Newham Council are Cheats - #4

 

Towing a car from a road in which there wasn't a restriction might not be cheating but simply rank incompetence.

Either way an innocent Mr Flacco had to go to the car pound, lend, as it happens, Newham Council £265 for 3 months, fight the PCN and generally be put through the wringer and have hours of his time wasted all whilst worrying he could be innocently out of pocket..

Removal of a vehicle is a serious step which is clearly not taken seriously enough in Newham. 

Seeing red in Hillingdon

Mr Mustard's client, let us call her Innocence (not her real name) made a small error in Hillingdon in the early hours of the morning. Hillingdon Council pounced on her but for an error she didn't make. She did overshoot the stop line at the traffic lights but did not stop in a yellow box due to the presence of a stationary vehicle. The police could have sent her a Notice of Intended Prosecution but they didn't, those lights may not have a police camera, only a council one. Mr Mustard can't share the video on the blog as he doesn't want to release the registration number so has extracted and redacted the still images which tell the story.

Here is the car about to pass the stop line with the lights on red.

Next, the car having entered the junction with the lights on red and the brake lights are on.

Innocence reverses back.

She finds the lights are green so moves forward again and exits the box in one movement.

The next event is the arrival of a PCN.

 

The rules for a box junction are patently clear. It is only a contravention if  a vehicle has to stop due to the presence of stationary vehicles (which is read as including a single vehicle).

Clearly, patently, obviously to all the world, this, whilst a slightly sub-standard piece of driving, is not a contravention within the letter of the law.

Mr Mustard made the representation. Hillingdon Council's on line 'smarti' system is being used dumbly, it offers the wrong selection of grounds on which one may make representations. This is enough alone to win on at the tribunal.

Mr Mustard happily selected the wrong ground. The way these systems work is that the ground you choose then pre-determines the template letter which will form the base of the response so Mr Mustard messes with the system by often choosing the wrong one, or none at all, and then adding a document which has to be individually considered.

The response was utterly wrong.

The vehicle was permitted to stop as there wasn't a vehicle in front of it which had stopped.

Mitigation was not put forward. A full on challenge was made that there was no contravention.

The CCTV evidence shows the exit was clear at the moment of entry and for the entire period the car was within the junction. The exit space was 100% clear. There was no vehicle in front, except perhaps half a mile away.

The word 'obstruction' in this regard does not appear in the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016 - Hillingdon Council are well out of date. A contravention has not been committed.

Mr Mustard's representation having been summarily and wrongly dismissed in five days it was only two days later, as soon as the Notice of Rejection arrived with Mr Mustard, that Mr Mustard started an Appeal on line to the independent adjudicator at London Councils. He was supremely confident of success. Hillingdon let most of the month pass in the run up to the hearing without doing anything and then with a week to go they DNC'd the case. DNC is shorthand for notifying the tribunal that they 'Do not Contest' the Appeal. They didn't give a reason but perhaps it was that they were 100% in the wrong and were going to read about their shortcomings in a public register. Instead they can read them here.

Had this vehicle been leased the lease company might have paid it and charged an administration fee for so doing. That is a good reason to not lease a car but to take out a normal loan with which to buy your car outright.

Councils don't think about people, they think about money from this source. Innocence's life is tough enough already. Cancer and radiotherapy have caused her to lose 40% of her body weight. Think about that Hillingdon Council when you send bogus demands for £130 and then don't see sense when your wrongdoing is pointed out to you.

Faceless, ignorant and stupid is the restrained description of your behaviour.

The end.

 

from (untidy) innocence to guilt

untidy but not unlawful

Now Mr Mustard, as an advanced motorcyclist who has been trained in the "system" of riding, just wouldn't park the blogger bus like this because it is not best practice. We should all aim to be parallel to the kerb if we can (if you have reduced mobility you get extra space in a disabled bay to make it easier for you to manoeuvre). However, this sort of parking is only wrong, and deserving of a Penalty Charge Notice (parking ticket), if the entire vehicle is more than 50cm from the kerb (and that rule was brought in as a way of defining & dealing with double parking). In this case the front wheel, and the passenger side mirror are well within the 50cm limit. One would have thought that a traffic warden would go equipped with a tape measure or 50cm ruler to prove this contravention.

The trouble comes though when you say "pah" and don't bother responding to the council paperwork.

You start with a PCN, you do nothing

within 6 months along comes a Notice to Owner, you do nothing again

just over a month later you receive a Charge Certificate, there is nothing you can do in response to that except pay or wait for the next document

then you receive the Order for Recovery which gives you 28 days to set it aside on certain grounds but you don't meet them as you have done nothing

so now you have gone from being innocent of a parking contravention to guilty by default.

The next person you will hear from is the bailiff and your car may get clamped and removed and you will get a bill for several hundred pounds all because you didn't deal with some simple paperwork.

So what should you do?

when you get a PCN, send in an informal appeal within 28 days

when you get a Notice to Owner, send in a formal appeal within 28 days

formal and informal appeals look the same, simply a letter or an email saying why you shouldn't have to pay.

If the council don't accept your formal appeal they will send you a Notice of Rejection of Representations (Mr Mustard eats these for breakfast) and an appeal form to send to PATAS. Mr Mustard can help you with these forms but you must be on time i.e. within 28 days of the Notice of Rejection.

At this point you have lost any chance of paying £55 instead of the full amount of £110 so you may as well appeal to PATAS as:

- it costs the council £40 and you nothing at all

- it gives you an extra 2 or 3 months to save up in

- if you lose you get 28 days to pay the £110, it does not increase for 28 days

- you have a 72% chance of winning

- it is a user friendly independent forum

- you can do the whole thing by post

Many people find paperwork boring (Mr Mustard loves it) but it is worth your time to fight if you don't want to be pulling the drawbridge up at home to keep the bailiffs out.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard