01/2013	15314	Dec	22,295.72	3,273.92	337.83
12/02/2013	15759	Jan	23,666.62	3,127.11	108.81
13/03/2013	16255	Feb	23,420.68	3,086.34	491.98
29/03/2013	16598	Mar	24,902.20	3,274.27
		Totals	256,842.68	30,866.31	2,850.75

which gives a total paid to Verrus/Paypoint via NSL of £290,559.

Amounts paid to park in the year were £2,945,682 so after allowing for a few sales of vouchers by shops we are looking at 10% of all parking income going to Verrus/Paypoint. It seems a lot for simply accepting money that people willingly want to pay. Mr Mustard is a debt collector and doesn't usually earn more than 10% of sums paid by debtors who don't want to pay willingly! Did Barnet Council negotiate fees hard enough? Do they even understand commerce?

The Verrus payments in the year ended March 2011, before parking meters were removed, was £58,221 and so the extra amount has not gone up by £80,000 but by £222,000 which wipes out all of the saving of the cash collection team.

It cost £240,000 to change the signs, remove the meters and repair the pavements afterwards so that means the net saving from this change for a whole year was a mere £80,000.

Now the businesses Mr Mustard has spoken to have suffered a drop in trade of a conservative 30%. We have 20 or so centres of shopping all with 50 to 100 shops. Let us suppose a typical shop has a turnover of £100,000 (again there will be many which were much higher). So the value of trade lost to the High Street by the bonkers policy of not having cash parking meters (and do see my post of yesterday about the prevalence of cash as a medium of payment) is

20 * 75 * £100,000 * 30% = £4,500,000 which is probably a massive under estimate.
Barnet Council exists in order to serve its residents and businesses. It is serving only itself by the policy of cashless parking.

By worrying about the cost of the service and not taking sufficient account of the value of the service the council have saved a small amount of money and badly hampered many businesses.

Much as Mr Mustard would be delighted to see the signatory of this DPR, Cllr Brian Coleman, leave the council and take up a post in the real world, Mr Mustard can't bring himself to write a reference that would help. Brian isn't solely to blame as no officer appears to have stood up and said what a bonkers policy it was and the "leader" of the council, Richard Cornelius didn't step in and stop the obvious madness.

If only traders had been consulted. Oh, they have been in North Finchley, Chipping Barnet, Edgware and East Finchley and all have asked for cash parking meters and the council are deaf to their pleas.

Cllr (Dean) Cohen rules out the return of cash machines

The time has come to listen.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Cash is King (not bling)

Thank you to the British parking Association (not something Mr Mustard types very often) for bringing to his attention a press release from the Payments Council trailing their lovely £750 report. Mr Mustard wonders if bloggers count as journalists so that he can have a free copy (how about it Bugle Dan?). Actually he doesn't need it as what he needs to know is in the press release.

Oh dear Cllr Brian Coleman, your adventurous (another word for foolhardy) decision in mid 2011 to remove cash parking meters was pants (moist gusset variety)(Mr Mustard apologises to anyone who now has an image of BC in his pants)

and Cllr Dean Cohen you need to get Officers to take another look at their/your stubborn refusal to countenance cash parking meters. We need them, there is demand. Bring them back and businesses across Barnet will sing your praises (and remember you in May 14). It is a mark of a great leader that they recognise duff decisions and correct them. We now have meters which will take cash, they have had the slots covered!

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Famous five Barnet Bloggers' open letter

Silence has been golden these last few months on the subject of the alleged assault of Helen Michael, a cafe owner (those words may come back to haunt you Richard Cornelius) which turned out, and no Barnet blogger ever doubted Helen for a moment, to be a real assault, if Brian had swng Helen around much more he could have been appearing in Dancing on Ice, and now finally disciplinary action is to be taken.

Barnet's Bloggers don't sit silent and we have written to the current "leader" of the council, Richard Cornelius demanding some action.You didn't show any leadership Richard last September did you?

This is what we wrote:

Dear Mr Cornelius

On Friday 3 May Councillor Brian Coleman pleaded guilty to the charge of common assault by beating of Helen Michael, in the High Road in North Finchley. Evidence from CCTV was shown in court and proved incontrovertibly that this incident was nothing less than an utterly indefensible act of aggression. It resulted from Councillor Coleman being caught parking in a loading bay, trying to evade the hugely controversial parking payment scheme he had imposed on residents in this borough.

Despite the fact that he has now been convicted of a criminal act of assault, Barnet Council has refused to comment, absurdly claiming that this is unnecessary as the attack did not take place while the Councillor was on council business.

Indeed local Tory members, including leader Richard Cornelius, openly continued to support their fellow member after he was charged, and were privately informing others that the story of the assault was false. Councillor Coleman was suspended from the party only after intervention from Conservative Central Office. Since the conviction, local Conservatives have issued no statement.
By his own actions Councillor Coleman has shown himself to be unfit for public office: such bullying behaviour, dishonesty and hypocrisy are not acceptable in an elected representative of the community. We demand therefore that he stand down from his seat in Totteridge, and that the Conservative Party expel him from membership.

We call on Richard Cornelius, as leader of Barnet Council, and on behalf of the Conservative Party in this borough, to apologise to Ms Michael, and to dissociate himself and his colleagues from this appalling incident. To remain silent is not an option: to remain silent is to condone an act of violence against a woman, and this was and must always be absolutely unacceptable.

Signed:

Derek Dishman
John Dix
Vicki Morris
Theresa Musgrove
Roger Tichborne

Richard always seems to be on holiday when the proverbial hits the wotsit. Welcome back to Barnet, Richard.

