Not so pro Force

Union St, High Barnet

If you are a security guarding company and decide to dress your vehicles up to make them look like police cars and thus highly visible then Mr Mustard's advice is to follow the rule of the law and not park for 7 minutes on a double yellow line whilst you buy your lunch in the Victoria Bakery, because, quite simply, you are being hypocritical in breaking the law whilst supposedly being in business to uphold it.

During those 7 minutes a traffic warden had patrolled the next road along, Salisbury Rd, and after that was 30 metres away in the High Street checking on people who had properly paid to park.

Never a traffic warden where you want, when you want, is there?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Looks like the traffic warden was a bit too crafty

Mr Mustard has tweeted about PCNs going missing. he has suggested to the council that they log places and traffic warden numbers of instances in which the PCN goes missing to see if there any patterns. Either there are phantom ticket nickers about in certain streets or it's always, mysteriously, the same traffic warden's tickets that go astray. Their pockets should be checked when they gets back to base?

This PCN doesn't look very well attached

but it should still have hung on unless a hurricane passed through Barnet.

The unfortunate thing for this traffic warden is that he/she issued 2 PCN within 3 minutes of one away to vehicles parked next to each other and neither driver got their PCN. Mr Mustard has worked in High Barnet for 27 years so is well known and he knew both drivers, honest people, who passed on their Notices to Owner to him. Mr Mustard doubts that anyone would steal a PCN from a vehicle parked outside a shop. He strongly suspects that both PCN were removed afterwards by the traffic warden who clearly doesn't know what he/she is doing, or maybe they do?

So that is the front vehicle of the two that Mr Mustard is dealing with. You can see two signs, one of which is angled away and not visible from the driver's seat. The driver can see the right hand sign which is a dual resident and business bay for which the vehicle had a valid permit. The left hand sign is PayByPhone. Can you see the join between the two bays? (nice fresh lines - pretty but wrongly painted) no you can't and that is because it wasn't visible before they were repainted as the 2 payment bays were only introduced about a year ago. So the driver could see a sign and walked off as he was correctly parked, or so he thought. Which sign did the traffic warden photograph, the incorrectly aligned left one (which would enable the issue of a PCN as no payment had been made) or the right one which the van was entitled to be parked against. Yes, you guessed correctly

This action by the traffic warden is at the sly end of the scale if not downright cheating.

He took his final photograph at 9:26 and then proceeded to ticket the other van at 9:27 for code 11 which in Barnet contractually requires a 3 minute observation period; was it given? Mr Mustard doesn't know as the PCN went missing. It is possible that both vehicles were observed at the same time and Mr mustard will ask the parking manager as he is just about to email him.

If you have had a PCN recently in Union St, High Barnet thanks to this confusion Mr Mustard will help you to sort it out. Email him at mrmustard@zoho.com.

This sort of behaviour is unacceptable from a contractor to a council. At the very least their contract should not be extended or renewed. We should look to bring the task back in house asap and only employ traffic wardens who sign a declaration that they will only issue a PCN when there is no doubt about their right to do so. 

It says in the current contract that signs and lines should be checked before the issue of a PCN. Clearly, that isn't happening.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard