Parasites

Mr Mustard is used to perfectly good challenges being rejected. Mr Mustard isn't medically qualified but is an advanced motorist and a human being. The person, Mr Mustard uses the term loosely, who rejected the below motorist's challenge is none of the above (one can't be sure they aren't an IAM or ROSPA member but Mr Mustard doesn't want to be their passenger if the safety of a fitting passenger isn't their first priority.)

Mr Mustard thinks that many people will be absolutely astonished by this rejection. Mr Mustard wasn't as he sees similar rejections all the time and is one reason why he keeps winning at the tribunal as there is an absolute disconnect between common sense, fairness & safety and the relentless drive to fill multi million pound holes in council budgets.

Barnet Council aren't unusual in this respect partly because there is a small handful of unaccountable outsourcing companies who process PCNs, like NSL, as in this case, whose disconnected employees sit in remote back offices (Dingwall in Scotland and Oldham) have probably never visited Barnet and will never be face to face with a motorist and have to be utterly hateful to their face. The concept of public service has been lost.

Councillors are too hands off. Do they speak to parking management to ensure that all challenges are given a fair and impartial consideration without any thought as to the income as the Secretary of State requires? Based on this response, it would seem not.

Get yourself ready for a sudden goodwill (PR based) cancellation, the PCN was correctly issued, blah blah, a one off error by a new officer, blah blah.

Mr Mustard is on the case. The Notice to Owner is awaited and will be robustly challenged.

The end, for now.

 

 

Councils can't afford to be kind

When he gets a fresh PCN Mr Mustard often has to warn people that, more likely than not, the council will not look kindly on the reason why they received the PCN. The council want your money, most of the time, and whilst they have a wide discretion, councils can cancel any PCN for any reason, the adjudicator cannot & must strictly apply the law. Adjudicators can only recommend that a council think again although Mr Mustard has seen them bend the law in order to excuse an error.

Here is a classic example of a situation in which Mr Mustard thinks the public would expect leniency to come into play but he wasn't at all surprised when it didn't. This is a situation which, other things being equal, will only happen the once.

The informal challenge submitted to Lewisham Council:

and the relevant part of their response:

This is a Catch 22 response. There is no evidence that the writer thought about exercising their discretion. Their explanation is that because the contravention happened, which was already conceded by the motorist, the council won't cancel because the contravention happened.

What should happen is that Lewisham Council should consider the mitigation put forward, decide if it has the ring of truth (why would you stay in a hotel in SE13 when you live in SE6?) which it does and then consider whether or not to cancel the PCN. There is no revenue loss to the council which didn't instigate an automatic refund of a payment for which no value was given (once you have a PCN you cannot get another the same day, unless the rules of the bay change, if you don't move).

The rejection letter should explain why discretion is not being exercised, like one of these responses:

a    your proof is not credible

b    we don't think the mitigation is sufficient as you could have paid the night before (if you can, although the driver might have been intending to get up early, buy flowers and attempt a reconciliation)

c    we want your money so won't cancel

d    we are venal and rapacious. (* copyright another PCN expert, Incandescent).

The law assumes that a public body endowed with absolute power will exercise that power in a manner which is fair in all the circumstances. Although this appeal for clemency can be argued both for and against what is apparent from hundreds of PCNs that Mr Mustard has seen is that in many councils heartlessness and ruthlessness are the order of the day (He does have good experiences, he recounted one with Islington Council on twitter last week but he sees far more bad than good).

The problem is that councils are not routinely monitored or inspected for the way they go about the issue and enforcement of PCNs. We need an outside body which referees the whole system and can visit councils and encourage best practice and fairness. There are 7 million PCNs issued in London every year. Councils are out of control in their quest for revenue.

Time to create OffPen.

The end.

Stop the rot

Mr Mustard expects that most drivers/residents will know the Golders Green station area as will many coach travellers as it is a stop on some long distance National Express journeys (e.g. Manchester to London). Here is an aerial view

Mr Mustard didn't realise when he snipped the image but there is a handily placed bus to demonstrate bus scale, Mr Mustard having drawn a line to show a gap of 10.9m into which a bus is meant to fit at the lights if going south down the Finchley Road and navigating around the island with the clock on it.

Why is Mr Mustard writing about this subject? It is because of this tribunal decision.

Mr Mustard looked up the coach in question to find it is a Mercedes Benz Tourismo and longer than the gap between the traffic lights and the yellow box it was going over.

Thus, as Mr Thacker said, it is impossible to not overhang the yellow box.

As the adjudicator pointed out the stop was due to red traffic lights not due to a stationary vehicle so absolutely no contravention had occurred and this behaviour is, in the words of regular reader Fraser 'ruthless, venal and rapacious' and Mr Mustard would add stupid and procedurally unfair.

It is hard enough to safely drive a coach through London especially around busy junctions without having to worry if you might get wrongly ticketed by some numpty at NSL who doesn't know the rules and thinks that because the computer controlled cctv has selected this as a possible contravention, that it must be so. In fact, two people are meant to watch the cctv extracts before pressing the PCN button but Mr Mustard suspects that the task is either not being performed or not diligently or with any real thought.

Mr Mustard is going to send this case to the relevant labour councillor who can start to bring some common sense and some law abiding behaviour to the parking / PCN department.

The end (or at least perhaps the beginning of it for revenue raising).