Don't expect the pressure to relent between now and May 2014; will you bother standing?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

A moment of Madness

The Madness of the King of Bling

tarnished bling

From Brian's low rent flat (fancy thinking in Court that the whole world didn't know where he lives, you only have to follow the gritting lorry as it leaves the depot) to the cashpoint at HSBC in Finchley High Road is a mere 0.8 miles which one can walk, per google, in 16 minutes or cycle it in half of that. Why oh why did Brian feel the need to take the car that fateful day in September 2012 when he needed some cash for his handyman. Mr Mustard frequently walks from the junction between Etchingham Park Rd and Ballards Lane back to Cafe Buzz as it saves his pennies, being outside the CPZ, and gives him much needed exercise. It is probably how he got falsely accused of stalking councillors although the blogger bus having his name on the side makes it a bit obvious! Incidentally google streetmap was updated on the day the Olympic torch came through, there are cones everywhere.

History

First some history for non-Barnet Residents. In the spring of 2011 Brian Coleman was the Cabinet Member with responsibility for parking. Although he loves driving, badly it seems as he is always picking up points, 

(and we are all guilty of that occasionally. Mr Mustard took his road legal race track Aprilia Tuono V4 to Uxbridge as that gave him free parking in the residents' bays and he looked away from the road for a few seconds and when he looked back a car had stopped a bike length in front of him. Emergency application of the front brakes saw the front tyre bite into the road suface, thankfully better in the LB of Hillingdon than in the LB of Barnet, and the rear wheel lift of the ground! This is a trick known as a stoppie for those who don't ride. Don't try this at home. It puts your heart into your mouth. A collision was averted which is just as well as the bike cost as much as a medium sized car and would have probably been a write-off)

he wasn't averse to punishing the motorist with a massive hike in charges. The charge for parking all day on street was increased from £4 to £7 i.e. by 75% (no-one at the council knows anything about elasticity of demand) and visitor vouchers, which are meant to be concessionary, from £1 to £4 for a day, an increase of 300%. At the same time the price for a resident to park their first car within the CPZ was increased from £40 p.a. to £100 p.a. an increase of 150%. These changes are the subject of a Judicial Review which is expected to come before the High Court on or about 2 July (Mr Mustard is taking all of his annual holidays in Court this year). These changes were the first event to catapult Mr Mustard into blogging.

Although Brian was the lead councillor for parking, there is collective irresponsibility in the Cabinet who met on 14 February 2011 (The Valentines Day Massacre of motorists and businesses?) and agreed to the increases having plainly failed to apply any restraint to their over enthusiastic colleague. The entire Cabinet should be ashamed of their failure to act which has contributed to the enormous financial pressures piled onto the businesses of our High Streets and should have prevented Brian from pursuing an obviously bonkers policy. I doubt they had all read every line of the Cabinet papers as surely otherwise they would have moderated the worse excesses?

Then during the summer of 2011 Brian signed a Delegated Powers Report to remove all the parking meters in the whole of Barnet, approx 450 parking meters which each cost £4,000 to buy and install, hence about £1.8m worth and turned it into scrap for which less than £10,000 was recovered. Brian did have the power to sign the DPR as technically in the relevant legislation this was a minor amendment although it had major consequences. When the legislation was enacted pay-by-phone probably didn't exist.

Parking meters were removed in late 2011 and early 2012 and this left motorists without both a mobile phone and a credit or debit card at a huge disadvantage. Trade for businesses plummeted by 30% and has not been recovered.

Slowly, card only parking meters are being reintroduced but they do not fix the problem for the unbanked.

What history could have been like.

What could have happened that fateful day in September 2012 when Helen Michael of Cafe Buzz was tipped off by an observant friend that Brian Coleman had naughtily stopped his car in a loading bay in order to use the cashpoint.

Brian could have laughed, given Helen a wave, got back into his car with Tom and driven carefully away.

Helen is one of the team when it comes to bloggers and she would have given the footage to bloggers. It would have appeared on various blogs and for a day or two Brian would have been the centre of attention. Brian could have agreed to pay the equivalent of a Penalty Charge to the Lord Mayor's charity. Given his record for outrageous statements and behaviour the matter would have been just a small extra blot on his copybook.

Brian would then have had less of the Barnet blogosphere rowed up against him (red, blue, green, yellow supporters all got together and the ABC campaign, Anyone But Coleman, gathered momentum) and might not have lost his seat on the London Assembly. That would have allowed him to remain on the Fire Authority and there would have been no need for him to stand down as Chairman of the Budget & Performance Overview & Scrutiny Committee or lose his place on the NLWA. 

Mr Mustard went to the last meeting which he chaired, having asked Richard Cornelius why Brian was still being allowed to chair it after his arrest (rules of the council's due process apparently, the full council had to remove him as chair, although Mr Mustard thinks Richard was too frit to do anything) and one thing he will say for Brian is that he had clearly read all of the papers, knew what was in them and stood no nonsense from committee members although he was a horrible bully to members of the public.

Conclusion

So if Brian had walked away and paid £110 to charity he might not have lost about £110,000 off his annual income and would not now have a criminal offence on his record, look, it is already on Wikipedia.

It is reported in the Telegraph that Brian was hated by a section of the Barnet community, a large cross section Mr Mustard would hazard, however Mr Mustard reckons that Brian's biggest enemy is, himself.

The Future

Mr Mustard would expect any other person to do the honourable thing now and resign and leave public service (oh how we laughed when that old chestnut was advanced in Court, how Brian has dedicated himself) do some charity work (helping victims of crime perhaps?) and get a proper job and sink out of public sight.

As this is Brian we are talking about the future won't be that predictable.

Will bloggers still be writing about Brian in May 2014? Come back then and find out.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard