When 'traffic wardens' meet

A funny story from the tribunal in Saturday's decisions. Here it is in full.

What is clear is that the Hounslow Council traffic warden who issued the PCN did so in a great hurry, as per usual, even though the motorist was in the frame from the very beginning.

Mr Mustard's advice is to calmly drive off in such a case as the notes made will often be deficient or the warden will make a false note as in this case. Mr Mustard has known the notes of the traffic warden to be destroyed by dashcam or doorbell footage.

If a traffic warden cheats you, please make a complaint to the council as otherwise they will continue.

The end.

Harrow Council - band of thieves

Harrow Council are hedging their bets. They are going to apply to London Councils to change from band B (outer London rates) to band A (inner London rates) but if London Councils own attempt to increase the value of all PCNs is successful they won't do it (for now anyway). Their website had a explanation from which Mr Mustard has extracted the most relevant parts.

 

Mr Mustard completed the survey. Questions 1 & 2 were about who he was and the postcode of his home.

Question 9 was how Mr Mustard had heard about the survey and Q10 as to whether or not he had completed the London Councils' survey.

Mr Mustard thought that this was the least useful survey he had completed for some time. (Please ignore the spelling errors in his responses, you get the gist).

Mr Mustard was also unimpressed with the FAQs which the public were intended to read and digest before answering the survey itself. Mr Mustard decided to ask some more penetrating questions and today he received the responses which are now followed by his commentary. Feel free to add your own at the end.

 

The only factor considered before bringing forward the survey (it can't count for anything before it has taken place!) is the bare number of PCNs issued. That is unconvincing as a justification.

 

The bare numbers of PCNs issued do not show a direct relationship between value and the number of PCNs issued. If there was such a direct relationship the numbers would surely be more or less constant?

 

There is your proof. If you don't know in advance what a PCN will cost you how can your behaviour be affected by not knowing? (it can be £60 or £80, £110 or £130).

 

Mr Mustard has the data as it is published by London Councils each year. 

In the year ended 31 March 2013, Waltham Forest issued 70,623 PCNs. 

On 1 April 2013 they increased the penalty levels by £20 per PCN. 

In the year to 31 March 2014 WF issued 69,082 PCNs a decrease of just 2.2% which Mr Mustard would suggest is not statistically significant (and isn't 3.3% which wasn't material either).

Oh dear, Harrow failed to notice, or chose not to notice, that in the year ended 31 March 2016, WF issued 88,767 PCNs, an increase on the base year of 2013 of 25.7%. The price increase was a disaster, it didn't work, clearly. Mr Mustard recalls from his secondary school days his maths text book which had a chapter  headed 'Lies, damn lies and statistics'. He didn't understand the heading back then but he sure does now.

 

Harrow were being wilfully blind in not taking a wider view of the PCN statistics of the last 20 years which are freely available to the public. They have cherry picked a small but convenient fall. They know nothing about the true experience in Waltham Forest.

 

No it isn't, it is a question of what you, Harrow Council, know about why the numbers of PCNs issued by WF have gone down slightly in one convenient year and shot up rapidly in four subsequent years.

 

Again Mr Mustard was asking what information Harrow Council held, clearly none at all.

Perhaps the time has come for an undergraduate or a professor of statistics to study this topic.

What is clear to Mr Mustard is that any report presented to councillors, which probably won't contain much more useful information than has already been given to the public, won't really contain a proper basis for an informed decision to proceed with the re-banding.

Mr Mustard doesn't know how Harrow Council works and isn't a resident of Harrow so doubtless has limited hearing rights at any council meeting, but you the reader can play your part.

Please ask the hard questions, complain if you don't like the answers and go to any relevant council meeting and have your say.

This survey is just laying the ground for revenue raising.

The end.

Hold on a minute

Each month or so the Barnet Council parking department thin client side has a meeting with NSL, the enforcement contractor. The Internal Audit department has recently criticised the minutes as being insufficiently detailed, a view with which Mr Mustard concurs. He did wonder if it was because of him that the minutes were left a bit vague as he would pick up all the processing errors from the minutes and use them to get Appeals granted.

Mr Mustard has never thought that having a "thin" client side was a good idea. If you have a contractor you need to monitor them closely as otherwise it is possible they will take the wotsit and not perform in accordance with the contract.

NSL's performance at PATAS, the Parking & Traffic Appeals Services, has been lamentable at best and hilarious at worst and one adjudicator has simply said to Mr Mustard, after he gave one of their Evidence Packs a going over that led to a rapid cancellation of the PCN, "well, that is typical Barnet for you". Mr Mustard also sees Evidence Packs and the processing skills of other boroughs and NSL Barnet are certainly in the relegation play-offs.

In the pack of minutes for 2013 which Mr Mustard asked for in one of his nowadays rare Freedom of Information requests (only one official request this year with some other PCN representations wrongly being turned into FOI) was the following page which supposedly shows an average performance at PATAS (as your first argument in response to a PCN is an informal Challenge, the second in response to the Notice to Owner are your formal Representations and finally your third bite at the cherry is your Appeal to an adjudicator at PATAS).

If these statistics were correct this would be an acceptable level of performance.

DNC means Do not Contest and is when, even though the council might have turned down your informal challenge and your formal representations once they know that an independent adjudicator is going to look at the case that they think they will lose (or they have too many cases to prepare) and throw in the towel. What this tells you is that persistence pays. When the council tell you you were in the wrong, it doesn't mean that you were.The average London-wide DNC rate is 20% with the City topping the table at 40% and Enfield only giving up 7% of the time ( figures from 2012-13).

The won  / lost numbers are usually about the same so well done NSL, but 

Mr Mustard doesn't, based on many years of experience, trust statistics which help the party who produced them so he checked two days at random. Here is 17 December 12:

There were only 10 cases decided that day, not 24. Mr Mustard thought that was odd, so he checked another day, the 10 January 13, and here from the PATAS website, are the real numbers:

Mr Mustard sees nine Allowed Appeals (i.e. nine PCN were cancelled) and none were refused. Where those seven Refused Appeals got to that NSL are claiming is anybody's guess.

Mr Mustard thinks that the newly appointed Parking Manager will be looking much more closely at statistics from NSL from now on, especially as Mr Mustard will be looking over his shoulder at them. Mr Mustard does hope that no KPI payments were based upon false statistics.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

N.B. It is possible that Mr Mustard has got hold of the wrong end of the stick and that the date column when used by NSL is the date that they were notified of an Appeal and what the eventual outcome was (which would all be on differing dates) although those are much harder statistics to track.

The Ministry of Silly Talks

Mr Mustard can't let misleading statistics go unchallenged.

Yesterday in the local Times newspaper Cllr Thomas ( Cabinet Member for Resources & Performance ) said "Previous industrial disputes have seen around 150 staff take action with 95 per cent of staff continuing to work as normal. He doesn't actually say that only 5% supported the latest strike but that is the implication. The 150 striking staff would be about 5% of the 3,000+ council employees. The trouble with this use of statistics is that the entire workforce were not balloted to go on strike. 

The number on strike was reported as 140. The number of staff in the DRS bundle is 232 as per the council's own report so the number balloted is likely to be in that area ( Mr Mustard is not privy to the exact number but doubtless the council are ) so it looks to Mr Mustard like over 50% of eligible employees went on strike which is a much more serious affair.

Daniel Thomas has form for using misleading statistics. Mr Mustard remembers his previous reported remark about collecting 99% of council tax reported in the local Times again here. Here is what he said:

“By the time we have pursued all council tax arrears we will have collected 99 per cent of the total amount owed."

Now the bad news for Dan Thomas is that Mr Mustard's alter ego has been a debt collector / credit consultant for the last 25+ years and so he knows hot air when he sees it. An improved position in the teeth of a recession didn't seem very likely. Mr Mustard duly sent in his questions under FOI ( the information being readily available in a spreadsheet in any well run local authority ) and received the following information:

Council Tax
	As at 30 Sept 2011
Year	% Collected	Arrears Balance
		£000s
2004/5	98.37%	457
2005/6	98.06%	943
2006/7	98.02%	1,809
2007/8	98.20%	2,282
2008/9	98.14%	2,780
2009/10	97.96%	3,451
2010/11	97.01%	5,147

So in the last 7 years the council has not collected 99% with all the above figures rounding to 98% ( except 2010/11 which will improve slightly over the next 12 months ) and if anything the trend might well be downwards which would make sense in the current economic climate.

You might say that a 1% difference is not worth quibbling over. It is when 1% = £2,200,000

Moral of the story: When numbers come out of the mouth of Dan Thomas, don't take them at face value.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard