Words weighing heavily on Wandsworth Council

Here is a tribunal decision about 2 PCNs which Mr Mustard only looked at as he had a family connection to the road.

 

Here is a map of the area. The B229 is Burntwood Lane.

The refusal of Wandsworth Council to cancel a PCN to a company just trying to do its job, is thoroughly miserable and flies in the face of common sense. Just look at the size of this vehicle, total weight of up to 44 tonnes.

The routes available to a lorry of that size in streets this narrow are limited.

Well done to C K Transport for fighting as far as the tribunal. It causes councils huge amounts of work and seeing them hoist on the petard of their own traffic order is most amusing as are the opening words of the adjudicator that he'll carry on without the rep. as they are going to win.

The end.

Bus stand exemption

Mr Mustard can see two bus stands in this road and below is one of them.

The bus stand is on the left adjacent to The Long Room bar and hotel, which is close to Amen Corner, one of the landmarks of Tooting, an area which Mr Mustard used to know quite well.

Here is the decision of an independent adjudicator at London Tribunals.

Mr Mustard hadn't, despite 13 years of fighting PCNs, ever heard of an exemption being given to an organisation, whether or not a charity providing food to those in need, to park on a bus stop or stand. It turns out this is a stand where buses might remain during a driver's hours break or similar.

A typically miserable council stance thet the driver wasn't with the vehicle but it is impossible to collect or deliver goods without leaving the vehicle and as a traffic warden can arrive, issue a PCN and be gone in less than a minute that is an awful lot less than the time it takes to wheel a pallet load of goods 200m to the relevant place and return.

Interesting exemption, as there is a loading bay opposite the bus stand.

If you collect and deliver goods and find there are locations at which you can never park legally the best option looks to be to ask the local authority to give you an exemption for where you would like to park.

The end.

Wandsworth Council - so slow, so incompetent, so illegal.

Mr Mustard had a PCN in Wandsworth and the council were so slow to respond that they lost by default. The law for parking, since May 22, says this:

Before May 2022 the 2007 Regulations said largely the same except that the requirement at b(iii) did not exist. As it happens Mr Mustard has not yet seen such a letter. It should be automated within the PCN process software as most things which adversely affect the motorist are.

 

Having seen one failure to send a formal Notice of Rejection such that it would be served, received, within 56 days and thus to allow 2 days in the post be sent by day 54, Mr Mustard decided to ask Wandsworth how often they were failing to comply with Regulations. It is assumed that enforcement authorities will use their powers in a way which is fair in all the circumstances. Mr Mustard sees so many different shenanigans that he is certain that they don't, at least some of the time, and different enforcement authorities have different tricks.

There isn't the same limit for bus lane or moving traffic PCNs for which an adjudicator will generally give a bit more leeway and only time the authority out after 90 days and this is why the request was tightly defined. In addition 'Notice of Rejection' has a defined meaning, it does not refer to the rejection of informal challenges made immediately after receipt of a parking PCN on street. The answer should have been that apart from the one Notice of Rejection of which Mr Mustard was aware there should be no other errors but of course there were. The response excluded the PCN numbers but that wasn't surprising.

So there we are, 378 errors in favour of Wandsworth Council, 378 acts of sending a Notice of Rejection when they were not entitled to.

Who thought it an acceptable timescale to send a Notice of Rejection 238 days after representations were made. A lot happens in people's lives in that time and a motorist could be excused for throwing their paperwork away after 180 days having decided the council has given up.

The thing to do as members of the public can't be expected to know these arcane rules in the same way as Mr Mustard and others experts do is to out your case on PePiPoo here and get expert help for free and to stop cheating enforcement authorities from relying on your lack of knowledge and as there is very little sanction if they break the law.

End.

Continuous contravention - Wandsworth

Here is a location where parking at an angle is allowed:

Wandsworth Council don't really understand road markings as if they did they wouldn't put a yellow box in front of the garages when they are only allowed at junctions and fire or ambulance stations etc., not on housing estates.

An unwell driver made a mistake and parked on the brick paved area in the foreground on the right and collected 3 PCNs in five days. They paid the first one and challenged the other two. Wandsworth Council decided to cancel the PCN issued on day 4 as although they were both correctly issued they had generously decided to treat them as one episode of parking on this occasion. So kind but hogwash. They refused to cancel PCN 3 which was inconsistent.

Mr Mustard took over. He pointed out that the PCN the council had agreed to cancel (the second PCN in time) still showed a balance on the council system. That was quietly corrected after a while.

This is what Mr Mustard wrote about the final PCN (you don't need to write reams).

It took 2 weeks but Wandsworth knew when they were beaten but again said that they had decided to treat the PCNs as one contravention. There isn't a choice, there either is one contravention or there isn't, it is a fact based question.

Here is an extract from the tribunal decision referred to:

Clearly, the second and third PCNs were not appropriate. Traffic wardens issued PCNs when they knew, or ought to have known, that they were not valid.

The back office pretend to be kind but they are spouting hogwash in order to try and play the situation to their advantage. They need to stop.

You just can't trust the parking departments of many councils.

End.

PCNs - exercise of discretion - #32 Wandsworth

Usual question, no real answer.

The end.

Wandsworth Council - cynical rejection

A friend of Mr Mustard parked where the above sign is to be found in Replingham Road. SW18. Let us call him Mr P. He runs a business and drives all over London most weekdays to supervise the progress of various works. He isn't computer literate although does have a smart phone and his preference is for paying at the meter. Mr P generally pays when he should pay.

At this location, there wasn't a meter to pay at and so payment was not made and a PCN was the resultant outcome.

Mr Mustard made a simple challenge:

'There wasn't a parking meter in the direction of the arrow shown on the sign.'

Simple enough for the council to show there was a meter or to cancel the PCN, one would think? Er, no.

The writer may well have been satisfied, self evidently easily satisfied, but Mr Mustard wasn't. What was missing from the reply? Yes, a statement of the location of a parking meter.

Is a wraparound sticker on a pole good enough? It is a sticker which Mr Mustard didn't notice initially, because the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016 do not sanction stickers as a valid sign format, so it is of zero legal validity.

There was a bit of a dire warning on the next page of the letter that you are risking having to pay an extra £55 if you fight on and lose.

Mr Mustard laughed and carried on, by waiting for the Notice to Owner to reach the keeper. He had made the informal challenge in his own name as anyone can challenge a PCN placed on a vehicle, as he might have been the driver on the day. Mr P told Mr Mustard once he received the Notice to Owner and so the 'formal representations' were duly made in the name of Mr P, as they have to be, ('formal representations' doesn't mean that you need to get out parchment and a quill pen, it just means they are the challenge by the keeper in response to the Notice to Owner). You may recognise the representations from the informal, PCN, stage.

'There wasn't a parking meter in the direction of the arrow shown on the sign.'

Consistency pays once you reach the tribunal, if you do. A month after the making of the formal representations, Wandsworth Council responded:

The first paragraph is a waste of time, everyone knows what the PCN was issued for but councils just can't stop trying to justify their actions even when they are plain wrong.

The second paragraph recognised what Mr Mustard knew was fact in the first place. What it does do is make the first rejection look like a cynical attempt to obtain payment for a PCN when the council had removed the meter and not updated the bay sign to reflect the fact that the only method of payment which was possible was by using a telephone. It was dishonest of them and many a motorist not represented by Mr Mustard would have paid up. Mr Mustard suggests that you never accept what a council says at face value but stress test it instead and use the internet to help you. Free help is always available for all sorts of problems with authority at PePiPoo. The link is to the council PCN forum but there are others for speeding and private parking charges etc. things that Mr Mustard does not involve himself in.

The signs in Wandsworth should all be changed, it isn't like they don't make millions out of parking tickets, they have a duty to erect signs which accord with Traffic Management Orders. Mr Mustard thinks he had better send a complaint to the Chief Executive.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard