Station Parade - Willesden - Unlawful use of cctv

 

Miss B stopped in the taxi bay in mid March 2026. Mr Mustard does not approve of that, not even for a minute. The sign says 'No stopping' so 2 seconds is enough to commit a contravention.

Had Miss B been issued with a PCN by a 'traffic warden' on foot he might have told her that he is too busy with work to assist (which is true, he still has over £5m to collect on his latest work assignment so arguing over your £160/£80 PCN is not a good use of his time at present) but Brent Council sent a PCN by post relying on cctv. Mr Mustard knew that was unlawful and so he acted.

Mr Mustard did three things:

1. He made formal representations against the PCN on 25 March 26. 

2. He made an Information request to find out how long and how much this had been going on.

3. He sent an email to the monitoring officer, the council official who is responsible for ensuring the council follow the law.

#1 For this type of PCN a council must reject representations within 56 days or they have accepted them by default. Mr Mustard checked the on line balance every week or so. On 12 May it was still £80 and the finishing line was fast approaching. On 21 May, day 56, the balance had been set to £zero. Hurrah. Brent did write to Miss B saying they had missed the deadline but that was a tactical move, to not admit they had erred in the first place.

#2. The information was supplied on time.

 

As the error was spotted so quickly by Mr Mustard no PCN had reached the tribunal or a bailiff. 

On the face of it that is only about 3 people a week getting caught, pretty good compliance on the whole. However, the cctv only started on 6 March and ceased on 3 April so that was about 6 motorists a day getting caught. If you are not in a proper London black cab stay out of these bays, they are not for you.

#3. Nothing had come back from this official by mid-June but they may have been off sick, the out of office response not being 100% clear. Someone else should be covering. Mr Mustard was wondering about an email to the Chief Executive when the explanation arrived on 19 June.

This is an excellent response. The council could have acted slightly quicker as Mr Mustard pointed out the grave error on 23 March. Putting that aside the council have still moved reasonably swiftly and most things in councils aren't rapid. They agree with the legal analysis, they have stopped acting unlawfully, they have cancelled all unpaid PCNs and they have refunded all payments received (some of which will be from lease or short term hire companies and those companies should pass on the refund to the client and cancel the administration fee). You cannot ask for much more than that.

Well done Brent Council (they don't like Mr Mustard much as he keeps putting them to the sword at the tribunal but Mr Mustard doesn't care) thank you for your corrective actions.

Miss B had donated to the North London Hospice at the beginning.

The end.

Councils need to watch out for enthusiastic amateurs - Philip Morgan in this case

Mr Mustard first encountered Phillip Morgan over a decade ago when Mr Mustard was new to 'parking tickets' (Penalty charge notices) having been given one for the wrong reason. Mr Mustard's thoughts, as a former civil servant and local government temp himself, was that councils wouldn't be doing much wrong. That naivety is long gone. Councils make lots of errors and have not stopped doing so for a decade. Sometimes they correct one error only to introduce a different one.

Parking, bus lane and moving traffic PCNs are all based on different laws and the minutia of the additional Regulations, Orders and Acts set traps for the unwary. For years there were only a couple of individuals who helped the public to fight back and the famous/infamous Barrie Segal has now retired from the fray.

There are now a dozen or more self taught experts who have little time for socialising being as they are, under the burden of hundreds of PCNs at any one time. Lots of them give their time for free on this website.

Until this year there was the choice at London Tribunals, the home of the independent adjudicators of having a postal hearing based on the papers alone (a bad a choice as the single justice procedure in the Magistrates Courts) or, if you really wanted to win, an in person hearing in Furnival St in the Chancery Lane area (the legal district of London) where you basically sat across the desk from the adjudicator and argued your case (techncially you assist the adjudicator to make his/her decision).

After the hearings were concluded & if another expert happened to be there on the same day and you both had finished you might repair to a local hostelry and toast your successess and drown your failures. Thus it was that Mr Mustard would sit and chat with Phillip and talk about PCNs and anything else in the world. Nowadays with all hearings by video there is less opportunity.

Sometimes experts don't agree and you try to dissuade them from their chosen course but all the experts are headstrong and likely to stick to their guns.

Phillip Morgan though was spot on when he noticed that Southwark Council's bus lane PCNs were issued under the wrong legislation.

Bus Lane enforcement in London came about with The London Local Authorities Act 1996 (as amended since then). The 2003 Act relied upon by Southwark is the primary legislation for alleged moving traffic contraventions (turning left where you shouldn't, stopping in yellow box junctions etc) and the 1991 Act whilst relating to traffic matters and driving penalties wasn't do do with bus lanes and was 5 years too early.

Phillip obtained the penalty income data using the Freedom of Information legislation:

The pedantic answer to Q1 could have been zero but that would have been a silly answer and just caused more work in dealing with the follow up reworded question.

The council was under the threat of a Judicial Review their hand and rather than spend tens of thousands on defending a legal action they wisely decided to refund everyone, a decision doubless helped by their contractor picking up the bill.

 

Mr Mustard thinks the contractor is APCOA, who are about to take over in Barnet as it happens. Mr Mustard will be looking out for their errors.

There is lots of profit in parking. The last published results for Apcoa Parking (UK) Ltd* showed turnover of £124,947,119 a gross profit of £33,982,300 and a profit before tax of £7,438,686 (*not sure if this is the correct APCOA identity but the underlying message is they aren't small and can afford to pay out half a million for a cockup). Mr Mustard wonders if councils generally are driving a hard enough bargain?

Well done Phillip.

The end. 

Lost in Haringey

 

Mr Mustard is often called upon to help other volunteers who, whilst giving up their free time, try to help others who need to be helped and find themselves in strange places and whilst simply trying to find their way, manage to miss a sign and incur a PCN.

So it was that the PCN from which the above is an extract was sent to James (not his real name) who was trying to deliver a consignment of food in his car to the Broadwater Farm Estate food bank. 

Although Mr Mustard purchased his first flat in a quiet turning off St Ann's Road back in about 1980 he then moved up to the delights of Potter Bar for a decade before settling in Barnet. Thus he couldn't recall The Avenue N17 or Broadwater Road.

Mr Mustard usually starts by having a look at the council's cctv record and he usually extracts a still image from it. Here is one.

From  this we can see that the car is proceeding down the stem of a T-junction. Mr Mustard then consulted a map.

From the map we can see that if the camera is placed at the junction of the two named locations, the vehicle must be in Broadwater Road.

Mr Mustard visited the location and took photographs and realised that the belief stated on the PCN could not be true. Whilst the car had entered Avenue Road for a short distance it did not commit a contravention within it, that occurring at the moment at which the car entered Broadwater Road.

 

Whenever possible, Mr Mustard writes short but undeniable representations, and he could do so in this case.

It took a couple of months whilst Haringey Council scratched their head perhaps looking for a way out but there wasn't one. Quite simply they were 100% in the wrong and so they cancelled the PCN.

 

You might wonder how the council got this wrong, not knowing the name of a location in their own borough?

 

The Traffic Order which was made was correct, it was the change of the order of the roads when creating this location in the PCN software where it all went wrong.

The creation of many traffic orders was contracted out and PCN processing is contracted out. Between the two teams somewhere was, most likely, a communication error.

 

Now, having brought to the council's attention a thumping great error which rendered unlawful every PCN issued at the stated location you would expect that the reaction of an honest council would firstly be to correct the error. Next they should have gone back through all PCNs issued at that location, cancelled them and refunded everyone.

 

If you are an affected motorist, demand a refund as the council's actions were illegal. They may not have known it at the time but they do now.

Naturally automatic refunds didn't happen. Why councils don't think they have to be honest when it comes to PCNs is a question of our age.

 

Fortunately Mr Mustard has a process by which he can try to force some honesty. Once a year any person can inspect the detailed accounts of the council, usually in July but sometimes later. Residents, as in those who are listed to vote, are also entitled to ask questions of the external auditor and ask them to go to Court to have certain items of income declared illegal. Mr Mustard is assisting one such voter but not in respect of this location alone, there was an unlawful wording in all moving traffic PCNs issued by Haringey which they only corrected in September 2023 so that is what has been attacked. It is too late for him to use this route for this location description as there are strict time limits. Nothing prevents Haringey Council from being honest, though.

 

Mr Mustard did the same in Hackney 2 years ago and whilst the auditor only suggested refunding on request Hackney Council decided it was administratively easier to simply refund everyone and did so to the tune of £268,000 and bailiff fees, which the bailiff received rather than the council, of about the same amount were also refunded.

Here's hoping for a similar outcome.

The end, for now.