Mr Mustard helps a man who works in Newham and merrily parks in bays with defaced or non-existent signage as there is no legal requirement on him to park his car in a bay with a sign. Bays can be painted and not have a sign in order to control where vehicles park, what Mr Mustard calls a 'free bay'. How are you to know if a bay is a free bay or a controlled one? by the installation of a sign.
Vandalism of this nature may well cost council tax payers a lot of money in fixing them and in PCNs being unlawful if issued but the solution is not to issue PCNs with no legal basis, as Newham Council frequently do.
Mr Mustard has now beefed up his representations to Newham and they tell the council directly that they are breaking the law and it tries to head off the response they might otherwise send which include irrelevances. He also warns them about possible cost consequences should they reject. Sometimes it works.
In the absence of signage the council are acting unlawfully by issuing a PCN on an unsigned bay.
The previous issue of a warning notice to the vehicle (not necessarily to the same driver) does not substitute for legally required signage unless the council can tell me what law over-rides the above one.
The presence or otherwise of CPZ entry signs is a red herring. The sole purpose of those signs is to avoid having to locally sign single yellow lines. They are of no relevance or application to a signed bay. A cpz could easily contain 100 bays all of which could have a different restriction e.g. doctors bay, motorcycle bay, pay bay, residents bay, diplomatic bay etc and all have differently restricted times and/or days.
It is vexatious behaviour by the council to issue a PCN given the lack of bay signage. Should the council reject this representation and thus necessitate an Appeal to the independent adjudicator I put the council on notice that an application for costs will be made should the Appeal be allowed.
On this occasion it worked:
The important information which could not be retrieved was a photograph of the sign because there simply wasn't one.
It does not explain why the motorist's own informal challenge was rejected, a fact which reinforces a widely held belief that councils reject the first representation because many motorists worry about the discount and so cough up after the first rejection even when innocent. The public also make the mistake of believing that everything a council writes will be unbiased and correct. They are in it for the money.
It was cheating to reject a good challenge and to have issued a PCN in the first place.
The end.
