Trebles all round in Haringey

Mr Mustard's client received an Order for Recovery and when Mr Mustard looked at it he could see that something had gone wrong and he had a good idea what it was.

Mr Mustard can add up and knew that 195 + 9 was not 222, but 204. He also knew that 195 +9 +9 +9 did = 222.

He asked Haringey under FOI to explain what had happened and how many people were affected. They answered fully without trying to wriggle.

There were 512 entries in the list, which is probably the maximum number agreed with the TEC for registration in one go. Haringey have to pay a fee of £4,608 to register these PCNs, many of which will get returned to an earlier stage once witness statements or statutory demands are filed, thus burning the £9.

Having identified the error Haringey Council cancelled the PCN on which Mr Mustard was instructed and as you can read above they planned to refund everybody who paid the bogus amount. Interestingly in the file with which Mr Mustard was concerned there was a note to the contrary.

If you know anyone who had a PCN in Haringey in 2023 you should get them to check the list below and demand a refund by emailing corporate.feedback@haringey.gov.uk (not sure that is the best email for parking but Haringey Council simply don't want you to email them).

 

Haringey Council PCN Court ... by MisterMustard

Are Harrow Council deliberately incompetent?

Readers with good memories will recall that Mr Mustard wrote about Harrow being horrible at the start of 2018, the back story is here.

It might have been the case that Harrow Council just got a little bit behind and their slowness was a one off which they should then have fixed. Unfortunately that is not the case as twice this week Mr Mustard has been contacted by clients who hadn't heard from Harrow Council for a year and then suddenly they did. If his clients thought the PCNs were over due to council neglect they would be correct in principle but wrong in practice as Mr Mustard checks every PCN twice a month to make sure nothing gets away from him.

The case with the worse delay has the following timeline:

You can see that Harrow Council have been sat on their hands for 33 months.

The Order for Recovery was sent to the same address as the PCN. Luckily the recipient had not moved home. If you had moved home in 2018 would you notify the council of your change of address from 2016? No, I didn't think you would. Nor would you have a postal redirection for more than 12 months, most people probably only have 3 or 6 months of redirection given how so much documentation now arrives by email.

Mr Mustard recommends that if you have had a Harrow PCN in the last 5 years that you contact them and ask them for the number (give them your car registration and date of purchase) and ask them to tell you the current balance of every PCN ever issued since you bought the vehicle and if it is not zero, to tell you the dates of all the statutory documents they have issued.

If you have moved you could do this even if you don't think you have had a PCN as it may have gone to your old address. Mr Mustard also recommends leaving a note for the incoming resident with your new address, as he did recently for a house he sold and he left a few parking visitor vouchers to help them in their moving in period - they were very pleased and have already dropped a final utility bill letter through his door. (Another tip, he read the gas, electric & water meters hours before they moved in and left a note of them at the property to save the buyers the time of performing the same task.)

What happens next to a PCN, if you don't file a witness statement (or statutory declaration in moving traffic cases) is that a bailiff will be instructed. If the bailiff finds the car, and most people don't move far and bailiff vans have ANPR, is that it will be clamped. As all of the paperwork will have been sent to your old address and you haven't been served with at least one obligatory statutory document Mr Mustard does not think you have been properly served but it is you who has the problem, a wheel clamp on your vehicle, which you may need urgently, so you end up paying. This is grossly unfair.

In this way, by being incompetent, Harrow Council and their bailiffs profit at your expense. That is unjust.

Once Mr Mustard has the current PCN sorted out, he will file a complaint with the council and if they don't apologise he will go to the LGO. He will also complain to the Iinformation Commissioner as the council, having abandoned enforcement of the PCN by their failure to act expeditiously, they no longer have the right to process your data.

After writing this blog post Mr Mustard decided to look through decisions made at the tribunal in October 19 & he found this one:

Councils are meant to learn from the decisions of Adjudicators, Harrow haven't learnt a thing and are plouging ahead with PCNs which they know is prejudicial.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Barnet Council parking are getting better - at apologising

A good apology is a thing of beauty and Barnet are getting better at them but then they do have to send Mr Mustard quite a few.

Mr Mustard checks the on line balance of every PCN he handles every 10 days or so. When he then sees a balance increase by £8 he knows that, in theory, an Order for Recovery has been issued. It turned out that Barnet had been increasing the balance when they asked the Court to approve the debt registration rather than when the Court responded. He is told that this was due to human error but Mr Mustard thinks it was the way the system was set up.

The event which confirmed that the horse was before the cart was when Mr Mustard, having seen a balance increase by £8, submitted a witness statement in order to get a debt registration cancelled and the TEC (the relevant part of the Court) told him that the PCN had not been registered as a debt. That was a procedural impropriety (blunder) on the part of the council.

You can keep an eye on your Barnet PCN balance here

Note that the fault was down to NSL who are meant to be PCN processing experts. Mr Mustard wouldn't want to deal with amateurs if this is what experts are like. Mr Mustard has been described as a professional lay representative which is, of course, an oxymoron. It is harder to get your contractors to do the right thing than manage your own staff doing it as they are within your sight. This is one of the prices you pay for outsourcing, loss of control.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Taking flipping Liberties - or TfL for short

Mr Mustard's client received the above Notice to Owner, but hadn't got the PCN and thus the location description was too vague to satisfy the requirement to set out the grounds on which a penalty was due.

Mr Mustard made the formal representations on line & in time, that due to the vague description on the Notice to Owner, the contravention was denied (his client often being in the Stamford Hill area & not having a PCN from the relevant date).

TfL wrote this:

Mr Mustard ignored the letter as formal representations had already been made which TfL were obliged to accept or reject within 56 days, the letter itself confirming that representations had been made. There wouldn't have been any photographs on a PCN given out at the roadside.

TfL neither accepted nor rejected the representations. After 67 days they issued a Charge Certificate as if no representations had been made and that increased the balance due by 50% to £195

Mr Mustard has now lodged a complaint which TfL will, if they do as they usually do, fail to respond to. Then Mr Mustard's client will be forced to lodge a witness statement in order to obtain a tribunal hearing. TfL will have wasted the £8 debt registration fee and the £30 tribunal fee and will lose the Appeal because they have not followed the set procedure. It is just plain wrong to put the client through the mill like this, a mill he shouldn't be anywhere near.

Mr Mustard has noticed a few enforcement authorities acting in this way (Islington & Camden to name but two, not Barnet generally). They receive formal representations which are valid but they don't like what is said so they engage the motorist (the Owner technically) in correspondence which is not within the Regulations which govern the Appeal process.

Mr Mustard thinks an extra letter would be reasonable if it was to the benefit of the motorist, something like:

Dear Sir / Madam

You have made a representation that your blue badge had slipped off the dashboard. If you provide a copy of that badge to us within the next 14 days we will cancel your PCN. If you do not do so we will reject your representations and you will then have the right of Appeal to an independent adjudicator.

Yours etc

That approach is in accordance with the letter of the Regulations and the spirit of exercising discretion in suitable cases (not likely though on the 20th time your badge falls off the dashboard).

If you are sent extra correspondece of the less clear kind Mr Mustard advises counting 56 days from the date of your representation being delivered to the enforcement authority for parking contraventions and 90 days for other, moving traffic, contraventions and then telling the authority that in the absence of their Notice of Rejection they have accepted the representations by default and that the PCN must be cancelled. (If their Notice of Rejection has actually got lost in the post you will have to go down the witness statement route in any event).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Enfield Council in time travel trouble.

Mr Mustard complained about the use of the non-statutory pre-debt reminder to Enfield Council on 26 January. He had previously complained about it in November and was told that all his points were valid and the reminder would be changed. The revised version was so similar that Mr Mustard didn't notice the subtle differences, he having expected radical change & possibly withdrawal of the use of the reminder as Haringey Council decided at about the time that Mr Mustard complained to them.

This is what Mr Mustard wrote on 26 January:

Dear Mr Parking Manager

Nothing has yet changed with the pre-debt reminder?

I don't think the contravention description is substantially complaint (sic) as looking at the meter on google streetmap it looks to have the red dash sticker on it. That means that payment could have been made by phone, which is not part of the alleged contravention. Surely this should have been a code 11, parked without payment of the parking charge and your PCN is unsustainable?

In the circumstances you could please cancel EF00123456.

Many thanks

Mr Mustard

There then followed a game of email ping pong which culminated in Mr Mustard's complaint being sent from parking to the complaints department from where it will end up with the Ombudsman who, his recent report Fairer Fines shows, is currently concerned about the fair treatment of motorists.

As there had been a pre-debt reminder Mr Mustard knew that a charge certificate had been issued. His client had not received the Notice to Owner and was awaiting the Order for Recovery so that the process could be rewound to the Notice to Owner stage.

On 27 January Mr Mustard's client sent him a copy of the Order for Recovery. Mr Mustard duly submitted his client's witness statement to the TEC the very same day.

On 9 February the council, as they were perfectly entitled to do, issued a fresh Notice to Owner.

On 15 February Mr Mustard's client sent him a copy of the fresh Notice to Owner and on the same day Mr Mustard went on-line to the Enfield Council computer and made representations that the PCN had been issued for the wrong contravention code.

Imagine Mr Mustard's surprise when he received a Notice of Rejection on 16 February which had been written on 14 February and which contained the following:

The order set out in the legislation is simple, it goes like this:

1 - Notice to Owner

2 - Representations against the Notice to Owner

3 - Notice of Rejection (or Acceptance) of the Representations

4 - Appeal to the tribunal (done!)

Enfield Council have decided to make Mr Mustard's email of 26 January which pre-dated the Notice to Owner of 9 February into a document which was issued 2 weeks later after the Notice to Owner.

In the four years that Mr Mustard has been fighting PCN he has never seen such a blatant procedural impropriety. They are defined as a failure to follow Parking Regulations but you could simply think of them as a council blunder.

He know has an Appeal pending which technically he shouldn't have but which he has no doubt will be allowed if it reaches a hearing which it probably won't as Mr Mustard will be filing a further complaint with Enfield Council. Mr Mustard will be making a claim for costs, which is very rare for him, as the council have been wholly unreasonable.

Mr Mustard doesn't suppose, or rather hope, that Enfield Council are playing guessing games about the representations that ordinary members of the public intend to make on a future date. If they are though, the public don't know the correct procedure like Mr Mustard does.

What the council's actions do disclose though is an indecent haste to reject Representations not yet made by Mr Mustard.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Charge Certificates

Charge Certificate by MisterMustard

Mr Mustard has noticed the unexpected arrival of a couple of Charge Certificates and although he thinks he might have written about them before they are worthy of a thorough blogging. They aren't yet an epidemic, unless you tell him otherwise, but he suspects that there is either a procedural error or human error creeping into the processing of PCN because on two occasions the formal representations have not been responded to. 

The processing of a single PCN could be in the hands of as many staff as exist within the NSL office. This is probably viewed as the most cost effective method but it also leads to loss of consistency. If appeals were dealt with accordingly to postcode or alphabetically by Surname then the appeal clerks (they are called Notice Processing Officers) would get to know the individual PCN and might remember some idiosyncrasy about an appeal which might prevent error. they would also get to see the pattern of someone's appeals and be better able to tell if they were genuine or a chancer and decide accordingly (although Mr Mustard rather suspects that the default setting is to reject an informal appeal regardless of merit).

On Friday he was sent a Charge Certificate for a PCN issued on 30 November 12. That PCN had the old invalid wording.

Informal representations were made online on 4 December 12.

They were rejected on 18 December 12 (Happy Christmas!)

The Notice to Owner (NtO) was then issued on 9 January 13.

Formal representations were made online on 5 February 13.

All went quiet.

Formal representations have to be responded to by the council within 56 days of their receipt. This was not done.

On 7 June Mr Mustard emailed the motorist as follows:

That is good. The council get 56 days in which to respond to a challenge made in response to the NtO. Be warned that the council might still wake the ticket up later! If they do I will help you. (How prescient of Mr Mustard.)

 

Today Mr Mustard emailed parking client side and they have sensibly and quickly killed the PCN off. That option isn't available to everyone and is only available to Mr Mustard as he has demonstrated a certain understanding of the system and doesn't waste the parking client side's time; in fact he saves it as they know when they are on a loser and can instead plague somebody who doesn't know the ropes who might well go wrong and have to pay up.

What you can do.

The choices of action in response to a Charge Certificate are limited to:

(a) do nothing, or 

(b) pay up. 

Your failure to pay at an earlier stage will have cost you an extra 50% on top of the parking ticket price. That is the harsh price of being slow, poor or mis-placing your paperwork. You should pay, as you don't want your parking ticket anywhere near a bailiff, if you have failed to follow the appeal process (download the guide from the top left). The Charge Certificate looks like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick to prod you into paying.

If however, the council have gone wrong then you should sit and wait as the Order for Recovery will be along in the next 3 weeks or so (although some are arriving 6 months+ or a year after the Charge Certificate which simply should not happen) and then you can react.

Form TE3 Order for Recovery by MisterMustard

At this point the cost is still nothing like as bad as it will be once a bailiff gets hold of your debt and it will become ten times worse, so if you haven't followed the procedure, pay up now, you are another £7 to the bad. (Fee now £8 August 2016)

If however, something has gone wrong, you can file a witness statement (form TE9) and if you do this correctly and in time (you have a clear date to act by so don't delay) then the PCN will go back to the first stage and you will have your chance to appeal. In London you can only make a witness statement on one ground alone; choose it out of the following four:

1.  You did not receive the Notice to Owner (if you didn't appeal at this stage then you may well not have received it especially if the PCN is old or you may well know for certain that you didn't receive it) This is the most likely reason for a witness statement to be filed by you.

2.  You sent in an appeal (they are called representations) after you did receive the Notice to Owner and you did not get a response from the council. This is also quite common sometimes due to them being scanned to the wrong file or not printed out and scanned at all. You will need to find a copy of what you sent in if you are to be believed.

3.  You sent an appeal to London Tribunals but you had no reply. This probably doesn't happen very often as London Tribunals are quite efficient. Mr Mustard always gets a free certificate of posting for any parking related letter. If you don't hear from London Tribunals within a week of sending your form in I would telephone them on 020 7520 7200 to check what has happened and if your form got lost in the post send them a copy of the copy (so do take a copy of it). (In some boroughs you can now file your London Tribunals Appeal on-line. If you do this it can't get lost)

4.  You paid in full.

Please do this form TE9 in time as out-of-time witness statements are simply another hurdle that is really best avoided.

This is what the form TE9 looks like. It will come pre-printed from the council with your data or you can download one from the Courts site here.

Form TE9 Witness statement by MisterMustard

It is quite straightforward. If your application is in time it will be processed very quickly, a day or two, by the TEC and then the council will probably send you a new Notice to Owner (if that was your appeal) or refer your application to London Tribunals if you say you made representations that were not responded to by the council or London Tribunals.

If you don't fully understand the process send an email to Mr Mustard and he will help you. At the very least he will want to see every single piece of paper relating to the PCN.

Whatever you do don't panic but do act now.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

NSL charge Mr Mustard (again)

a trainee Notice Processing Officer

Mr Mustard seems to recall that NSL have previously tried to register him as a debtor with the TEC (Traffic Enforcement Centre - attached to Northampton County Court). Mr Mustard has a message for NSL, he does not get parking tickets (PCN) as he always parks properly, or, if he does get one, it will be an error and it will not reach the Charge Certificate stage as he will make representations. If NSL, you are thinking of putting Mr Mustard's name on a statutory document, stop and think as you are almost certainly about to drop a clanger. Here is the offending document:

The name isn't even correct. Initials are "D R" not "R D"

Mr Mustard does not have a Fiat and was not parked in Union St on 22 March 2014.

For the average motorist there isn't much you can officially do in this situation other than wait for the Order for Recovery (and then file a witness statement) but it would still be best if NSL make a similar blunder to tell them by email to barnet@nslservices.co.uk and copy the email to your ward councillors.

Mr Mustard took his usual direct approach, ignored NSL, and went straight to the parking manager who cancelled the PCN without further ado.

Doubtless a handsome written apology with flowers, chocolates or wine will arrive from NSL later on in the week.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Order for Recovery - new TEC email address

If you find yourself completing an Order for Recovery, which Mr Mustard wrote about here last year, the fastest and surest way to get the PCN taken back to the Notice to Owner stage is to email the Traffic Enforcement Centre (TEC).

Mr Mustard did so today for a client using the contact details provided by Barnet Council with the Order for Recovery which he found are now nearly out of date.

The new email address to use is tec@hmcts.gsi.gov.uk

and the existing address will be retired on 31 July 14. The new address is nice and short. Make sure you use it.

Hopefully the council will put the new address on their paperwork by 31 July 14. Mr Mustard has asked the TEC to nudge them.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

NSL - out of order again

There is a safety net built into the PCN enforcement process to catch you if you don't receive the Notice to Owner or if the Notice of Rejection of Representations does not arrive.

The way it works is that the Traffic Enforcement Centre (part of Northampton County Court) agree that a batch of PCNs can be registered as debts and enforced as if they are county court judgments (although they don't count towards your credit rating).

Under Civil Procedure Rule & Practice Direction 75 this fact must be communicated to the debtor (i.e. the registered keeper of the vehicle) within 15 days of that batch being agreed (7 days in the contract with NSL, Mr Mustard thinks) i.e it must reach the debtor within 15 days thus allowance must be made for time in the postal system. The TEC keep a note of the deadline for each PCN which is 36 days after the date of their decision.

Barnet Council then send you a form TE3 Order for Recovery which tells you this. The TE3 has a date on the front by which you must file a form TE9 to return your PCN to the Notice to Owner stage (if you didn't receive the Notice to owner the first time) or have a PATAS hearing (if you didn't receive the Notice of Rejection). You get 21 days in which to file your form TE9 (by email is best).

(NSL have cut a big hole in the safety net by being slow to act. Here are the dates of a case which, thanks to the rejection of an in-time TE9 as being out-of-time, Mr Mustard got dragged into (luckily for the motorist concerned).

29 Jan 14: TEC agree debt registration 

13 Feb 14: Official deadline to issue TE3 Order for Recovery

28 Feb 14: TE3 issued

6 Mar 14: 36 days after debt registration = deadline for TE9

10 Mar 14: Witness statement TE9 filed (rejected as late)

21 Mar 14; Deadline for TE9 set by Barnet Council/NSL (incorrectly)

So what you say this is just a one-off? No, Mr Mustard had a case he was dealing with in November 13. Ah, so at least 2 cases then which would be 2% of the cases that Mr Mustard deals with in a year. Therefore, with 165,000 PCN issued annually we could expect there to be 330 such cases in a year. How many were there?

6,193 (let Mr Mustard repeat that)

6,193

yes, 6,193 not issued within 7 days at May 13 (since presumably 1 May 12 when the contract started).

So that is 6,193 PCN not processed in accordance with the contract or within the Civil Procedure Rules and thus illegally pursued.

We don't know how many went to bailiffs and were paid, completely illegally.

We don't know how many people paid up in fear, completely wrongly.

What we do know that the contract with NSL is a One Barnet contract.

We know that it is a disaster.

We know that we paid for a service we didn't get.

We do know that KPI.9 Processing Services has a zero tolerance for failure. Mr Mustard will be checking that this KPI has not been paid for in 2013/14 given that it has obviously been consistently failed (and 2012/13 was still being negotiated last time Mr Mustard looked).

So if the thin client side can't manage such a simple contract what hope is there for the contracts with Capita and Re:  (bloody stupid name for a joint venture)? Absolutely no chance at all that these much larger and more complicated contracts will:

a) perform

b) have contract terms that are properly enforced.

The only way to be 100% sure of what is going on in a department, is to run it in a hands-on style.

The NSL contract isn't working (this is not the only process failure).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

4/4/14
Amended by Mr Mustard to change the 15 days which he changed to 7 back to 15!

The Park Road palaver

Palaver

Park Road, Hendon, is quite long and has 2 different Controlled Parking Zones

HC1 (Hendon Central) covers numbers 54-164 and 57-171

WH3 (West Hendon) covers numbers 13-39 and 6-38

So what happens if you live in the HC1 zone and renew your CPZ permit and receive your permit for the year ahead in the post? Well you simply place it in the car windscreen, you probably don't look at it all that closely.

A few months later, a more diligent traffic warden than usual, spots your car outside your house, where it has been for 17 months, sporting a permit with the wrong zone identifier. Result: a PCN for £110 for not displaying a valid permit. Strange you think, I have one. Then you check the other local cars and find the error.

So you log onto the council website and find that they have recorded your house as belonging to the wrong CPZ and they issued you with the wrong permit so this will easily be corrected won't it? Oh come on this is Barnet Council we are talking about; where you will have to deal with 3 different departments to resolve one simple query.

So you write in on the same day that the PCN was issued and explain what has gone wrong and 10 days later your appeal is rejected. You decide not to waste further time and arrange to meet Mr Mustard in the Bohemia (when it was serving drinks). You give him a signed letter of authority and a few days later you receive the Notice to Owner. This is the second stage at which an appeal can be made. Mr Mustard writes the second stage appeal, as follows:

I represent Redacted of 1** Park Rd, London, NW4 as attached authority letter.

 

This is a somewhat unusual case in that Redacted has been issued a permit for zone WH3 whilst living in zone HC1. It is the case that Park Road is long and is divided into two sections for CPZ purposes and somehow the council chose the wrong identifier when printing my client's permit.

 

Please cancel the PCN and issue a new permit with the correct zone identifier. This PCN is the result of a clerical error on the part of the council itself. Please cancel it.

 

Simples? Er, no.

 

Mr Mustard received the standard auto-acknowledgement to his email so he knows the council have received it. He does hear that NSL Ltd somehow can't manage the simple task of printing an email out and scanning it into the correct file on every occasion and that then things do go wrong.

They did go wrong. Mr Mustard didn't get a letter but the client did. It told them that as a Charge Certificate had been issued it was now impossible to appeal. They also tell the client, and they are writing on Barnet Council notepaper, to phone the permits section of Barnet Council to sort out a new permit. This is unhelpful in the extreme when it is the council who have made the error. They also tell the client that they didn't make any representations in response to the Notice to Owner; oh yes they did. They also tell the client he didn't provide any evidence to support their claim. Their evidence is on the council website. How can you prove which zone your house is in?

It is sort of true that there is no right of appeal to a Charge Certificate but the council can cancel a PCN at any stage, especially if they are wrong, so they should look at any letter received with an open mind. They tend to look at them with an open wallet instead.

Yesterday Mr Mustard wrote again, and copied in his contact in the parking client side of the council who he only bothers when things are going wrong, not for routine cases:

Something has gone wrong in your system.

On 22 August 13 you issued the Notice to Owner.
You gave it a Date of Service of 26 August 13.
28 days are allowed for formal representations.
They were submitted in time on 17 September 13 by email.
They were auto acknowledged by your system (see attached)
I have not seen a Notice of Rejection of Representations but it would allow 28 days for payment or to appeal to PATAS.

 

That time is not up so a Charge Certificate should not have been issued.
 

That issue is a procedural impropriety.
 

Please cancel the PCN.

 

Having checked the  council website today Mr Mustard sees the balance is now £0.00 and so that it seems that after a huge waste of everyone's time, the matter has been resolved.

Now mistakes will happen occasionally. If you fix errors promptly and apologise and maybe send a bunch of flowers to say sorry for all the inconvenience, you will be better thought of than if you hadn't made the mistake in the first place. Mr Mustard's suggestions that parking should send boxes of chocolates or bunches of flowers, or even a few visitor vouchers, to residents who they have wronged, have so far fallen on deaf ears. Now that he has the ear of a very senior officer, he will have a word about good manners and reputation. Funny though. If you go wrong that is £110 and no mercy. If the council go wrong, it isn't even sorry. It is not a just situation.

 

This is the trouble with organising yourselves the way that the council has done.

Permits are issued by customer service parking permit team.

PCN are issued by NSL who also deal with enforcement.

Formal appeals are meant to be dealt with by the council themselves.

Some other department must have set the house up in the wrong zone.

Too many cooks.

So, wherever you live inside a CPZ, go outside now and check the zone identifier and expiry date of your permit (there is a permit printing problem at the council since last Friday so if your replacement permit is late arriving the council should not give you a PCN. You bet they will).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Footnote: After the Charge Certificate the next document is the Order for Recovery. It sets out 4 grounds on which you can get the process put back to the start. Use form TE9 and tick only one reason. Starting again won't mean that NSL will read your appeals properly though, although in this case it means that the papers would have been referred to PATAS and they would have done so.

Bolt out of the blue or Justice delayed is justice denied

an old bolt to match an old PCN

Mr Mustard thinks that there are possibly 8,000 rip van winkle PCNs which have been pulled out of their state of sleep and subjected to new processing. Someone, and who that is Mr Mustard does not yet know, at Barnet Council doesn't think they have to abide by the Code of Practice issued by London Councils which says that if there is a delay in processing at any stage of the process of more than 6 months the PCN should (emphasis by Mr M) be cancelled. Rules are of course only for little people. Some parking rules are in the Highway Code and we are expected to abide by those but apparently the council can treat other Codes as optional.

How might you hear about your PCN lurching back into life after a year of gathering digital dust on a hard disk? 

You might get a letter giving you 7 days to pay before the debt is registered with the Traffic Enforcement Centre at Northampton County Court (which acts as a clearing house for PCN across the land - no actual hearings take place there). The next document you receive would be the Order for Recovery.

You might get the Order for Recovery.

You might get the Charge Certificate (and you can do nothing much at this stage in the standard procedure except wait for the Order for Recovery or pay, as if)

You might get a Notice to Owner (if that is the case and it is more than 6 months since the Penalty Charge Notice simply write to Barnet Council and tell them they are out of time, full stop).

You might get a letter or a visit from a Bailiff which is the least palatable option.

What can you do?

The first step is to send an email to mrmustard@zoho.com with copies of every document.

If you have the Order for Recovery (form TE3) it will have with it a form TE9 which you can complete with one, and only one, of the four possible grounds. The 4 grounds are

1. I did not receive the Notice to Owner

2. I appealed against the Notice to Owner within 28 days and heard nothing back

3. I appealed to PATAS on time but heard nothing back (not very likely)

4. I have paid.

If you do this on time, and you can do it by email to the TEC, then, for option 1,  the PCN will go back to the beginning and you will be able to appeal or, for options 2 & 3 it will be listed for consideration by PATAS and presumably for option 4 the money will be chased down as a clerical error has probably occurred, be ready to prove payment. Mr Mustard doubts there will be many option 4 cases.

If the PCN has already reached the Bailiff in the form of a warrant of execution then as well as filing the form TE9 you will also have to file a form TE7 which is an application to file form TE9 outside of the time limit and you will need a good reason for being late which might be that you didn't receive earlier documents about the PCN. Mr Mustard can help you with these.

When a bailiff is sniffing around you need to move fast (the same day) to make sure he doesn't get your car removed before you have filed the forms with the TEC.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Missing any forms, get them here.

Parked Parking tickets

Is your PCN in this office?

Word reaches Mr Mustard that stagnant parking tickets from 2010 and 2011 which had not been pursued at or after the Charge Certificate stage, when a ticket penalty is increased by 50%, and which in 2013 motorists will think have been written off and thus they have thrown their own paperwork away, are now being brought back to life and Charge Certificates are being sent out or, the next step, are being registered at the County Court as a debt.

Not surprisingly motorists are confused, astonished or angry, or all three, and are complaining to Barnet Council. Mr Mustard has asked the council this morning exactly what is going on and will get a reply after full investigation in due course.

The question of delay was considered in a Parking Appeals Service case ( Paul Richard Davis v Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea) in March 1998 which set out that councils should act in a timely manner. Over a year is not timely.

In their report for 1995/96 the Parking & Traffic Appeals Service said that a PCN should be cancelled if 6 months had elapsed since the issue of the Charge Certificate (which bumps the penalty up by 50%) and the penalty had not in those 6 months been registered as a debt at the County Court.

Since that time the Code of Practice issued by London Councils says, at para 170, a PCN should be cancelled if there has been a delay of 6 months at any stage of the enforcement process.

So now you know what to do if an old parking ticket appears out of the blue, complain. A request for compensation for distress might make the council move a little quicker to cancel your parking ticket as they should have done when they left it to rot of old age in the first place.

If you receive an Order for Recovery in respect of an old parking ticket you can send a Witness Statement to the County Court to roll the process back and allow for your appeal to be heard in certain circumstances, as follows:

The Witness Statement is an important legal statement which states that you did not receive either:

1.   a Notice to Owner, or

2.   a Notice of Rejection from the council, or

3.   a Notice of Refusal from the Traffic Penalty Tribunal, or

4.   that you paid the penalty charge within 28 days of receiving it. 

On the form you will see ONE of 4 boxes to tick each of which relates to one of the headings above. Only tick one box.

Do not make a false declaration although how you could be found to have made a wrong statement about what happened in 2010 Mr Mustard is not sure.

Mr Mustard would be more inclined though in the first place to telephone customer services at Barnet Council (020 8359 7446) and say he wished to make a complaint and only after giving them a week to sort it out and them failing would he then send a Witness Statement if he was are at that stage.

If you live in Barnet you can also ask one of your ward councillors to help put right this obvious injustice. Find out who they are on this page

Don't pay; fight!

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard