Free chances at PCN adjudication - London Tribunals

If you have a Notice of Rejection from a council in London and are unsure of your chances of winning at adjudication then the following statistics may help you make your mind up. Councils bluff all the time and reject challenges against PCNs which they know will lose if an adjudicator sees the arguments so also knowing that most people pay up like lambs the Councils have nothing to fear by rejecting your representation.

There is no cost for the public to go to London Tribunals and the council will have to pay £32 which they never see again. There is a very slim chance of costs being awarded against you if you are vexatious, frivolous or wholly unreasonable. In the year to 31 March 25 there were only 74 awards of costs against the public out of 42,907 Appeals which is 1 in 580 so very rare (as the legislation says they should be). The total awarded was £5,080 so an average of £68 per case.

If the council does not offer the 50% discount in the Notice of Rejection (there is no legal requirement for them to do so) and given that you do not have to pay a fee to go to Appeal at London Tribunals and as the chances of being made to pay costs is almost zero, why wouldn't you do it?

The fact is that many cases are won by default. Here are the statistics for the year 2024/25.

There is a 75% chance that Hillingdon will not contest your Appeal at London Tribunals and so they will have to cancel the PCN. That is therefore the borough that motorists should fight every time. There is only a 4% chance that Greenwich will throw in the towel so you do need a half decent case in that Borough. Overall there is a 26% chance, 1 PCN in 4, that after starting the Appeal you won't have to do anything else.

Looking at your overall chances of winning they are as follows:

You should certainly fight the top 8 authorities in the list every single time as your chances are better than 50/50 and you have a one in four chance against the best authority, Southwark, a borough that has a good team of officers dedicated to attending the tribunal hearings.

To save you time looking here is the alphabetical list.

The meek will not inherit the earth, they will meekly pay out for PCNs which they could beat.

The number of PCNs issued in the year 2024/25 in Greater London was 9,457,848 (thanks to a massive increase in the number of restrictions on driving down certain roads which are still invitingly left open to traffic movement and monitored by cameras) and so the 42,907 PCNs taken to Appeal at London Tribunals is a piffling 0.5% or only one in every 220 PCNs issued.

If the 45% beaten at Appeal is overall representative of whether a PCN was correct or not that is four million PCNs which aren't being over-turned which could be.

Stop giving up people, be like Mr Mustard, learn everything you can about the subject and get stuck in and fight. The more you fight the more you learn and the better you get.

The end. 

Harrow Council - band of thieves

Harrow Council are hedging their bets. They are going to apply to London Councils to change from band B (outer London rates) to band A (inner London rates) but if London Councils own attempt to increase the value of all PCNs is successful they won't do it (for now anyway). Their website had a explanation from which Mr Mustard has extracted the most relevant parts.

 

Mr Mustard completed the survey. Questions 1 & 2 were about who he was and the postcode of his home.

Question 9 was how Mr Mustard had heard about the survey and Q10 as to whether or not he had completed the London Councils' survey.

Mr Mustard thought that this was the least useful survey he had completed for some time. (Please ignore the spelling errors in his responses, you get the gist).

Mr Mustard was also unimpressed with the FAQs which the public were intended to read and digest before answering the survey itself. Mr Mustard decided to ask some more penetrating questions and today he received the responses which are now followed by his commentary. Feel free to add your own at the end.

 

The only factor considered before bringing forward the survey (it can't count for anything before it has taken place!) is the bare number of PCNs issued. That is unconvincing as a justification.

 

The bare numbers of PCNs issued do not show a direct relationship between value and the number of PCNs issued. If there was such a direct relationship the numbers would surely be more or less constant?

 

There is your proof. If you don't know in advance what a PCN will cost you how can your behaviour be affected by not knowing? (it can be £60 or £80, £110 or £130).

 

Mr Mustard has the data as it is published by London Councils each year. 

In the year ended 31 March 2013, Waltham Forest issued 70,623 PCNs. 

On 1 April 2013 they increased the penalty levels by £20 per PCN. 

In the year to 31 March 2014 WF issued 69,082 PCNs a decrease of just 2.2% which Mr Mustard would suggest is not statistically significant (and isn't 3.3% which wasn't material either).

Oh dear, Harrow failed to notice, or chose not to notice, that in the year ended 31 March 2016, WF issued 88,767 PCNs, an increase on the base year of 2013 of 25.7%. The price increase was a disaster, it didn't work, clearly. Mr Mustard recalls from his secondary school days his maths text book which had a chapter  headed 'Lies, damn lies and statistics'. He didn't understand the heading back then but he sure does now.

 

Harrow were being wilfully blind in not taking a wider view of the PCN statistics of the last 20 years which are freely available to the public. They have cherry picked a small but convenient fall. They know nothing about the true experience in Waltham Forest.

 

No it isn't, it is a question of what you, Harrow Council, know about why the numbers of PCNs issued by WF have gone down slightly in one convenient year and shot up rapidly in four subsequent years.

 

Again Mr Mustard was asking what information Harrow Council held, clearly none at all.

Perhaps the time has come for an undergraduate or a professor of statistics to study this topic.

What is clear to Mr Mustard is that any report presented to councillors, which probably won't contain much more useful information than has already been given to the public, won't really contain a proper basis for an informed decision to proceed with the re-banding.

Mr Mustard doesn't know how Harrow Council works and isn't a resident of Harrow so doubtless has limited hearing rights at any council meeting, but you the reader can play your part.

Please ask the hard questions, complain if you don't like the answers and go to any relevant council meeting and have your say.

This survey is just laying the ground for revenue raising.

The end.