Beware the 'flying motorbike' sign

 

Mr Mustard thinks that by now, every driver in London would be aware of the 'flying motorbike' sign given that it spread across London like a rash during covid before when, although in the Highway Code for decades, it was little used. Councils rushed to cash in when they realised how easy it was to miss this sign (you wouldn't miss a red no entry sign) and how they could stick it halfway down a well used thoroughfare and get the cash register ringing like crazy.

This morning Mr Mustard took a phone call from a lady who had driven into Holmes Road, NW5 as above and received a PCN. The signs are set back a bit, they should be more prominent, but an adjudicator would probably find them to be adequate. Looking online at the 23 PCNs which went to the indepedent tribunal for this road, the vast majority were lost. Camden are generally well organised.

When you see a 'no through road' sign you expect to be able to drive down it until physically stopped, but no, it may be a stoppage due to signage, like these

Observant readers will have spotted 'Holmes Rd' overlaid by google on the image. Yes, this is further down the same road, about 80m further down. Yes, you guessed it, the lady drove straight through this restriction as well. So that's two PCNs at £160. Ouch.

Now you have to get out of Holmes Road. Two places where you don't want to turn left to get out !

 

You really need to be sharp to drive in London these days. Forget the sat nav, start looking through the windscreen, at everything, say out loud all the signs you see and also go online and read about traffic signs a free site which will save you hundreds of £££.

Do you know what this sign means?

It means no vehicles, except cycles being pushed. There, that has saved you a few quid.

The end.

DVLA - one part of their advice is dangerous & could be expensive

Here follows a standard letter from DVLA

Do not follow the line which Mr Mustard has highlighted in red as if you do not challenge (make representations against) a PCN that you are not the keeper of the vehicle which was given the PCN, but that it is a clone, the PCN will progress though a number of stages and end up with a bailiff.

 

Report the car cloned to the police and the DVLA and challenge every PCN that you receive. You may get a lot of PCNs at the start but you should by reporting the cloning to the police make it too hot to continue to use and then the criminals will stop and move on to another plate.

The end.

 

Barnet Council 56 day error

 

Mr Mustard recognised the name Michael Strom and when he searched the register he found 13 Appeals of which Mr Strom had only lost one. Chapeau. It therefore didn't surprise Mr Mustard that Mr Strom knew the law better than Barnet Council do.

The council always manage to count 28 days when that leads to the next step they can take to move a PCN along but have not programmed their computer to prevent themselves from breaking the law. The law, for parking PCNs, says that a formal representation, one made in response to the Notice to Owner, is automatically cancelled if the council have not served a response within 56 days of the date of receipt of the representations.

The lack of an external overseer for PCNs is becoming more critical by the day. There is no sanction for this council failure although Mr Strom might be able to claim costs for vexatious or wholly unreasonable behaviour but the costs bar is a high hurdle as costs are rarely awarded by law.

The end.

Parasites

Mr Mustard is used to perfectly good challenges being rejected. Mr Mustard isn't medically qualified but is an advanced motorist and a human being. The person, Mr Mustard uses the term loosely, who rejected the below motorist's challenge is none of the above (one can't be sure they aren't an IAM or ROSPA member but Mr Mustard doesn't want to be their passenger if the safety of a fitting passenger isn't their first priority.)

Mr Mustard thinks that many people will be absolutely astonished by this rejection. Mr Mustard wasn't as he sees similar rejections all the time and is one reason why he keeps winning at the tribunal as there is an absolute disconnect between common sense, fairness & safety and the relentless drive to fill multi million pound holes in council budgets.

Barnet Council aren't unusual in this respect partly because there is a small handful of unaccountable outsourcing companies who process PCNs, like NSL, as in this case, whose disconnected employees sit in remote back offices (Dingwall in Scotland and Oldham) have probably never visited Barnet and will never be face to face with a motorist and have to be utterly hateful to their face. The concept of public service has been lost.

Councillors are too hands off. Do they speak to parking management to ensure that all challenges are given a fair and impartial consideration without any thought as to the income as the Secretary of State requires? Based on this response, it would seem not.

Get yourself ready for a sudden goodwill (PR based) cancellation, the PCN was correctly issued, blah blah, a one off error by a new officer, blah blah.

Mr Mustard is on the case. The Notice to Owner is awaited and will be robustly challenged.

The end, for now.

 

 

Due adjustment - #1 Barking & Dagenham

Regular readers will recall that Mr Mustard recently set the scene for a series of blogs about enforcement authorities in London and the due adjustments they should make for a disabled person who cannot write - put simply, the local authority should accept representations on the telephone.

The first response in alphabetical order, from Barking and Dagenham, was very disappointing.

Mr Mustard really didn't understand that, a council is by very definition a public service and must therefore be 'customer facing' (recipients of PCNs don't really relish being called customers though).

The legislation for parking PCNs says this about the form of representations:

and the joint committee, said this in March 2013, so not new:

which proposal was duly accepted:

Therefore the council's reply is utter twaddle, misleading, unkind to the disabled and in breach of the law.

As it happens the Chief Executive of the council, back in October when Mr Mustard started his research, was Chris Naylor who used to be the second in command at Barnet Council and Mr Mustard had met him. Mr Mustard asked Chris for his help as he rather hoped that such behaviour would bother him.

It was only last week that Mr Mustard started thinking about writing this blog post and recalled he had not had a reply. By then it was public knowledge that Chris was leaving the council for a post in the private sector. However, on the council website he was still shown as the Chief Executive. A follow up email was replied to by an out-of-office email that he had left and the interim Chief Executive was Claire Symonds. When Chris was at Barnet so was Claire and Mr Mustard had met her. So Mr Mustard duly emailed Claire.

Mr Mustard didn't get what he asked for but did instead get a review of the Freedom of Information request, which didn't need reviewing, it accurately set out how they don't care for the disabled at Barking & Dagenham Council. Here is the review:

Mr Mustard didn't ask if there was direct dial access to the parking team, only if there was a telephone number for the council that a disabled person could ring in order to make representations. It is merely a case of typing what the person says and in this day and age the task could probably be completed by a speech-to-text system backed up by a person listening afterwards to the saved audio file in case of query. The system could prompt for information such as the PCN ref, car registration, name, address and phone number of the caller and then ask them why they want to challenge the PCN.

Mr Mustard went to the contact us page and it isn't explicit but he presumes the disabled are meant to phone 020 8215 3000

Mr Mustard did click through to the Parking page and then to the PCN page and then again to the Challenge a PCN page. There was a Help with your PCN page, it is no help to the disabled.

The telephone number is not printed on PCNs. It should be as otherwise how are the disabled, if they can't use the internet, going to find the number? this is setting them up to fail and gives them another hurdle to jump in a fixed time or they get timed out of the process and the penalty can then increase by 50%. Isn't the life of the disabled hard enough without Barking & Dagenham Council making it even harder?

What assistance is there for the disabled printed on a PCN? The FOI review said this:

Mr Mustard didn't have a copy of a PCN so he has sent to Barking & Dagenham council for a copy. Then he came across one from October, here it is

There is absolutely nothing on it to tell the disabled how to obtain help. Mr Mustard has been lied to, not for the first time.

It isn't the role of the Citizens Advice Bureau to make up for the failure of the council to do what it is legally required to do. That is an attempt by the council to avoid having to accept a telephonic representation, the hope that the CAB will write to or use the online form instead. The CAB have enough to do with sorting out complex problems, not undertaking routine challenges.

Mr Mustard took himself to the One Stop Shop page. It says it is for 'assisted self-service' which is not what the disabled need, they need a full service, the ability to explain to a person what the challenge is and have it written down for them.

Mr Mustard checked the council's webpage about libraries, there is no mention of help for the disabled.

To summarise the situation at Barking & Dagenham Council.

They are despicably obstructive to the disabled and failing in their legal duty.

It would be useful if you are the helper for a disabled person who cannot write to test out the system the council says is in place to assist them. Will it work? Mr Mustard doubts it. Please try it out and if the helper could let Mr Mustard know what happens he can then contact the Chief Executive again.

The end, for now.

Pay-by-Phone - an obvious flaw - easily fixed

An evidently persistent lady, probably one of his readers, has kindly emailed Mr Mustard to tell of her success in recently obtaining a refund of £30 that she paid in April 2013 in respect of a PCN which was issued because she had paid £1.10 for the wrong car. She had spoken to an operator and added her new vehicle and logic dictates that 99% of the time most people will have sold the old one. Why then, when you are transferred back to the automated payment system to finish your transaction and it defaults to the last car you paid for which will of course be the one you just sold.

Wouldn't it be better if adding a new vehicle wiped the default option and if the operator also asked you if you had sold a car.

That way the available cars for you to pay for is kept to the minimum as is the possibility for error.

If the council are committed to truly helping residents they will ask Verrus PayByPhone to implement such a simple software change.

If however, they want to revenue raise from your unforced error, they won't.

Let's see whay they do? (the council do read this blog & my tweets @_MrMustard)

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

(Mr Mustard recommends going on-line if you have access and doing the change yourself. He has actually registered 3 vehicles himself but he hasn't paid any money ever; it's just in case one day he has no other choice; for now, he will continue to park on the edge of a CPZ and walk).

p.s. If you ahve paid for the wrong car in the past and  ended up paying the PCn you might as well ask for a refund of the parking charge. You haven't, after all, had any consideration for it. Send your request to barnet@nslservices.co.uk

From Vexatious to merely vexing - a journey - stage 1.

Vexatious: seeking only to annoy (that is from the dictionary; vexatious isn't actually defined in Freedom of Information legislation and Mr Mustard has unfortunately helped to formulate what it means. Doh!)

Vexed: Irritated, angered,(of a problem) difficult and much discussed, problematic.

It was Mrs Angry of Broken Barnet fame (currently to be found paddling in the sea off Brighton due to some meeting or other, Mr Mustard wouldn't know the details because it involves Politics with a big P which Mr Mustard simply doesn't have time for. Ooh, and La Bloggeuse was on the telly) who told Mr Mustard that he was only vexing not vexatious. (Yes, she did also tell him he had overdone the number of questions, as did two other people, but by then it was too late and Mr Mustard had the ICO's decision to deal with.)

Rather than spend hours preparing for a long, tedious and difficult hearing in front of the First Tier Tribunal at which Barnet Council would have instructed the best specialist barrister available (an uneven contest against a lay person) at which every rotten word he had ever written would have been dragged out of the blog and given an out-of-context airing, which the tribunal would probably have frowned upon, Mr Mustard negotiated a settlement with the Chief Operating Officer but more of that later. Before then, you need the scene to be set. 

What were those vexatious questions that Mr Mustard asked a year ago and caused such angst. These:

and these (two others were answered recently as they weren't vexatious after all, but by then Mr Mustard didn't really need the answers anyway)

So Mr Mustard thinks you will agree that these were not particularly taxing in terms of time and weren't likely to lead to Mr Mustard writing about an individual except in one case where the post was quite senior and that is allowed and the intention was to blog about the rapid turnover in personnel within the post and improper procurement that he wanted to write about, in any case.

So why did Mr Mustard ask these question? Answers follow the question numbers.

1.  In order to compare the numbers of tickets issued since NSL took over to when it was in-house. We now know from other reports that following NSL's appointment parking tickets have increased by 25%. Coincidence? Mr Mustard doesn't think so.

2.  The invoices supplied in response to a question didn't match the ones on the over £500 spending list.

3.  Asked for NSL's invoices each month so that the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) payments could be tracked.

4.  To confirm what Mr Mustard already knew that the answer was nil. A gross dereliction of duty and the cause of much trouble now that they are being sent off to bailiffs a year after the event.

5.  The council had just voted to start enforcing these moving traffic violations. There is a consultation ongoing about the location of new cctv cameras but some will be placed at these locations whatever the public says.

6.  So that costs of PayByPhone could be compared to the cost of cash collection from meters.

7.  To see what template wordings were in use.

8.  To get a feel for the likely success of an informal appeal and whether 100% of them were rejected.

9.  The minutes cannot have been sufficiently clear.

10.  Just to see what the plan was and whether it included longer hours, targeting particular offences etc.

11.  The parking department should produce an annual report and send it to the mayor. If they had done so this question would not have been necessary. The question was so that the trend of income could be looked at accurately.

12.  The circumstances around the appointment of the AD were murky to say the least.

13.  It was not produced in breach of legislation.

14.  This question was about the manner of serving to get a handle on the numbers affixed to vehicle or handed to driver or sent in the post.

15.  This was to see if proper procedures had been followed for a friend who had a PCN. It was won on review at PATAS.

16.  To see if NSL were doing that aspect of their job or just issuing PCN regardless.

17.  The TMO were given to NSL on a memory stick so it was a few minutes work for the council to provide these and then not have to deal with individual requests.

18.  In Woodside Grove there are CPZ bays across people's drives which is rather odd and an explanation would have been useful and appreciated.

19.  This question was asked on someone else's behalf. Next time they can ask their own.

20.  as for 3.

Do these questions strike you as particularly long, complicated, unreasonable, obsessive, difficult, excessive or anything else if all asked in one month or vexatious? Put your view in the comment box below.

The second part of the story will follow soon although Mr Mustard does have to spend some time looking at the 2,000+ page Capita contract for Customer services (NSCSO) which Mr Reasonable asked for and Mr Mustard didn't as he hasn't asked a question of Barnet Council (hello to Governance in TfL, Haringey, Harrow and Islington where he has) since 12 July (which was a request for the locations & numbers of PayByPhone bays which must be in a spreadsheet somewhere: Answer - vexatious!) and he is now free to ask on Parking, Parking Tickets and CPZ's but hasn't. 

Ironically if he had asked for the NSCSO contract, a multi-million pound decade long and controversial outsourcing deal, that would not have been rejected out of hand as being vexatious (it would have been declined on the grounds of future publication which has now happened). Funny old world!

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard