Newham Council - misleading 'Help' offered

 

So here we have Mr M's car in a bay without a sign on 1 August 25. That makes it a free parking bay. As it happens Mr M lives in a different road within Newham which is subject to frequent vandalism of its sign and this road, Holbrook Rd, is one where Mr Mustard has fought a dozen PCN none of which have had to be paid.

Mr M thought he would point out by himself the absence of a sign and not trouble Mr Mustard and so he did this on 4 August 25.

On 3 September Newham Council rejected the informal challenge of which the gist is below:

It is specious.

They accept ('noted') that 'one of the nearest time plates was missing'. They didn't notice that this bay in their traffic order is meant to be 25m long (a resident has illegally repainted the bay in order to get access to their yard) nor that the bay only ever had one sign so once that sign is missing there is no sign.

The car was within a cpz but the zone entry signs only set the times for single yellow lines which don't have their own timeplate and they do not set the time for bays, each of which must have its own sign and may have its own type and times.

There is a legal obligation that every bay must have a sign.

Councils have an obligation to erect and maintain signage so that motorists can find out what the rules are.

Looking at the next sign, or the one on the other side of the road is very bad advice. Image 3 consecutive bays from which the signs have been stolen. Bay #1 is a motorcycle bay, bay #2 is a residents only bay, bay #3 is a bay for blue badge holders. Bay 4 is for people paying to park, the sign is of no use in informing motorists in the other 3 bays what the rules are.

At this point Mr Mustard was instructed.

On 30 September 25 a Notice to Owner was sent but didn't arrive.

On 5 November 25 a Charge Certificate was issued and the balance claimed increased from £160 to £240.

This certificate is misleading nonsense. It does not need to contain reasons 1-3 and Newham Council knew that options 2 & 3 did not apply so why include them? All a charge certificate needs to say is that the penalty has been increased by 50%

The council tell you in bold that you are stuffed.

They then go on in the next paragraph about the County Court in an attempt to frighten the recipient still further. They give you no details about the options which will be available at the Order for Recovery stage which include the ability to roll the process back, get a fresh Notice to Owner and then once more have the right to make representations. Newham Council have been selective in only presenting the bad news.

Laughably they rendered the £10 court fee as zero.

The 'strong advice' which the council give is highly selective and largely biased in their favour and it is no part of Newham Council's role to give out advice on a matter in which they have a financial interest.

Mr Mustard gave advice to Mr M that he should await the Order for Recovery but might get another document first as he was aware of the stunts that Newham pull.

Thus it was on 24 November 25 that Newham Council sent a letter purporting to offer help. Here it is: 

What utter tosh. Newham Council not thinking they could help with the cost of living crisis by cancelling the PCN that they should never have issued.

Mr Mustard decided to have a bit of sport and complete the online enquiry form knowing he would write things that Newham Council didn't want to read.

Mr Mustard only had to wait a few days for a response although it was utterly useless.

Mr Mustard was not amused at the refusal to provide any help so given that Newham Council didn't like his first effort he crafted a much longer and harder hitting enquiry:

Did this result in a reasoned and complete response, no of course not, it received the same standard letter saying Mr Mustard couldn't use the enquiry service in this way.

Mr Mustard waited patiently.  He had put the PCN into the too difficult pile and Newham Council decided to burn £10 and register the PCN as a debt at Northampton County Court which is really just a big filing cabinet for PCNs.

It was on 8 January 26 that Mr Mustard checked online and saw that the balance had increased to £250 so the Order for Recovery had been issued. Without waiting to see it Mr Mustard filed a 'witness statement' which declared that the Notice to Owner had not been received. As the statement was in time the 50% surcharge and the £10 fee were both taken off the online balance.

On 9 February 2026 a fresh Notice to Owner was issued.

On 10 February 2026 the formal representations were made online in the following words: 

The council are under a legal duty to sign a bay.

There is no sign alongside the bay.

The motorist was therefore not on notice of the terms of any traffic order. 

The PCN is too vague. It does not state which of the types of bay is concerned, is it a residents bay or a shared use bay. A motorist is entitled to know exactly what they are accused of, not to have to undertake research. 

The council sent a letter on 24 November which not authorised by the 2022 Appeals or General Regulations and is a procedural impropriety. 

The council's behaviour has been wholly unreasonable and vexatious throughout.

The final line was a clear warning that costs would be applied for if the council rejected the representations and an appeal was necessary to the independent adjudicator.

This time some-one with at least half a brain thought about them as they were accepted and the PCN was cancelled. Their thought process was still flawed and the majority of the acceptance letter was utter tosh and churlish.

Mr Mustard wonders if the council will learn anything from this. Once Mr Mustard decides a PCN is wrong he will fight it all the way to the tribunal and if he does that the council will incur the tribunal fee of c.£32. Newham wasted the £10 in this case for the TEC registration, Mr Mustard did warn them.

The problem, and the reason councils do this, is that many unlawful PCNs get paid, often by lease companies (try not to lease, just buy yourself a smaller older car with a straightforward loan if you can) and so there is no stick to balance out the carrot. If councils issue an unlawful PCN they should have to give the amount of the penalty to the recipient. That would make councils think before they shoot.

The end. 

Barking & Dagenham Council dig themselves a big hole

For years council staff could tell the public anything they liked about a PCN and the public would accept it was true and meekly pay their PCN. There were a small number of PCN experts but they were spread quite thinly. Nowadays, with the explosion in PCN numbers the number of experts has also grown and they help each other to learn and share knowledge. Thus, council staff are regularly tested and in rare cases councils are having to appoint barristers to fight us at the tribunal as we have uncovered fundamental flaws in the legitimacy of their PCNs.

Why, with the increased scrutiny, council (or possibly outsourced provider) staff, opposed in a tribunal case by an expert with an eye for detail, think they can tell a whopping great lie in a witness statement is a mystery. Here is the statement. Mr Mustard has redacted the officer's name as this case may be sent to the council's fraud department. ('Officer' just means member of staff).

Mr Mustard had watched the footage, the camera didn't move which suggested a fixed installation and he also didn't think staff would be poring over cctv at gone 5.30pm on Christmas Eve so he asked what sort of camera was in use.

So there we have it. A Witness statement which is patently untrue and leaves the witness open to prosecution. Mr Mustard will now ask the motorist (whose Appeal was decided on the grounds that the PCN was invalid so the witness statement wasn't considered) if he wishes to report the officer to the Fraud department. The council take fraud by residents sufficiently seriously to put it in their policy, will they equally investigate fraud by their own staff?

 The end.

Short term bays and blue badges

Someone who knows someone who knows Mr Mustard phoned him up. Mr Mustard's response is always the same, show him the paperwork. That was duly delivered, an evidence pack following a witness statement that representations had been made and a Notice of Rejection had not been received. That was problem number one, before we can even talk about the sign, the procedural hurdle.

When you make a witness statement on the ground that a Notice of Rejection was not received the council can either send you a copy and invite you to pay or make an Appeal to the tribunal (restoring you to where you would have been) or they simply refer the file to an adjudicator at the tribunal for directions. It's a bit bonkers but the tribunal send you a letter asking you to prove you made representations and if you don't respond to that letter they make a decision that the PCN is payable because you did not reply and yet when you look at what the council, Barking and Dagenham in this case, sent to the tribunal, it included both the representations and the Notice of Rejection so the tribunal are asking you a question they know the answer to and penalising you if you don't reply.

When Mr Mustard looked at the evidence pack he saw straight away what had gone wrong. Instead of the keeper of the car making the representations her grandson had done them. That was because she does not speak very good English it being her second language. The grandson's English is well up to scratch. He made the representations in his name (he happens to be an insured driver with Motability but isn't the keeper as that is the disabled person). Motability cars are noted at the DVLA by putting 04441 after the name of the person whose car it is. Now what should have happened is that the council should have pointed out they were in the wrong name and asked for confirmation they were on behalf of the keeper and confirmed that with her signature. They had acted promptly, on day 5 so there were still 23 days in which they could have been done again.

However, in this case, perhaps because the address was the same, the council instead issued a Notice of Rejection in the wrong name. Bingo, said Mr Mustard to himself. He had saved five previous tribunal decisions which all find that action to be wrong. Here is the earliest of them

Mr Mustard has submitted this decision to the tribunal along with proof of the representations and is hopeful that the Direction will be either that there will be a hearing or that the PCN is cancelled. There is a slim possibility of rejection if the adjudicator is not persuaded by the prior decisions as they are not precedents.

On twitter Mr Mustard invited you to say if the time limit for a blue badge holder was 10 or 20 minutes or without limit. You should have been offered 3 hours as well.

The car was observed twice, 25 minutes apart. A PCN was issued for being parked for longer than permitted, a blue badge and clock were on display but a good photograph of them was not taken.

This is what the driver made as representations, twice, to Barking & Dagenham Council:

'I have checked online and on the disabled parking booklet where I can park and it states that even if there is a time limit for the bay, it does not include blue badge holders'.

The council's formal Notice of Rejection contained the following:

That official response makes no sense.

A blue badge holder gets 3 hours on a single or double yellow line provided that loading is not banned (and that will be indicated by short yellow marks across the kerb and a sign if the marks are single ones not double - which apply for 24 hours a day). Thus a time limit of 3 hours in the bay would be logical but is not correct.

If you said 10 minutes you would be wrong. Officially you can only stay 10 minutes but there is now a period of overstay of 10 minutes in a bay if you were previously legally parked, and whether it is a pay bay or a free bay and there is a traffic management order in place, and during that time you cannot be given a PCN (as an adjudicator told me, it is still a contravention, just one you cannot get a PCN for).

Here is a tribunal decision which confirms the extra 10 minutes at this very spot and which tells us how trigger happy they are at Barking and Dagenham and that they didn't know the law as they made the motorist go to Appeal

If you said a blue badge holder could park for an unlimited time you were correct. This is because of this law.

which says that traffic management orders ('TMO') written under S45 or S46 must exempt blue badge holders from payment, a time limit on length of stay or return.

Was the Barking & Dagenham TMO made under one of those sections Mr Mustard hears you ask. Well, Mr Mustard doesn't know for certain because instead of putting the on street Axe Street TMO into the evidence pack for the tribunal the council put the TMO for the off street car park at Axe Street service road instead so they haven't proved to the tribunal that they have the right to issue a PCN at that location in the first place. Those are the sort of blunders which happen all the time and help Mr Mustard obtain a high success rate.

However, the correct map based TMO was drawn up by the same company as produced Barnet's and the boilerplate for the Barnet TMO starts like this

and Mr Mustard would be surprised if the Barking & Dagenham TMO did not start in the same vein.

Mr Mustard went through all the tribunal decisions at this location in the hope of finding one which confirmed his point of view, he only found one that said the opposite:

but Mr Mustard thinks that is a defective decision, and would not have been made if he had been the representative, for two reasons:

a - the extra 10 minutes, &

b - the blue badge

for both of which he would have put the relevant law in front of the adjudicator who should have known of them in any event, but they decide cases upon the evidence in front of them so incorrect decisions get made (sometimes in favour of the motorist).

So in the not very humble opinion of Mr Mustard he is right and the council and one adjudicator are wrong.

Mr Mustard is humble enough though to think he may have told blue badge holders who stayed for more than 25 minutes in these very common part time loading cum free parking bays to pay up when they were ticketed and had the blue badge on display.

If he did, he certainly won't again. Blue badge holders, please put your blue badge and clock out when you park in these. If you get a PCN Mr Mustard will fight it for you.  Please don't park in them for 6 hours as that defeats the purpose of generating rapid turnover of vehicles in town centres and it will lead to the council changing the rules to put a time limit on blue badge parking, it would in all fairness be longer than 15 minutes as blue badge holders are not as mobile.

Remember that a 15 minute bay is actually a 25 minute bay for everyone, but not 26! No need to stress if there is a small queue for your takeaway coffee.

If councils like Barking and Dagenham were not so focused on making as much revenue as they can from parking PCN it is possible that someone with a heart or common sense or a sense of civic duty would have made due adjustment for a blue badge holder, who are disabled by definition, or that they might have taken seriously the politely presented argument of the motorist and asked a more senior colleague or researched the law or even asked the motorist to give them the on line link they had found or asked to see the booklet which had been referred to. They didn't though as their raison d'etre is revenue at all cost.

The world should not be like this.

Mr Mustard will let you know the outcome, whether he prevails or not.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The TEC & Hackney Council - doubly unhelpful

Within the regulations which govern penalty charge notice processing there is a procedure which rewinds the process so that motorists do not lose out if a document goes missing in the mail. In a recent case Mr Mustard's client, let us call him Ben, did not receive the Notice to Owner and he knew this as after the PCN issued to the vehicle the first document he received in the post was the Charge Certificate.

Mr Mustard therefore drew up a witness statement for his client to sign, a form TE9, and submitted it to the TEC (Traffic Enforcement Centre). He kept an eye on the balance on the Hackney Council computer and for weeks it was stubbornly stuck at £195, rather than having reverted to £130, and a fresh Notice to Owner did not arrive.

Sometimes things go wrong so Mr Mustard emailed the TEC so that they could tell him if they had processed the form and on what date.

This was the thoroughly unhelpful answer he received.

We have been unable to process your request for information on the above Penalty Charge Number.

We would advise you to contact the London Borough of Hackney to ask for the information you require.

Very odd as the standard acknowledgement from the TEC contains the following line:

The current status of the Penalty Charge (e.g. has my document been processed?) - Within 10 working days.

The TEC are able to answer, when they say they are 'unable' to do so. They mean, of course, unwilling, for some unknown reason.

Oh well, thought Mr Mustard, time to ask Hackney Council what they did about the revoking order that the TEC should have issued in response to an in time witness statement (without knowing if they had actually processed it or not) so an email was sent to Hackney Council to ask them.

The response was as unhelpful as the one from the TEC and left the motorist completely in the dark and unable to take any steps & denied him his rights to fight the PCN:

Thank you for your e-mail. Please note that the form should be sent to the Traffic Enforcement Centre and you would need to direct any enquiries regarding an update to a submitted form directly to themselves.

The action plan to tackle this which Mr Mustard decided upon was to submit a Subject Access Request to Hackney Council which would force them to provide the requested information and also to send a complaint to both bodies with copies of the two useless responses and ask them to agree who would respond.

Mr Mustard had drafted the requests and the complaint, a week after Hackney's useless response, when he checked their website and found they had closed the PCN so he had reduced the balance from £195 to £130 to £zero. How nice.

What this told him was:

1. The TEC had processed the witness statement (they could have replied to that effect in 2 minutes).

2. Hackney Council had not issued a fresh PCN as soon as they were able to (although they were still in time).

3. The request for information caused Hackney Council to look at the file and decide to close it (which they should have told the motorist who clearly wanted to know).

All is well that ends well but this has been a right palaver that less experienced PCN fighters would have really struggled with.

Enforcement authorities and Courts have huge powers. They really need to wield them in a professional manner and give out vital information promptly when requested. (All authorities, please take note.)

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Taking flipping Liberties - or TfL for short

Mr Mustard's client received the above Notice to Owner, but hadn't got the PCN and thus the location description was too vague to satisfy the requirement to set out the grounds on which a penalty was due.

Mr Mustard made the formal representations on line & in time, that due to the vague description on the Notice to Owner, the contravention was denied (his client often being in the Stamford Hill area & not having a PCN from the relevant date).

TfL wrote this:

Mr Mustard ignored the letter as formal representations had already been made which TfL were obliged to accept or reject within 56 days, the letter itself confirming that representations had been made. There wouldn't have been any photographs on a PCN given out at the roadside.

TfL neither accepted nor rejected the representations. After 67 days they issued a Charge Certificate as if no representations had been made and that increased the balance due by 50% to £195

Mr Mustard has now lodged a complaint which TfL will, if they do as they usually do, fail to respond to. Then Mr Mustard's client will be forced to lodge a witness statement in order to obtain a tribunal hearing. TfL will have wasted the £8 debt registration fee and the £30 tribunal fee and will lose the Appeal because they have not followed the set procedure. It is just plain wrong to put the client through the mill like this, a mill he shouldn't be anywhere near.

Mr Mustard has noticed a few enforcement authorities acting in this way (Islington & Camden to name but two, not Barnet generally). They receive formal representations which are valid but they don't like what is said so they engage the motorist (the Owner technically) in correspondence which is not within the Regulations which govern the Appeal process.

Mr Mustard thinks an extra letter would be reasonable if it was to the benefit of the motorist, something like:

Dear Sir / Madam

You have made a representation that your blue badge had slipped off the dashboard. If you provide a copy of that badge to us within the next 14 days we will cancel your PCN. If you do not do so we will reject your representations and you will then have the right of Appeal to an independent adjudicator.

Yours etc

That approach is in accordance with the letter of the Regulations and the spirit of exercising discretion in suitable cases (not likely though on the 20th time your badge falls off the dashboard).

If you are sent extra correspondece of the less clear kind Mr Mustard advises counting 56 days from the date of your representation being delivered to the enforcement authority for parking contraventions and 90 days for other, moving traffic, contraventions and then telling the authority that in the absence of their Notice of Rejection they have accepted the representations by default and that the PCN must be cancelled. (If their Notice of Rejection has actually got lost in the post you will have to go down the witness statement route in any event).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Charge Certificates

Charge Certificate by MisterMustard

Mr Mustard has noticed the unexpected arrival of a couple of Charge Certificates and although he thinks he might have written about them before they are worthy of a thorough blogging. They aren't yet an epidemic, unless you tell him otherwise, but he suspects that there is either a procedural error or human error creeping into the processing of PCN because on two occasions the formal representations have not been responded to. 

The processing of a single PCN could be in the hands of as many staff as exist within the NSL office. This is probably viewed as the most cost effective method but it also leads to loss of consistency. If appeals were dealt with accordingly to postcode or alphabetically by Surname then the appeal clerks (they are called Notice Processing Officers) would get to know the individual PCN and might remember some idiosyncrasy about an appeal which might prevent error. they would also get to see the pattern of someone's appeals and be better able to tell if they were genuine or a chancer and decide accordingly (although Mr Mustard rather suspects that the default setting is to reject an informal appeal regardless of merit).

On Friday he was sent a Charge Certificate for a PCN issued on 30 November 12. That PCN had the old invalid wording.

Informal representations were made online on 4 December 12.

They were rejected on 18 December 12 (Happy Christmas!)

The Notice to Owner (NtO) was then issued on 9 January 13.

Formal representations were made online on 5 February 13.

All went quiet.

Formal representations have to be responded to by the council within 56 days of their receipt. This was not done.

On 7 June Mr Mustard emailed the motorist as follows:

That is good. The council get 56 days in which to respond to a challenge made in response to the NtO. Be warned that the council might still wake the ticket up later! If they do I will help you. (How prescient of Mr Mustard.)

 

Today Mr Mustard emailed parking client side and they have sensibly and quickly killed the PCN off. That option isn't available to everyone and is only available to Mr Mustard as he has demonstrated a certain understanding of the system and doesn't waste the parking client side's time; in fact he saves it as they know when they are on a loser and can instead plague somebody who doesn't know the ropes who might well go wrong and have to pay up.

What you can do.

The choices of action in response to a Charge Certificate are limited to:

(a) do nothing, or 

(b) pay up. 

Your failure to pay at an earlier stage will have cost you an extra 50% on top of the parking ticket price. That is the harsh price of being slow, poor or mis-placing your paperwork. You should pay, as you don't want your parking ticket anywhere near a bailiff, if you have failed to follow the appeal process (download the guide from the top left). The Charge Certificate looks like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick to prod you into paying.

If however, the council have gone wrong then you should sit and wait as the Order for Recovery will be along in the next 3 weeks or so (although some are arriving 6 months+ or a year after the Charge Certificate which simply should not happen) and then you can react.

Form TE3 Order for Recovery by MisterMustard

At this point the cost is still nothing like as bad as it will be once a bailiff gets hold of your debt and it will become ten times worse, so if you haven't followed the procedure, pay up now, you are another £7 to the bad. (Fee now £8 August 2016)

If however, something has gone wrong, you can file a witness statement (form TE9) and if you do this correctly and in time (you have a clear date to act by so don't delay) then the PCN will go back to the first stage and you will have your chance to appeal. In London you can only make a witness statement on one ground alone; choose it out of the following four:

1.  You did not receive the Notice to Owner (if you didn't appeal at this stage then you may well not have received it especially if the PCN is old or you may well know for certain that you didn't receive it) This is the most likely reason for a witness statement to be filed by you.

2.  You sent in an appeal (they are called representations) after you did receive the Notice to Owner and you did not get a response from the council. This is also quite common sometimes due to them being scanned to the wrong file or not printed out and scanned at all. You will need to find a copy of what you sent in if you are to be believed.

3.  You sent an appeal to London Tribunals but you had no reply. This probably doesn't happen very often as London Tribunals are quite efficient. Mr Mustard always gets a free certificate of posting for any parking related letter. If you don't hear from London Tribunals within a week of sending your form in I would telephone them on 020 7520 7200 to check what has happened and if your form got lost in the post send them a copy of the copy (so do take a copy of it). (In some boroughs you can now file your London Tribunals Appeal on-line. If you do this it can't get lost)

4.  You paid in full.

Please do this form TE9 in time as out-of-time witness statements are simply another hurdle that is really best avoided.

This is what the form TE9 looks like. It will come pre-printed from the council with your data or you can download one from the Courts site here.

Form TE9 Witness statement by MisterMustard

It is quite straightforward. If your application is in time it will be processed very quickly, a day or two, by the TEC and then the council will probably send you a new Notice to Owner (if that was your appeal) or refer your application to London Tribunals if you say you made representations that were not responded to by the council or London Tribunals.

If you don't fully understand the process send an email to Mr Mustard and he will help you. At the very least he will want to see every single piece of paper relating to the PCN.

Whatever you do don't panic but do act now.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard