Knowledge is Power and persistence pays off

Mr Mustard helps a loft conversion company if the boss or any of the staff get PCNs. Their contracts with customers require that they provide as many visitor vouchers as are required but still things go wrong sometimes.

This PCN was picked up in Merton:

During the to and fro emails with the office it turned out that the driver had spoken to the CEO (Civil Enforcement Officer = traffic warden) to tell him of the works which were taking place in the street and that he was waiting for his client to sort out a visitor voucher. On arrival the client was on the phone and once he was off it he had run out of printed vouchers in any event (virtual ones may be available in Merton but how tech savvy is the client and does he have to go off to work?).

 

Mr Mustard looked at the photographs and found the driver in one of them. It is timed at 08:51 so two whole minutes before the PCN was issued.

Mr Mustard enquired as to what was said. Apparently the CEO said that the information was in the machine and although the PCN had not yet been printed there was nothing he could do other than complete the PCN. Mr Mustard was not amused. He decided to get the notes made by the CEO by making a Subject Access Request (you too can do this for your own data). He did that on the same day (5 August) as he made the informal challenge. Mr Mustard wasn't worried about the discount for early payment as he intended that nothing would be paid.

During the evening of 15 August Mr Mustard checked the PCN on line, the balance was zero. Clearly when a motorist makes a Subject Access Request the parking department knows that a critical eye is going to be cast over their handiwork so if it is defective it is best to cancel as early as possible. It turned out that they had cancelled the PCN that very morning. He was sent copies of the PCN system after reminding Merton that a response was overdue.

The notes are very interesting. The CEO certifies that he has attached the PCN to the vehicle at 08:52 a PCN which wasn't issued until 08:53 !

 

The payment system was only checked up to 08:46 so any payments made on arrival wouldn't show up, that is a huge flaw in Merton's systems.

 

The CEO comment that no driver was seen would go against Merton at the tribunal as the driver, wearing a liveried shirt, is shown in one of their photographs. If the CEO got that simple fact wrong how much of their evidence could be relied upon?

As to the notes of the conversation, which are mandatory, they didn't exist.

Lots of people assume that local authorities must be right, the truth is far removed from that, incompetence abounds.

 

The loft company were as honourable as they always are, another £50 was paid to North London Hospice.

End.

The Wrong Approach - now righted

A resident emailed Mr Mustard with the above PCN and told him that he wasn't in Approach Road when he parked but in The Approach. A feature of the latest PCN software that Barnet Council use is that they put a pin on a map to show roughly where the PCN was issued, like this:

Clearly the PCN is a nullity for want of an accurate statement of the contravention, the locus being a vital fact. A challenge was sent in saying that the vehicle was not parked (= not waiting) in Approach Road, New Barnet. Here is the relevant part of the response, a rejection of the challenge:

The response is wrong, not just a little wrong, but 100% wrong.

How can a council, or their contractors, NSL, get something so basic as the location so wrong. Approach Road is adjacent to New Barnet railway station.

The two roads are 6 miles apart. It is very hard to muddle them up if the slightest attention is paid.

Now the motorist is asking Mr Mustard if he should pay. Definitely not is the answer as the council have accused him of something which is simply not true. The motorist will now have to wait for the Notice to Owner, and has all of the worry of a PCN hanging over him for all that time, & if the car is leased that will mean an administration fee has to be paid, one that should not be necessary if the council and/or NSL did their job properly. There is no guarantee that the formal representations in response to the Notice to Owner will be considered any more carefully than the informal challenge was, or wasn't, and then an Appeal will be made to the tribunal. It is only at that point that an impartial view will be taken of the facts by a body that doesn't have a financial interest in rejecting perfectly good representations.

Mr Mustard thinks it is time for a change when it comes to how the surplus from road traffic related PCNs should be spent. Let councils cover their costs and all of the surplus after that should go to a central body to spend on something charitable. Councils would rapidly cut their activities back to the minimum and focus solely on the traffic management purposes which should be their primary goal, rather then generating surpluses to reduce their wider budgetary pressures.

We also need an independent oversight body who can investigate why some councils keep making errors in their own favour.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Update 3 December 2019

The Notice to Owner was issued on 30 October to the garage whose car it was.

Mr Mustard challenged it on 12 November pointing out the road error, providing maps.

Barnet Council refused for a second time to cancel on 26 November.

On 28 November Mr Mustard started an Appeal to the tribunal.
On 3 December he checked the PCN balance and the PCN has, at long last, been cancelled.

What a waste of time and money.

Barnet Council have had to pay a c.£30 case fee to the tribunal. They were always going to lose the case. Why didn't they cancel earlier? Because many people give up even when they are in the right.

Mr Mustard never gives up.

Lying - Barnet Council policy or just ignorance?

Mr Mustard doesn't, as usual, know if a Barnet Council employee actually wrote the above Notice of Rejection or if an NSL employee did, although formal representations are meant to at the least be decided upon by an employee of the council.

The part that is not the truth is the statement that you cannot board or alight (on a double yellow line) where loading/unloading is banned (as notified by double marks across the kerb stones). It is true that no loading also means no blue badge parking but this wasn't such a case.

What the car owner told the council was that his wife who was driving and was collecting him and two small children left the car in order to help him because he has a disability. That is perfectly proper behaviour. The rules for loading or unloading are different to those for boarding or alighting.

The council set the rules for each section of road. This is what they say about boarding and alighting.

The passenger was disabled and therefore as long as necessary is allowed for the purpose of boarding.

How do Barnet Council not know about their own Traffic Management Order? They should have known, particularly in this case, as the formal representations included this huge clue

Needless to say an Appeal is now being made to the independent adjudicator at London Tribunals. Costs can be awarded in cases where the council has been wholly unreasonable. The bar is set very high but ignoring the exemption in your own traffic order may well be seen to be.

Thus in this case Mr Mustard comes to the conclusion that ignorance can be no excuse. It looks like a cynical and deliberate refusal to accept the obvious.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard


 

Traffic wardens 67x/67y - proper novices

On 16 October in the Finchley Central CPZ Mr Mustard's client, let us call them Ms T, received a PCN at 10 in the morning on a single yellow line which starts at 2pm. Mr Mustard noticed that the traffic warden had a high badge number, 67x, where x is a number he is not going to tell you, and so Mr Mustard surmised that new traffic wardens were being sent out with inadequate training or supervision, or both. Mr Mustard lodged a complaint, the PCN was cancelled and the traffic warden given more 'guidance' whatever that is.

Roll forward to 23 November and the same thing happens again, a PCN given out by a different traffic warden 67y, where y is a number known only to Mr Mustard & his client, the same mistake at the same place by another newbie traffic warden who clearly needs the same guidance as the others.

Another complaint by Mr Mustard, another cancellation and a second letter of apology.

The additional training needs to be before the traffic wardens (CEO) are let loose on the street issuing real, painful, expensive PCNs.

There was of course no question but that the council would not pay compensation to Ms T. This is exactly the sort of case where compensation of a fixed sum, say 50% of the PCN value, should be paid as a matter of course.

Study your PCN very carefully if the issuing traffic warden has a badge number above 669.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Complaints must be repeated

Here is the story of how Barnet Parking failed, at the first attempt, to properly respond to a complaint.

A man, let's call him Oliver, rented a car to use as a mini-cab and a PCN was placed on the car in January 2017 which, for some reason, did not reach Oliver, the driver at the time (there has been talk of traffic wardens putting PCNs back in their pockets after issue in order to deprive drivers of the discount but that would work against the council's hunger for PCN income and they are happy with the 50% at the beginning, so would rather traffic wardens didn't do this, Mr Mustard surmises) . The Notice to Owner was quite properly sent to the registered keeper, the rental company. They made representations against the Notice to Owner that the car was hired out under a rental agreement which included a statement that Oliver was liable for any PCNs. The council then sent a fresh PCN to Oliver but unfortunately someone copied the address down incorrectly and sent the paperwork to #25 instead of #27. Oliver lives in a large block of flats and documents sent to #25 were simply retained by the occupier and not handed on.

The PCN progressed through the usual stages of Charge Certificate, Order for Recovery, Warrant of Control, Notice of Enforcement and the bailiff tracked down Oliver and upon request sent him a copy of the warrant. Oliver immediately saw the problem and a friend helped him to submit a complaint, of which this is the gist:

I am writing to make a formal complaint in connection to the above PCN.

First of all I did not receive any PCN at all, nor did I receive any statutory documents.

The bailiff has contacted me regarding the above PCN and he sent me the attached Warrant of control. However having reviewed information provided by the bailiff, it appears that the warrant was issued for the wrong address and also the local authority have sent all the statutory notices to the wrong address.

If I had received the PCN and the statutory documents I would have made a formal appeal straight away and I would  not have let the case progress to the bailiff at all.

My address is 25 Redacted House, Redacted Road, London NW? ??? and I have never lived at 27 Redacted House.

In addition I would like to inform you that I do not own and have never owned this vehicle and it is not registered under my name with DVLA.

I do recall that I have hired the vehicle  however, having reviewed the hire agreement I strongly believe that it does not comply with The particulars of hiring agreements set out in the relevant Regulations (which quoted Regulations were the superseded ones but the requirements were the same)

In order for the hire agreement to comply and for the liability to be transferred it must comply with the relevant Regulations.

I therefore request you to review the hire agreement submitted by the hire company and you will clearly see that it does not meet the requirements.

Please kindly cancel the warrant and  this PCN and remove my details from your system.

Now at this point you would expect the council to check two things, firstly the address on the hire agreement and secondly whether they had allowed liability to be transferred in accordance with the relevant Regulations.

Instead, Mr Mustard thinks they hit the defensive button and set about justifying their actions:

Mr Mustard sees the first paragraph all the time. It is a load of nonsense designed to try and deflect complaints. The complaint is about the process having gone wrong so it must be considered as such. The council should consider complaints made at any time, in case they have done something wrong.

The 'understanding', or rather lack of, of the writer is irrelevant padding, designed to obfuscate.

Just because a PCN was affixed to the car does not mean that it reached the driver.

 

OK, so a signed hire agreement was received by the council and based on that, they transferred liability to the person hiring the car.

Then the council claim, in terms, to have sent the fresh Notice to Owner to 27 Redacted House but the records show that they sent everything to 25. As that was a substantive point of the complaint, it is pretty poor work, or wilful blindness, to have missed that fundamental fact.

Mr Mustard has yet to see a copy of the hire agreement but he knows the friend will have correctly analysed it and it will not meet the requirements of The Road Traffic Owner Liability Regulations 2000 which is the correct set of Regulations, not the Traffic Management Act 2004 at all.

Answers on a postcard please as to how you can respond to a Notice to Owner which was not delivered to you?

It is never too late for representations to be considered. It is the council's PCN, if they discover they have done something wrong, they can cancel a PCN at any time for any reason, even if the PCN is actually correct. It isn't ever the case that the council are unable to cancel a PCN, it is that they are unwilling to do so.

It isn't the job of Marston to mop up the council's mess.

The information wasn't helpful at all but that isn't unusual.

Needless to say a second complaint was sent to the council that their handling of the first complaint was inept and that parking had lied about the address to which documents were sent. Cue a rapid change of direction and the following email being received:

I have asked the Parking Team to further investigate and they have confirmed the following:

I have just compared the original signed hire agreement with the address NSL recorded on the system and Oliver is correct, they mistakenly put down his house number as 25 rather than 27 – accordingly, I have asked NSL Services to arrange for the bailiffs to return the Warrant as it is not enforceable. Once this is done, I will have the PCN cancelled accordingly and will write to Oliver to confirm this.

Good news but the enforcement contract isn't with NSL Services Ltd, it is with NSL Ltd. Note that NSL get given the blame and although they are to blame for the initial error the handling of the complaint should have been dealt with in-house by the council itself. Delegating complaints to whoever made the error in the first place is not wise as they will not be sufficiently critical or analytical.

What worries Mr Mustard is that less able motorists than Oliver would have paid the bailiff, especially if their car had been clamped and they needed it to go to work that day or on holiday. Monies paid to a bailiff are a nightmare to recover.

Making a mistake does happen but you are measured by how you deal with it, very badly in this case. More reputational damage has ensued for the council. Will Oliver ever trust anything the council says in the future?

There is too much automation in the world of PCN. In nil response cases sending the PCN to the bailiff is a bad idea, the case should be checked for obvious errors before a warrant is applied for, as the chances are if no response was received that the statutory documents have not been served.

Liability in rental agreement cases is transferred without proper checking in Mr Mustard's experience.

Mr Mustard thinks that complaints should not be handled by the parking department but by a dedicated complaints person, or even better, by a person independent of the council. Mr Mustard could provide that for other councils in London should they wish to improve their procedures. He can't do it for Barnet as he would be too conflicted by all the Barnet PCNs he challenges, he could decline to handle the small number he does in any other borough.

So now we await seeing the apology which Mr Mustard presumes that Barnet Council are going to send. How fulsome will it be? Will there be an offer of compensation for getting the address wrong in the first place and secondly for rejecting the valid complaint which could have caused a weaker person to pay up, that surely is maladministration?

Put your answer on the same postcard as Barnet Council never seem to regard their wrongdoing as cause for payment, it is only residents who must pay them for their misdeeds, not vice versa.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard
 

Greenfield Gardens NW2 business bay trap

Mr Mustard has been trying to get the signs on two business bays, on opposite sides of the road, made the same since the spring of 2015. He has over-turned 3 PCN here.

No times = 24 hours a day

the times the other bay was meant to have

When the council introduced a map based Traffic Management Order (TMO) it corrected obviously wrong signs but others it used as the basis for the TMO and thus the tail wagged the dog. There aren't numerous business premises at the southern end of Greenfield Gardens, especially 24 hour operations, but now we are in a situation where half the bays are legally restricted 24 hours a day. Mr Mustard lost a PCN at the tribunal yesterday (it was one of two PCN issued within a minute to two ladies who knew each other, the other PCN was cancelled at the first challenge) and the adjudicator was correct in that legally the bay applied, even though the council didn't mean it to and even though they acknowledged last year that the bay was wrongly signed but he can't apply mitigation or discretion. Such is life. Mr Mustard is still on won 100+ & lost 4 in 2016.

The adjudicator wasn't very impressed with Barnet Council though.

Yet more incompetence exhibited by Barnet Council (NSL will have sent the letter) and unfairness but legal.

If you see a business bay without times do not park in it at 22:20 (as did Mr Mustard's client) as traffic wardens will gleefully ticket you up until 23:00

Barnet Council made a parking tribunal net loss yesterday. They will get £110 from the one PCN that was upheld and have paid 7 tribunal fees of c.£30 for each PCN = £210 going out. Result: £100 and many man hours down the drain.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Dapita (you'll see) (best check your CPZ permit)

The motorist doesn't know that when it comes to wrongly issued permits that the fault lies with Dapita (Capita - who have managed to renew a C zone permit as a D zone, taking business process management to a whole new level of spectacular incompetence) and this is not a one-off although the usual mistake is to send you a permit with no zone marked on it which in theory you could use in any zone (although you might struggle to explain to an Adjudicator why you thought you qualified for an all zones permit).

It is now just 2 months short of 2 years since the customer service (or lack of) contract started with Capita (well renamed Crapita by Private Eye) and you would think by now that they might just know one CPZ zone from another but no, this is what you get for employing cheap call centre staff in Coventry (Mr Mustard has nothing against Coventry & in fact has plans to visit there soon) who possess zero local knowledge because they don't travel about the borough seeing things. The councillors who didn't read much or any of this long contract which they foolishly signed up to won't have carefully road tested the service before going ahead either. Mr Mustard hazards they would all road test a new car before they bought one (a new car worth £30,000 is a mere 0.04% of the value of the Crapita customer service contract) and that they would spend longer test driving a new car than test driving the Crapita service before agreeing to buy.

Now, given the above error, please all pop outside now to check if you have the correct CPZ zone for your road, you can always search for your address here then click on a restriction and the hours and zone will pop up.

Whilst you are looking at your permit you might as well check the expiry date as there is at least a 1 in 100 chance that it has expired as you haven't received a reminder either because your email address has changed or because Crapita seem unable to post reminders out consistently.

If Crapita can't even renew a resident permit correctly, what hope is there for any difficult task they may be contracted to perform?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Saracens - left hand - right hand - drop the ball

So here is a tweet that the council have just put out:

Saracens play The Sharks this Saturday. Have a look at our Event Day CPZ page for info http://t.co/HmHz5oWgyo
— Barnet Council (@BarnetCouncil) January 23, 2014

So Mr Mustard did look at the CPZ page, and here it is:

Has this 25 January fixture been added to the Event Day schedule on the website recently? Probably, if the council are only just tweeting about it. Mr Mustard has found that it was announced back on 9 December, here. Mr Mustard then went to the google cache and found the previous page which was crawled by the googlebot on 16 January. Here it is and it proves that the page change is a recent one:

Then Mr Mustard looked out the fixture list that was distributed by Saracens themselves early on in the season, the front sheet of which was headed

"AVOID GETTING PARKING TICKETS ON MATCH DAYS"

and here it is:

So look at those three lots of information in reverse order to get them in ascending date order.

To start with Saracens say there will be a match this Sunday.

Then Barnet Council somehow put down a match for this Saturday but not Sunday.

Then finally, with only 2 days to go, Barnet Council manage to get both matches onto their website, which no motorist is obliged to look at before they enter the zone. Parking compliantly based upon officially published information on which it ought to be possible to place some reliance, you simply can't.

What should the council do this weekend? They should decide to not issue a single ticket in the Event Day zone as profiting from its own incompetence is most unattractive.

What is the extra Saturday match anyway? It is a friendly against The Sharks (a team from South Africa and not from anywhere near Sale as Mr Mustard wrote previously). Will the crowd be that large that it should count as an Event day? Possibly not. (Mr Mustard got half of this entire blog wrong, the crowd is at least 9,000)

Everyone who gets a PCN in the Saracens ED event day CPZ zone should appeal three times. See the guide to appealing at the top left. The reason for the appeal is that the council have not made you properly aware that it is an Event Day. Simply repeat that appeal all the way to PATAS & you will probably win. Every PATAS appeal costs the council £40, they hate paying those fees. Make their pocket hurt.

Come on Barnet Council. Behave with honour and dignity.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

---

Update, Thursday 4pm

Just to show you how little Mr Mustard knows about rugby he has been told that 9,000 tickets have been sold for the friendly fixture. There are only 300 parking spaces at the ground which isn't exactly well served by public transport. Enforcement therefore has to take place as residents complain about bad parking and about getting parking tickets when they shouldn't be there (different residents obviously). The numbers of PCN being issued are apparently slowing, going down from about 500 a day at the peak to under 200 now. Of course if you are one of the chosen 200 it isn't funny. More PCN are being cancelled if appealed (so appeal!) and you probably have a better chance if you live within the zone and then apply for a free permit. The whole size of the zone is again under question as the traffic wardens are wearing their shoe leather out covering it. Some dot matrix signs of a more reasonable price have been identified and they will get used the rest of the year for other purposes, road closures, special events in town centres that sort of thing.

It seem to take forever sometimes but changes are coming apparently. As part of Mr Mustard's deal with the COO to get a reasonable number of FOI questions answered (although he hasn't asked any for months) he agreed to write a bit of good news as well as bad, so when these changes arrive you will read it on this blog.

Breakdown in the Bus Lane

Executive summary:

Residents in CPZ's have to pay for the incompetence of Barnet Council.

The reasoning:

Mr Mustard has been thinking about parking ticket collection rates. He wondered how Barnet Council were doing in this area. He decided to send for certain figures for the year ended 31 March 2011 as it is a year that can be considered as over as "debts die of old age" is a saying in his industry and by now over 99% of everything that is going to be resolved for that year has been. Here are the figures:

Penalty Charge Notices (PCN) in 2010/11	Parking	Bus Lane	Notes
The total number of PCN’s issued	99,982	24,183
The number paid	72,766	15,567
Percentage paid %	73%	64%	1
The number sent to bailiffs	16,723	0	2
The number paid after bailiff intervention	2,508	0	3
Bailiff success rate %	15%	n/a
The number cancelled for any reason	17,880	1,849
Cancellation rate %	18%	8%	4
The number still being chased for payment	3,000	4,872	5
Unresolved rate %	3%	20%	6

Notes:

1. The percentage of bus lane tickets paid ought to be higher than for parking offences as mistakes in bus lane tickets should be rare and as the reasons for a valid appeal are more limited.

2. Here is the real reason why the percentage of bus lane tickets paid is lower than for parking tickets. It is because none at all were sent to bailiffs. This means that in 2010/11 you could simply ignore a bus lane ticket and you would have not been prompted to pay by a bailiff arriving on your doorstep.

3. The bailiff enforcement system is not an effective one if they only collect 15% of what they are asked to collect. It also begs the question as to how good the quality of the issued parking tickets were.

4. More than 1 in every 5 tickets for alleged parking offences were cancelled. This also makes one question the quality of the tickets issued. What a huge amount of pointless administration. If the quality was increased to 99%, perhaps by employing better paid and trained traffic wardens, the back office administration parking team could have been reduced by 20%. 

Even for bus lane tickets a cancellation rate of 1 in 13 tickets is pretty poor.

5. Mr Mustard finds the still being chased number of 3,000 to be a conveniently round number. He was not told that it was an estimate. There is a 1 in a 1000 chance that is is the truth. 

For bus lanes 1 in 5 tickets are still supposedly live. Mr Mustard thinks that they are only being chased in theory and it's just that no senior manager has had the guts to write them off.

Why?

Why have no bus lane tickets been sent off for bailiff collection? The story that came Mr Mustard's way was that it was the implementation of a new and incomplete Civica CE system, so file that, if true, under senior management failure.

The financial loss to us CPZ residents.

If the collection rate for Bus Lane tickets had been as high as for parking then the number of tickets paid would have been 17,600 which is an extra 2,033 tickets recovered.

In 2010/11 bus lane tickets were £120 and if unpaid they went up to £180 so the revenue lost is £365,940, or £366,000 to the nearest thousand.

In the report to Cabinet Resources Committee on 14 December 2011 the outsourcing of Parking had an untroubled passage to an Agreed vote. The attached report said that NSL were expected to provide the following increases in income 

2012/13  £59,000

2013/14 £121,000

2014/15 £186,000

which by one of those rare co-incidences amounts to £366,000

If NSL do nothing other than routinely put bus lane contraventions through the entire collection cycle, rather than stopping part-way, they will collect in one year the extra income needed across three years and thus look fantastic simply by doing an average job. One Barnet will be marked down as a roaring success when in fact it was due to an internal administrative failure or a management decision that the income was depressed.

Instead of Mr Mustard's "blogger bus" CPZ permit rising in cost from £40 to £100 it could have risen instead to the more reasonable sum of £65 (there being about 10,000 permits in issue which could have been increased by about £35 less - rounding £366,000 divided by 10,000 downwards) or Visitor Vouchers could have been pegged at £1.

Think about that councillors. If you had paid more attention in CRC and asked some searching questions and if you knew more about the resources of the council that you make rapid decisions about, then you wouldn't have residents and businesses up in arms about parking and your seat looking rather wobbly.

Here is a snippet copied from the Mrs Angry's Broken Barnet blog (and she is very angry at the moment about being described in a most unladylike fashion along with the rest of the public gallery - in an ungentlemanly fashion for some of them)

Hugh (Rayner) made a very interesting observation. If contracts do fail, he said, with absolute seriousness, the bloggers will know before we do. Would it be possible to ensure that they, the councillors, are informed when contracts are about to fail?

Mrs Angry laughed to herself.

Don't worry, Hugh: We'll tip you the wink.

Not only do we know about impending One Barnet failures Hugh, we already know more than most councillors and Directors and Assistant Directors about current administration failures. 

Have a think about this one and go and buy yourself a fine tooth comb for future meetings of the committee that you chair. Throw away the clock you watch and just have more meetings that last longer and are more rigorous.

Might some serious scrutiny have uncovered this before a blogger did so?

Does anyone at the council, whether Officer or Councillor, feel even the tiniest little bit ashamed or embarrassed to be shown up in this way?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Gifts & Hospitality in Environment, Planning & Regeneration

Mr Mustard has been a bit slow in getting through all lists of gifts and hospitality. Some say that this sort of thing just doesn't go on any more but given that the word free is a magic word, Mr Mustard thinks it does. There were a few gifts in EPR as one would expect with all those planning permissions to obtain, so much at stake, must curry some favour with a croissant (yes really, a single croissant) or 4 cupcakes (bless)  

So here are the gifts and hospitality. Not a single value was written in the value column so it has been excluded from the table. Please record real or estimated values in the future EPR.

Date	Details	Recipient	Donor
12/04/2010	Tickets to Sadler’s Wells x2	Martin Cowie, AD Planning and Development	EDAW
18/05/2010	Dinner x 2	Stewart Murray, Director of Planning, Housing and Regeneration	Pinnacle
07/07/2010	Tickets to cricket match at the Oval and dinner x 2	Stewart Murray, Director of Planning, Housing and Regeneration	CBRE
15/07/2010	Drinks Reception at RA		Trowers and Hamlin
28/08/2010	Football ticket	Pam Wharfe, Interim Director for Planning, Environment and Regeneration	C&G Properties
10/09/2010	Lunch	Pam Wharfe, Interim Director for Planning, Environment and Regeneration	C&G Properties
12/10/2010	Dinner and talk		Nabarros
23/10/2010	Tea, coffee and tour of estate development x8		Home Group
02/11/2010	Grants Whiskey  bottle x1
02/11/2010	Dinner (while attending event in Manchester)		WSP Engineers
12/11/2010	Fresh croissant x1
30/11/2010	Bottle of wine
15/12/2010	Box of chocolates
15/12/2010	Bottle of wine		Priority Estates Project
16/12/2010	Bottles of red wine x2
20/12/2010	Bottle of wine		Priority Estates Project
23/12/2010	£20 M&S gift voucher
24/12/2010	Cosmetic products (donated to charity shop)
24/12/2010	Box of chocolates
08/02/2011	Chocolate cupcakes x4
22/03/2011	Bottle of wine
28/03/2011	Book loan
28/03/2011	Travel clock x1

Now let us have a quick check of the rules; Mr Mustard likes rules; Barnet Council only like rules for other people. 

Invitations to prestige sporting events, such as Wimbledon, and other occasions such as theatre, opera or weekend breaks must not be accepted.

Cast your eyes up a bit and what do you see? 

Sadler's Wells, oh dear Mr Cowie, better get your coat.

A cricket match at the Oval! Better get your coat Mr Murray. What, you already have, and you found a big fat cheque in the pocket! It's that cheque which Mr Mustard is trying to find the size of and Barnet Council are being coy about ( even though Robert Rams recently wrote "Barnet has nothing to hide" ) . They are now talking to the Information Commissioner about it and doubtless in the end they will have to tell Mr Mustard.

A football ticket for Pam Wharfe. Now I know that this comment will cause huge trouble but it just has to be said. If that was a ticket for Barnet FC there isn't a problem (Mr Mustard is only jesting - he has been to Underhill but the rules do say prestige and he didn't even get a seat - that isn't a prestige event - sorry Bees - pleased to see you out of the relegation zone though - Barnet FC blog coming next) but if it was for a top of the table team then it is a breach of the rules. So 28 August 2010 was a Saturday and the premier league fixtures were these. If you saw Ms Wharfe at Chelsea or Tottenham then get her coat for her, its a red card for the interim Director of EPR.

Who are C&G Properties anyway? Well, C&G Properties Ltd (not plc per the C&G website) is, per companies house, a dormant company but its part of the  Cavendish & Gloucester Plc stable.

Here is a link to a development they are doing in Mr Mustard's parish, off Park Road, a cul-de-sac behind the police station. He popped along and took a look at it. This development is by M25 Securities Ltd, one of the C&G group.

Planning permission was granted in December 2007 under ref N14947F/07 ( link here ) for 14 houses for sale and 93 flats many of which were social housing. This was granted subject to a S106 contribution split into 3 staged payments and a monitoring contribution of £16,500

The £16,500 should have been paid within 28 days of any material work commencing. That payment is well overdue. 2 whole blocks of flats had been built by 2009.

The 3 stage payments were £102,500 for Education & Libraries, £115,000* for local highway improvements and £110,000 for improving parks and open spaces. It makes sense to make them different amounts and then payments don't get confused with each other. *£114,525 had been paid as at mid-October 2011.

The three stage payments were due as follows:

3.2.1 one third payable on the completion of Blocks 1 and 2
3.2.2 one third payable on the completion of Blocks 3 and houses on plots 1-14
3.2.3 one third payable on completion of Block 4 (St James' Court) and houses on plots 47-65

In August 09 the plans changed and a new application was submitted. The number of this is B/03161/09 ( you can look at all the documents here ). I have extracted the most interesting document below in the box. The planning statement is why the applicant thinks they should be granted planning permission.

Planning Statement About Park Rd Development

The usual reason cited for the change is the new economic circumstances. Barnet Council are susceptible to this appeal to the pocket. I once watched in horror as Cllr Cornelius deferred an already overdue £1m on the Choices for Grahame Park S106 contribution despite the developer having several £million in the bank. Property developers are big boys. The council should stand firm with them. The S106 is just another cost of development which they should put proper funding in place for.

According to Mouseprice.com ( and Mr Mustard's buying and selling ) average house prices in EN5 have risen 6.17% in the last 5 years and the UK average is a fall of 2.15%. Time that the council stopped listening to developers bleating on.

Back to the box above. Take a look at:

Para 1.2 and 1.4 say less units will be built, down from 107 to 99 but the developer is still keen. Of course they are, that's how developers make money, by developing.

Para 1.7 shows how the profits will arrive. Less flats and more houses for sale.

Jump now to the last page and para 5.40. It is clear that the developer expected the S106 contribution to change and upwards is the only logical direction. I cannot see from the planning papers that it did but from the S106 spreadsheet that I was sent I can see that there is now mention of 33 houses so the new scheme was applied to the old date and reference ( it's a good job that bloggers can work these things out ).

Mr Mustard walked around the top half of the site. The blocks of flats and houses accessed from the upper main entrance are complete. The lower section is well advanced.

good views but small bedrooms

So there we have it. Barnet Council didn't collect the £16,500 when work started and the building inspector knew because he has to visit often. Does he talk to whoever collects the S106 payments which would be sensible? In fact they should probably sit in the same room so that information flows naturally.

I don't suppose Pam Wharfe checked whether C&G owed Barnet Council any money before she accepted their hospitality or that she discussed overdue payments at half time. Anyway, now that I have pointed it out and as she knows them so well Mrs Wharfe will doubtless get C&G on the phone and get the money in very soon. It would help the borough whose budget is so tight. What the heck they have been doing in EPR to not collect all this S106 money Mr Mustard has no idea. If you haven't collected it you can't spend it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard