Paying for parking took 59 minutes

The below is an edited version of a recent PATAS adjudication of a PCN issued to a motorist who parked in the Stanhope Road Car Park and did their best to follow the system, if you can call the way we have to pay a system.

There is no dispute as to the whereabouts of vehicle on the material date; namely at a location requiring the purchase of time to park and the display of a paid-for time voucher and/or facilitating the purchase of parking time by telephone payment.

The Enforcement Authority assert the absence of payment/display in respect of the said vehicle.

The Appellant denies liability for the ensuing Penalty Charge Notice on the basis of the prevailing circumstances as contained in her written representations, supported by mobile device screen-shots and Freedom of Information documentation.

The evidence upon which the Enforcement Authority rely to substantiate the assertion comprises the certified copy Penalty Charge Notice, extracts of governing Traffic Management Order provisions, and computer-generated notes made by the Civil Enforcement Officer together with photographic evidence: still frames revealing the said vehicle in situ, and the applicable signage notifying motorists of the restriction.

The Appellant indicated the full circumstances encountered at the location and clearly described the sequence of events to the Enforcement Authority from the outset, including forwarding copy mobile device screen-shots demonstrating the on-going exchange commenced  at 9.41 a.m. and resolved at 10.40 a.m.

The Penalty Charge Notice was issued during the currency of such payment transaction.

A motorist must be afforded sufficient reasonable time to comply with the requirements of a parking regime, whether that be attending at a voucher-dispensing machine, obtaining and completing a visitor's permit, or completing a telephone payment transaction.

I find the Appellant's evidence to be cogent and credible and I accept it in its entirety.

The points raised by the Appellant deserved proper consideration and due response, I therefore carefully examined the wording of both the Notice of Rejection itself, and the Case Summary to assist in my determination as to whether or not the Enforcement Authority had accorded requisite consideration as it is obliged so to do. 

I note an overt failure to adequately identify/rebut or retort to the Appellant's issues in the Notice of Rejection; a 'belief' that cancellation would be 'inappropriate' does not meet the criteria. Further I observe there to be a similar lacking of compliance of the same in the Case Summary, which infers that since the scenario did not come within an Appeal Ground it was not entertained.

I concluded that the Enforcement Authority had not discharged its fundamental duty under Regulation 5(2)(b) of the Civil Enforcement of Parking Contraventions (England) Representations & Appeals Regulations 2007 which I find to be a 'procedural impropriety' on the part of the Enforcement Authority.

Accordingly, this Appeal is allowed.  (thus the PCN was cancelled)

What a state of affairs when a motorist has to faff about for 59 minutes making payment in a Car Park where the minimum time you can pay for is 30 mins at a cost of 75p (per the council website) and where the business they wanted to transact might only have taken 15 minutes.

If this doesn't show that Pay By Phone is not the solution, when to insert real coins would have taken less than a minute, then what does?

What an omnishambles.

Well done to the motorist for sticking it out all the way to PATAS, Mr Mustard salutes you. NSL, acting as the council's agent, garner no credit for making the motorist go all the way to PATAS at Islington and for doing a poor job of answering the motorist's challenge.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

How many lives has the removal of parking meters ruined?

A guest blog by a trader who would rather stay anonymous - it could be any of them, well any of the ones who are still there.

an empty car park one week after meters bagged over

I took the above picture in Moxon St car park in High Barnet one week after the council put bin bags over the meters ( 8 November 2011 ). 

As you can see, the car park is empty. Historically on a Wednesday at this time you were lucky to get a place.

The second picture is from when they actually took away the meters, the reverse of what’s happening this morning – ground has just been broken for the replacement meter 532 days later. From observation, I calculate lost revenue to the council coffers (at  £577 per day) to be over £307,000!

the hokey cokey meter dance

This debacle has cost our towns MILLIONS of pounds. Our business alone has lost tens of thousands of pounds. Many jobs have been lost, partnerships have reached impossible levels of stress and children left in broken marriages. It’s not just the businesses that have closed: those that survived have let go cleaners, laid off full and part-time staff, they have cut back on advertising and charity sponsorships and they themselves cut back in spending amongst their peers in the high street. They have been forced, like us, to work impossible hours. Forget the Working Time Directive, I now work over 78 hours a week and have little time to spend with my children. The knock-on costs have been immense.

Have the council apologised? No

Have they made any attempt at recompense? No

Have they held out a hand and offered to help stimulate the high streets? No

It all leaves you feeling a little sick and disillusioned with those that pretend to be civilised but are simply masquerading as ‘humanity’.

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and now back with Mr Mustard. You can feel the personal pain from the above heartfelt words that traders are suffering.

The cash option was removed as it cost about £500,000 a year to employ a team of people who collected the cash from 400 meters. This is about £1,500 a day and when compared to the possible lost revenue from one car park alone it seems that a proper cost benefit analysis was not done. The problem is that the solution was thought to be a simple choice between two options, 400 cash meters or none at all. That was the thinking of closed minds.

The first thing that should have been done was a cull of 25% of the meters that collected the least amount of money and make those bays free with a time limit for parking to balance supply and demand. Then a review of those meters that remained to see if some could be converted to free bays or to stay the same, and those in car parks retained as cash payment machines with pay-by-phone offered as an option for those that wanted to pay by card using an app on their smartphone. In a car park with multiple meters some could have been cash and some for credit card only making them less liable to be vandalised. Cash only machines could be put under cctv and enclosed in a protective metal cage so they are harder to attack.

This could have left an estate of 100 or so machines and a much reduced cash collection cost along with the flexibility that the public wants and needs.

In Barnet the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Pay-by-phone put to proof at PATAS

what we want, meters that take coins & cards

Pay-by-phone parking has been controversial since it became, in effect, the only way to pay (vouchers and paypoint are not fast enough). Before then, when offered as a choice, it was OK. Cash is a universal medium which it should still be possible to use at the point of parking i.e. in a meter.

The following case from PATAS the home of the independent adjudicator shows that it is worthwhile for you to put the council to prove as to how pay-by-phone should have worked and how it was explained to you. You can appeal on the grounds that the instructions were not clear or not available to you at the parking place. Make the council prove their case. This one is reference number 2130000659. Just before the hearing at PATAS, at least 3 working days before your hearing date, the council has to send its evidence to you and to PATAS. If you have put the instructions for payment into question then the council should prove the rules and the signs. If they don't put that into the evidence pack you can send and email to PATAS adding this absence as a further argument to your case. The more arguments you put forward the more likely you are to win.

The appellant attended the hearing before me. He reiterated the statements made in his representations and Notice of Appeal. Basically he claims that payment of the parking charge was made and so he denies the contravention. He admits that he was subsequently made aware that the payment had been made in respect of his wife's vehicle and not his vehicle. He has detailed the steps taken upon parking in order to make the payment.

The Authority has produced a copy of Penalty Charge Notice, as well as the contemporaneous notes recorded by the civil enforcement officer.

The appellant basically claims the information given on the pay by phone system is not clear, he states that his wife was asked by a recorded message whether she wanted to use "the account", he said that she assumed this referred to something akin to a payment account and not to the vehicle registration mark. He said that at no point in the process was his wife informed of the vehicle registration mark against which payment was being taken.

The Authority is under a duty Regulation 18 (1) of the Local Authorities' Traffic Orders (Procedure)(England & Wales) Regulations 1996 to ensure that the motorist is given adequate information as to what is required in order to comply with the restrictions.

The Authority has not produced any evidence as to the instructions given to motorists wishing to use the pay by phone system. The Authority has produced no evidence as to the steps the motorist should have taken in order to pay by phone for this vehicle as opposed to the other vehicle. The Authority has produced no evidence to show whether there are any written instructions on a sign plate informing the motorist of what he is required to do in order to pay by phone. On the evidence I cannot be satisfied that at the time of payment motorists are clearly informed that the payment made is being registered in respect of a particular vehicle registration mark. The burden is on the Authority to show that they have complied with their obligation under Regulation 18.

I allow the appeal.

Dealing with an appeal to PATAS is not hard. Their appeal form is simple and you will have already advanced your arguments to the council. All you need to do is summarise them, Mr Musatrd likes to put in numbered lists if there are several points of appeal, and refer to the documents so as to make it simple for the adjudicator to follow. When you get the evidence pack from the council go through it and see if anything is missing or wrong and bring that to the attention of PATAS straightaway (no need to tell the council). You can email them.

You have nothing to lose by appealing. If you win that is it (the council can ask for a review but that is very rare) and if you lose you can ask for a review if the adjudicator has missed something or you can take it on the chin and you get 28 days to pay the original charge of £60, £110 or £130.

Mr Mustard is writing a guide to appealing and will release it in stages as it progresses.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard 

Lodge Lane Car Park

http://theonlygreenroom.blogspot.co.uk

Mr Mustard is assisting a resident who paid for 180 minutes parking using pay-by-phone but got a lesser amount of time and a parking ticket. I see there was also a case which went to the independent adjudicator last week where in the very same car park another person paid for 180 minutes but received only 30.

Mr Mustard wonders if there is a problem at location 7521

Mr Mustard would like to hear from you if you received less time than you believe you ordered or were charged a different price than is shown on the board. Email him at mrmustard@zoho.com

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

1.5m people in UK don't have a bank account

The wrong question - Pay-by-phone is the elephant in the room

When coming round from his slumbers one recent morning (a lovely image for readers to have in their head) Mr Mustard heard on Radio4 that 2 million people did not have a bank account in the UK (or Britain or England - Mr Mustard was only half awake). Well he thought that is 2m people who face great difficulties if they want to visit Barnet and we do want them all to visit Barnet at some point but why bother when paying for parking is such a pain and it is easier to go elsewhere and have an easier life.

The exact figure of the number without a bank account is unclear. The Daily Telegraph has it at 1.5million. Looking further afield Mr Mustard found a report from the Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services which looked at the area of financial exclusion in 2009. That found that 100% of Danes have a bank account, 98% of people in the UK and 49% in Bulgaria so those Bulgarians who move to Barnet in the future are in for a rude awakening.

The parking reviews which are currently being carried out across the borough are proceeding at snail's pace, not asking the right questions and not resulting in the steps which are necessary to allow everybody easy access to a payment system that meets their needs.

Let us see them

1847 - North Finchley Parking Review by MisterMustard

DPR1847 Appendix B Analysis of General Questionnaire Responses - North Finchley Parking by MisterMustard

1907 - Edgware Town Centre Parking review by MisterMustard

1910 - Chipping Barnet Parking Review by MisterMustard

Now the perceived parking problems had to be put into order of importance. That leads to a problem. Is it a bigger problem that parking is £2 an hour or that if you don't have a credit/debit  card you cannot pay? everyone will have a different idea.

In North Finchley 54 businesses said it was the cost and 48 cited the pay-by-phone system as the main concern but another 18 said the lack of pay&display (by which they are taken to mean cash meters) so taken together that is 66 who think it is the payment method which is the most important. The cost of parking was reduced although much more could be done by the council to actually attract people to the High Street rather than not putting them off but nothing of import was done about aboutcash payment options.

In Chipping Barnet, which has fewer shops, there was a lower response but 20 of the 38 respondents cited pay-by-phone as the main problem. 4 others said the lack of coin operated parking meters. Did that lead to cash parking meters being re-introduced? No.

Finally for now, Edgware. 19 responses here. Largest complaint, yes you guessed it, pay-by-phone.

The "wrong" method of questioning was used. What the council should have asked was closed questions such as:

Would you like cash parking meters to be re-instated?

Mr Mustard suspects that the answer would have been yes in 99% of replies but then the council would have been obliged to do something they don't want to do because they want to save the costs of collecting the cash which is to Mr Mustard's mind completely the wrong way of looking at things.

If you are a business in a town centre yet to be surveyed please write "I want to see coin operated parking meters in this town" on every page of the questionnaire.

Let people who want to pay-by-phone do so. Let those who want to pay by coin do so. In business the customer is meant to be king but here in Barnet we have been scuppered for now by the soi-disant King of Bling (Brian Coleman signed the DPR to remove parking meters and scrap them and it will take a bold decision by Dean Cohen to put them back and Mr Mustard has yet to see him do anything bold).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Have you had a poxy post pay-by-phone PCN?

parking tickets are like a rash in Barnet

Recently Mr Mustard made a new twitter acquaintance. This person had paid for their parking on the pay-by-phone system and then 2 minutes later, whilst about their business, they received a PCN (Penalty Charge Notice or parking ticket in old money).

This means that, officially, they have to start filling in on-line forms or writing letters in order to get the obviously incorrect ticket cancelled as in the case of parking tickets you are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. By keeping the text that proved they had paid, using twitter and chasing @barnetcouncil the parking ticket did get cancelled but of course most people aren't going to do that, especially those who are not au fait with computers in general and twitter in particular (Mr Mustard didn't tweet until he started blogging).

There should be a local phone number you can ring, and an email address you can send to, for when the parking ticket is patently wrong and should be squashed with the minimum of fuss. It is understandable that appeals on substantive grounds have to be in writing (and those should also be possible by email which you currently cannot do) but not what amounts to the correction of errors perpetrated by the council (acting by their agents).

Mr Mustard has been looking into this area. The handheld equipment used by traffic wardens (to use their old name) is meant to update within 2 minutes according to one FOI answer he has had, and according to the equipment manufacturer, Motorola, it should be updated in less than a second. Mr Mustard has asked about one sample day to see how often the equipment does not work properly or there isn't a phone signal as that is what is relied upon. If he gets a sensible answer he will let you know.

Mr Mustard had a chat with a traffic warden. They said it would take 4 or 5 minutes (that means 5 then!) for a pay-by-phone payment to show up on his/her handset. If you have paid for 30 minutes that is quite a chunk of time when you are at risk.

To find out how widespread the problem is, Mr Mustard needs your help. If you paid for parking using the pay-by-phone system or paypoint and received a parking ticket after you had paid please send proof to him at mrmustard@zoho.com and tell him how easy it was to get the ticket cancelled.

If you have sent in an appeal and been rejected please send copies of both letters to Mr Mustard who can probably sweep away the administrative hurdles for you.

If you paid for parking, had proof, appealed, got rejected and then gave up and paid the parking ticket please tell mrmustard@zoho.com about that as well and he will do his best to get your money back for you.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Westminster wheel wobble

Is this a car or a motorbike? in Westminster they are all the same

Mr Mustard has some friends, yes he really does, who live in the Home Counties, who occasionally go up to London, either the man on his own, often on his high-powered motorcycle or together as a family in the family car. Mr Mustard has known these friends for coming up to 30 years when he met the man who worked for some big city lawyers and Mr Mustard was a credit manager for an equally large firm. A common interest in motorcycles was the initial bond.

The man uses Westminster's pay-by-phone system and has registered both the family car and the motorbike.

Back in March 2012 there was a family visit to town and it being late afternoon it was fairly easy to find a parking space, pay £12, go off for the evening's entertainment and come back to the car to find a parking ticket affixed to the windscreen. Very odd, the £12 has been paid as the credit card statement shows (you can often see your most recent payments on-line) and there is a text message confirming payment. 

Telephone calls ensued to Westmister City Council and/or NSL who issued the ticket, and/or Vertex who deal with back office ticket processing (Westminster Council themselves are legally obliged to deal with formal representations) and/or Verrus who provide the pay-by-phone system and it turns out that £12 was paid and the motorcycle registration number was the one entered into the system as being what the payment was for. Now whereas here in Barnet it is free to park your motorcyle in Westminster, because lots of people now commute in, to park on the road costs £1 for all day (in Westminster's car parks in marked out bike bays it is free and you are in the dry to get out of your kit). It is blindingly obvious therefore that a simple administrative error has been made. The driver knew he had the family with him and was in a car, he must have told the pay-by-phone operative this because £12 was taken, and so someone somewhere made a mistake. Will anybody deal with this problem and quash the ticket? No.

Many local authorities bleat on that charging for parking isn't to make money, honest guv, it is purely to ration the space, to keep the traffic moving, to make sure the emergency services can get through etc etc although they don't complain about the side effect of making millions which helps to keep council tax down, oh no.  

Barnet Council aims to keep the borough’s roads and pavements safe for pedestrians and drivers. and make a few £million at the same time.

After all the arguing a deadline for an appeal got missed and so a decision was taken. To pay the ticket under protest and then sue in the County Court for a refund. This has now taken place and Westminster have agreed to refund the £130 and the £35 court fee.

Here is the message from Mr Mustard's friend:

"What a lot of bother over nothing in particular. They said it should have been sorted out a long time ago!!! Hey ho."

A number of interesting questions are raised.

Why did commonsense not prevail?

Why wasn't it sorted out a long time ago?

Did outsourcing to 3 different companies cause a problem?

If Westminster ran everything in-house would communications be better?

Is the Verrus pay-by-phone system fit for purpose?

Has it happened to you? (If so, issue in the County Court, it is easy)

 

Mr Mustard thinks that the problem is that as soon as a ticket is issued the mindset in every council is that they are right and the cancellation of any ticket is a let-off and they put the revenue loss before the motorist. In fact, Mr Mustard has obtained some exclusive footage of a small section of a video that is played at all parking enforcement training courses at Westminster Council to condition new appeal officers in the proper behaviour to adopt when hitting the cancel button.

Councils everywhere, stop being juvenile and start using some commonsense when appeals are received. Grow up and take the adult decisions.

Update of interest to people with more than one registered vehicle.

The only thing I have learnt is that even when you speak to a real person and give them the reg. number you want to use the system then goes back to the first one registered, so you have to listen closely and change the reg. before you confirm payment. That was never explained to us, and where the error occurred.

If the above happened to you, take your appeal all the way to PATAS.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

It really isn't rocket science

the jpg referred to

The pdf figures

Mr Mustard wonders how many people are giving advice to Cllr Dean Cohen. It is probably quite a few. Hopefully he will ignore anything his predecessor tells him or just do the opposite as that is likely to be popular.

I was sent a copy of an email from a Mr Jez Simms to Cllr Cohen (I have left the misspelling of Choen as I am re-printing not proof-reading). If you want to give the Cabinet Member in charge of parking your opinion you can email him at Cllr.D.Cohen@barnet.gov.uk

From: "Jezza"

Date: 15 July 2012 15:39:10

To: <cllr.d.cohen@barnet.gov.uk>

Subject: Parking

Dear Cllr Cohen.

I write to you this rainy Sunday afternoon in order to articulate my thoughts on the current situation regarding parking in North Finchley.

'P' stands for Parking. It also stand for Potty! This seems to me to be a perfectly appropriate title to represent how this parking project has been handled from the start. I'm starting to wonder if the whole exercise has been designed to eat into whatever money the council does have, in order to justify not having its budget cut for the the next financial year.

A couple of years ago, the council went to great expense by updating the pay-by-coin parking meters with new ones. Barely a year later they were replaced by pay-by-phone ones. Consultation was kept to a minimum because, I suspect, the public and traders alike would have been up in arms about both the way these meters functioned and were priced.

Cutting to the chase Mr Choen, we all know what an utter fiasco this parking project has been. Whilst I appreciate that the council needed to address the issue at the time - about coin machines either breaking down or being vandalised - nevertheless the resultant pay-by-phone solution has not gone down at all well. It's discriminatory, expensive and introduces the necessity of a mobile 'phone in order to allow the facility to function. That - in effect - is taking a tried & tested formula and putting it in reverse - every pun intended!

I understand the council is now thinking about altering the machines - again - to facilitate payment by credit card. Ok, that's fine since it extends the way in which a person can pay for the privilege of using a parking space.

However, I believe the fundamental issue here is about pricing. I've only now just realised - thanks entirely to Helen Michael's efforts - that, in fact, the prices for the Lodge Lane car park, and indeed, all of North Finchley has doubled! Two pounds for one hour? To coin a famous, exasperated cry, "You cannot be serious!" Although, in real terms, when one adds on the addition of 20p that the pay-by-phone operator charges on top of the parking fee, the price increase is even higher.

The reason I attached the jpg Mr Cohen is obviously very clear. The prices that Hertsmere Council set the public are fair and balanced.

And yet this area is seen to be just as if not slightly more affluent than North Finchley. So, if a neighbouring council can come up with car parking prices where, per house-hold, the net income is possibly higher than that of the average home-owner in North Finchley, how on earth can Barnet Council possibly justify trying to extract even more money from the slightly less well off?

The answer is simple - IT CANT!. The leader of the council virtually admitted to me that - there is no money. In other words - thanks to Government cuts - we have no money so we're going to penalise the public through massively inflated parking charges in order to balance the books. Nice try Barnet Council. But when North Finchley is a complete ghost town, when not just a dozen shops have been forced to close down but virtually all of them, what do you plan to do about parking charges then? Because then it will be way too late.

I am disgusted to think that Helen Michael was arrested for effectively defending her right to protest. Yet more waste of tax payers money.

She, like many of her fellow traders, can see the damage that is occuring right before her very eyes. If anyone should be arrested it is the Council itself for its total mismanagement of this whole parking scheme, since it is clearly a contributing factor why businessess having been going under. Those unfortunate businesses are the ones that should be suing the Council! The Council is who should really be questioned - at length - and NOT a lady who is simply fighting for survival.

And on top of this, the Council has the audacity to insist that the shop owners themselves distribute scratch cards to the punters. Discount incentives here, right's to sell at face value prices there - it's just another totally unnecessary addition to a system that has worked so simply, so effectively; for so long.

So I invite you Mr Cohen to look, think and consider again - just for a moment - exactly what the jpeg represents as against the pdf figures.

It's very simple - common sense against common senselessness.

Mary Portas is absolutely right when she observes that the only way to re-invigorate local shopping areas is by giving the incentive to shoppers that they cant get on-line. And one way, as Hertsmere Borough Council have clearly identified, is by setting sensible car-parking charges through machines that are simple to understand and operate. It really isn't rocket science.

If Barnet Council does not heed these warnings, I fear the damage to the local community will be irreparable. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the on-line shopping community is sitting in the neon sun in Sillicon Valley thinking 'thank you Barnet Council - bring it on!"

I look forward to hearing from you at your earlist convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Jez Simms.

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That one line "It really isn't rocket science" reverberated with Mr Mustard. Running a parking system should be a cake walk. Make it easy to pay and people will pay; society is fundamentally compliant. Barnet Council is so busy navel gazing and reorganising and having pointless interminable meetings and trying to run One Barnet when it can't even walk that it takes stupid decisions like forcing the motorists of Barnet to go cashless as if Barnet isn't part of the real world. It is and consequently it has to offer the same payment methods as everyone else. By all means offer pay-by-phone but as a choice along with cash, credit card in a local machine or voucher.

Where has Mr Mustard spent money this weekend? John Lewis (Welwyn not Brent X) where he paid with a mixture of vouchers and credit card (large value purchases) Waitrose where he paid with his John Lewis card (to get the 1% cashback) The Paper Shop where he paid by cash, the fish stall on Barnet market (lovely tuna steak) where he paid by cash (it doesn't take credit cards although after 20 years of going though he could probably have an account) Dory's Cafe where he paid by cash, Bargain Buys where he bought 6 lightbulbs and paid by cash and had a free tug of war with Sammy the resident dog. Imagine if all of those 6 shops insisted on being paid by credit card how long it would take to do your shopping and how odd you would think it was.

Do you have a view on how we should be able to pay for our parking and what level the charges should be set out. Then sharpen up your pencil and email Dean Cohen. Remember that councillors work for us and it is our democratic right, our duty even, to write to them and tell them what we think. The more we do it the more they will start to realise that they represent us and not the other way around. If you don't tell them what you think then you can't complain if they do things that you don't like.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard