Newham Council are Cheats - #31

 

This is the same situation as occurred in cheat #9 Newham Council should not be blaming the motorist when they know from other cases that their system was at fault.

It is a blatant lie that the payer can choose the amount to pay. Mr Mustard tested the payment system with an old overdue PCN of a client and got the following answer:

The payment amount is fixed by the system.

Newham Council dropped a clanger and need to 'suck it up'.

Newham Council are Cheats - #9

 

The reader might think that Newham Council have cheated themselves in this type of case rather than be the cheat but they are 100% in control of the sum demanded. Paying on line gives the council complete control over the amount that can be paid, you cannot for example pay £110 on line if the PCN has advanced to the £165 stage, except by posting in a cheque and that won't stop the process whereas paying on line usually does.

This is not the only case in which £1 has appeared. In another case, which might appear later, Newham Council denied that it was possible for their system to demand the incorrect sum but of course sensible motorists have taken screen shots of the error and the usual band of experts knew of the glitch.

What was cheating was to object to the settlement that Newham Council had themselves offered, which had been accepted, and put the motorist through the tribunal system.

Hatton Garden robbery foiled

Mr Gold (not his real name) parked his car in Hatton Garden within the confines of a painted bay that usually had just the one parking sign but on this occasion didn't have one at all. Essentially, due to missing signage, the bay was a free bay (not many of those in central London). If this is a situation that you encounter take a photo of the car which includes in the background the location of the missing sign then you have proof of the facts at the time of parking in case the sign gets replaced whilst you are away from your car.

Mr Gold knew he had not done anything wrong so he made his own informal challenge (as representations against a PCN are known at the first stage). He expected a cancellation as he pointed out that the sign which had been photographed was from the next bay and so not applicable (although by design they are often the same but not necessarily so) and here it is.

The blue shop sign and yellow banner are not above the bay in which the car was parked.

The council's response was designed solely to try and extract £40 from an innocent Mr Gold.

The first line encapsulates the challenge and so that is what the response should focus on.

It doesn't matter if the CEO (traffic warden) observed the vehicle for 5 minutes or 5 hours, no contravention had taken place. Within that 5 minutes the traffic warden had plenty of time to note that the bay did not have a sign and so there was nothing to enforce (had it been a loading bay with Loading Only marked on the road the answer might be different).

The vehicle was not '8 yards from a time plate warning drivers of the restrictions in place' as that sign (which was more than 8 yards away) was in a different place, the next bay along, separated by a yellow line. It was no more relevant than a sign on the opposite side of the road or one in Hatton Cross.

In Hatton Garden the bays are individually numbered with the one the car was in appearing to be 13355 (which a motorist wouldn't know as the sign is missing) and the one which the traffic warden took a photograph of being 13354. If you pay in the wrong bay you get a PCN so the advice to pay for the wrong location number was bad advice. Here is one sample adjudication decision, there are hundreds of them.

The writer of this terrible rejection, whose name Mr Mustard knows but has decided to withhold, creates a non-existent duty on the motorist to make up for council deficiencies by refusing to park without payment and going somewhere else where the council has managed to maintain its signs to park and pay (Mr Mustard doubts they get vandalised much given the private security which operates up and down the road).

When a council employee says they are 'unable' to withdraw (they mean cancel) the penalty charge on this occasion they are writing piffle. If a council can't withdraw a charge when it is point blank wrong, then they never can. What they meant was that they were 'unwilling' to, a council has an absolute power to cancel any PCN including one that is 100% correct and obviously they can and should when 100% wrong as in this case.

A friend of Mr Gold knew of Mr Mustard and so matters moved swiftly on. Now that Mr Mustard has been interested in PCNs for over a decade he has some contacts within management at councils and Camden was one such. This way he can sidestep the restrictive rules about only making representations at certain times and bring to the attention of management a problem which would cause them more trouble if left to fester.

This is what he sent to a senior manager at Camden Council. Polite but pointed.

The manager was quick to act with Mr Mustard getting a response on the same day as his complaint was read. All of sudden, someone who knew what they were about was writing and the content was much more acceptable. No ifs, no buts, 'we were wrong, we will learn'. Lovely to see.

The only thing that bothers Mr Mustard at the end of this is how many other nonsense letters have been sent and led to wrongful payments by the innocent public but at least this one was quickly sorted.

End.

Sign your rights away

Here is the side of view of some recent parking, the most left hand end is where the car which was given a PCN was parked. This is Golders Green Crescent.

From the end of the bay, this is the view of the sign; what sign? It has been engulfed by foliage. You can see how a motorist might have parked thinking there wasn't a restriction.

Now, from google street view, the scene, and you can see another bay to the right with a clear sign.

The hedge hadn't swallowed the sign at that point.

How can a traffic warden give out a PCN in such a situation? Sometimes by bending back the foliage and then taking a photograph. Not this time though, the sign is clear as a bell.

How can that be? Simple, the traffic warden photographed the sign from the next bay along and the white house is the clue in the background. Mr Mustard can hear you thinking; you are thinking that the sign for each bay can be different and you are correct, the sign within a bay applies to that bay alone.

Thus the traffic warden has been either a cheat or indiligent. It is helpful though as the traffic warden had to walk past the sign for the bay in which the car was parked to get to the one they photographed, well that excuses the motorist not seeing the proper, but hidden, sign.

Mr Mustard doesn't like injustice so he has filed a complaint. Let's see how long this PCN lives for. It would be fair to give the motorist £55 for this mistake, the same sum as they would have had to pay if the sign had been visible and they missed it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Update: 24 September 2019. The motorist has received a letter cancelling the PCN.

NSL traffic warden - incompetent or a cheat?

Dear xxxx (name redacted by Mr Mustard)

Oh dear, a rotten case for you to read about this morning and one which, if you cancel the ticket quickly, will reflect well on you and remedy some of the bad publicity that Barnet Council is about to get.

In the good old coins (days!), when we had cash parking meters, if a meter was out of order the motorist was expected to find the next nearest one and get a ticket from there and there was no question of a parking ticket being issued. When we changed to pay-by-phone the rules were deviously changed and this has given the council more opportunity to issue Penalty Charge Notices which are the mainstay of the special parking account. If you now pay using the wrong bay number you get ticketed as not having paid (for the correct location which may be as small as a 1 car space, 2 in this particular instance) and people take their cases to PATAS and usually lose on this point (although they may still get their ticket cancelled for some other reason). All errors (this word should have been "appeals")  to Barnet Council for innocent error are pretty much automatically construed against the motorist. The most extreme example of this was seen in the PATAS case 2120534362 when a motorist lost his appeal to the independent adjudicator, the first digit of the bay code being wrongly entered and the motorist ending up paying for parking somewhere in Canada, an obvious injustice, the system having been negligently designed in not stopping such an eventuality.

Now what if the traffic warden makes an error, or deliberately photographs the wrong bay in order to issue a PCN for non-payment. I think that compensation of the equivalent amount (£60 in this case, £30 if you pay within 14 days) should be made to the motorist who has been subjected to stress, inconvenience & time-wasting or is the subject of an attempted fraud.

Here are the two photographs from the council website. The first one clearly shows the vehicle parked on the south side of Percy Rd

and this next one shows the north side of Percy Rd.

As soon as I saw these photos I knew that the warden had used the wrong bay sign (whether accidentally in which case they aren't fit to do the job, or deliberately in which case they should be sacked as we don't want a cheat working on our behalf in Barnet) and here is the proof in the form of two more photographs that I took yesterday.

This photo clearly shows Cafe Buzz and the adjacent hairdressers which you can match to the council's photo with the car in it.

and here from the other side of the road, is the bay sign with the yellow computer sign on the wall behind it.

There has been an epidemic of missing PCN cases at PATAS and in this case the PCN went missing from the car. I have heard stories of traffic wardens issuing PCN, taking photos and then removing the tickets and walking off. I ask myself if that happened in this case?

It is clear though from the blacked out sign that the traffic warden was desperate to issue a ticket and so crossed the road and deliberately photographed the wrong sign. Now before you say that the sign has been blacked out since the parking ticket was issued (which wouldn't in any event explain why the traffic warden crossed the road) I will tell you that I go to Cafe Buzz most weeks (the breakfasts are excellent, I'll buy you one at Cafe Buzz some time if you would like to meet and discuss parking enforcement, gifts below £25 do not need to be published on the council website but should go in your directorate's local record). When I go there I try and use any blacked out bays and I photograph my vehicle and the sign every time that I do so. I therefore have a collection of photographs of that sign and here is one from 15 November 2012

which is the identical paint splodge to now, so the sign has been like that for months.

Now the unfortunate thing about this particular parking ticket is that it is for the car of Helen Michael, the owner of Cafe Buzz, and given that she has led the North Finchley traders' vocal opposition to the removal of parking meters and the massive hike in charges, this ticket could look like an act of retaliation as the over-zealous wardens that operate in North Finchley will have frequently seen her unloading, parking or driving her distinctive car.

The question is why traffic wardens would feel any need to cheat? There is huge pressure on parking income, it is viewed as a revenue stream (no matter what fine words are issued to the contrary) as otherwise when income dropped there would have been no need for a Parking Recovery Plan to be devised. The question is whether any such pressure comes from the Cabinet member, the Director of EPR, the Assistant Director of Highways, the parking client side contract manager, the NSL contract manager, or parking supervisor?

Mr Mustard will be blogging about this later on today. The sooner you squash the ticket the better you will look. In the unlikely event that you don't cancel an obviously unjust ticket it will be pursued all the way to PATAS and costs will be claimed for wholly unreasonable behaviour by the council. This PCN has the old invalid wording as well, just for good measure.

Best regards

Mr Mustard

since writing this blog the sign has been changed.

Update Thursday 31 January 2013

The response from the parking section at Barnet Council

Dear Mr Mustard


I have raised this with the appropriate manager at NSL Services and they have since confirmed that the Penalty Charge Notice was issued in error. This was due to an oversight on the part of the Civil Enforcement Officer and NSL have confirmed that the appropriate action will be taken. I confirm that the Penalty Charge Notice has been cancelled.

I have noted the request for compensation, and I would advise that an appropriate remedy has been applied in that the Penalty Charge Notice has now been cancelled as in line with our statutory obligation.

With regards to the Penalty Charge Notice wording, I can confirm that the matter is currently under review and therefore I am not in a position to make any comments at this time.

Kind regards

Redacted by Mr Mustard

Full marks to the council employee who saw that the proverbial was going to hit the fan and leapt into action. 6 hours 25 minutes to stop the rot.

What a laugh (except that attempted fraud is serious)  the parking ticket was "issued in error".

If you make an error it costs you £60 or £110. If the council make one they just walk away and think that the "remedy" of giving you nothing except to cancel the parking ticket that you shouldn't have been given is compensation enough! This was maladministration at the very least, a bunch of flowers wouldn't have gone amiss or a personal letter of apology signed by the traffic warden.

Mr Mustard has no idea what the review of parking ticket wording is concerned with so he will find out. He does know that every parking ticket issued from April 08 to early December 12 was non-compliant and would be cancelled if it got as far as PATAS. You have appealed haven't you?

Issuing 160,000 parking tickets a year is not making Barnet a better place, they are only issued because the council is addicted to the near £7m a year that is the profit from parking and parking tickets contribute most of it. The goose that lays the golden egg is well and truly in danger of being shot. We want our High Streets to survive, they need help not this sort of hindrance.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

London Councils - help wanted

lovely car

There is a prize ( a Mr Mustard t-shirt ) for the first person to tell him whose car this is and whether they have a legitimate reason to be in Carnarvon Rd, EN5 on 5 July at 3.20 in the afternoon. Mr Mustard knows 95%+ of his neighbours and thus their visitors. This is the second time he has seen this London Councils employee car in the street with the same post-it note visible. Mr Mustard notes how near he is to the shops of the Spires shopping centre (such as they are nowadays) and wonders if that was the real attraction. 

There is no concession as far as he is aware that London Councils vehicles are not ticketed. The problem comes that any appeal is ultimately heard by PATAS (Parking and Traffic Appeals Service) which is run by London Councils.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard