PCN - 50% 14 days woes - help needed

Mr Mustard has a friend with a PCN whose 50% payment, sent by post in the first week after receiving a PCN, was processed after 2 months.

He is now looking for any other examples of this to see if it was an isolated instance or an epidemic. If you have one, whether sorted or not, please email the details to mrmustard@zoho.com

Not many of us use cheques nowadays and to avoid being counted out of time it is best if you can to pay on-line using a credit or debit card as there is no doubt about the payment date.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Expired Permit PCNs should be cancelled

Mr Mustard really doesn't like such vague answers. "Short term" is not specified as a period and letters were not sent to three residents of my street (out of about 40 with cars) who had suffered reminder failure which makes the number of 20 seem risible. (Did Capita pay any compensation for their short-term failure? - probably not, as the council saved postage and gained PCN income so had a profit, not a loss).

Reminders have been sent ever since the first CPZ was introduced in about 1987 and so they are custom & practice, thus residents have a reasonable expectation that they will be reminded on which they are entitled to rely.

See also this FOI response to Mr Mustard

so the council guess at 20 when 46 reminders are needed per working day to equal the annual number of permits in issue of 12,000.

Anyway if you are one of the affected residents you can email Richard Cornelius at cllr.r.cornelius@barnet.gov.uk and cc barnet@nslservices.co.uk with your PCN number and ask for it to be cancelled and if you have paid one, since mid-May when the process was moved to Capita, ask for a refund as you have paid under a mistake. 

An honest council would refund you. Let's see how honest Barnet Council are (not very is Mr Mustard's guess).

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Perception and reality

Why is the £750,000 Barnet Council website so useless?

Go to this page

and click on the Ravensdale Avenue FOI entry and you get this

 then click on Download and it all goes pear shaped

Others have had the same problem.

Sort it out Barnet Council.

Finally, some good news from Barnet Council

Although this decision arrives somewhat late in the day, as the first illegally over-priced permits and vouchers were sold in April 2011, Mr Mustard does welcome it as the council are doing the right thing for which they should, finally, be gently applauded.

Mr Mustard does have some sympathy with the council who must have thought that after all the free bad publicity about the permit price hike and the judicial review in national newspapers like the Guardian, that residents would be  stampeding up to the Town Hall with their refund applications. That turned out not to be the case.

What the council probably overlooked was their own statistic about resident churn in the borough in that 8% of residents change each year so those who have moved away (or sadly died) wouldn't have known that a refund is due.

So far only about 5,200 out of the estimated 12,000 who are eligible for a refund have received a collective £1.2m with another £1.3m still to be distributed.

Mr Mustard's only concern with this 9 page report (he has shown you just the main 2 pages) is that as far as Mr Mustard can tell Civica are only going to contact residents at the address on file. There is no indication that any tracing action will be taken if the resident does not respond in order to verify if the resident is still resident or if they have moved away and to obtain the new address.

Mr Mustard thinks that another report to effect tracing will be required later on.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Permit pandemonium

Visitor vouchers

Mr Mustard had plans to write about Residents permits but first a few words about Visitor Vouchers which completely derailed his plans on Monday afternoon as instead of working he helped a local friend who was expecting builders to sort out enough visitor vouchers to cope with the imminent arrival of the builders. She had phoned the Crapita Coventry call centre, they are also known as "help lines" and it turned out they were absolutely no help at all. Mr Mustard's friend needed to know where her order of Visitor Vouchers, placed a while ago, had got to. The answer she got was that they had run out of vouchers. When asked how her builders were going to be able to park legally she was told that was for her to sort out. Henceforth, Crapita Coventry shall be known as the "absolutely no help at all" line.

Later on she was told she was being sent half day vouchers for the price of full day ones (half day vouchers still have an official price of £2.08) and that the NSL traffic wardens would be told not to ticket. Oh, how Mr Mustard laughed at the notion that advantage would not be taken of the situation. So let us suppose "24 half day full day" vouchers were purchased and 20 were used for the builders. The rest got put in a drawer and forgotten about until 2016 when whilst looking for something else they are unearthed and used for Auntie Mabel who has just come to stay for a few days. She puts out 3 half day vouchers, suitably scratched off, the car is out of sight at the end of the road and it picks up 3 PCN. Will the council believe the motorist who says "my niece spoke to the helpline two years ago who said everything would be all right"? Whenever they tell you something concrete like that at Crapita, ask them to send you an email right now to confirm. Take their full name. If they won't do both of those things, they are fobbing you off.

Resident Permits

Now to Permit Pandemonium. Mr Mustard kept getting cases of PCNs being issued to people who had paid for a new or renewed permit and were waiting weeks or months for the new one to arrive and other PCNs issued to people whose permit had expired without them having been sent a reminder after two decades of receiving them. He hardly ever sends in Freedom of Information requests nowadays, but this topic was worthy of one.

Here it is in digestible chunks:

Mr Mustard thinks, but can't be entirely sure, that the correct answer to the question posed is "zero" but it might be that the council simply handed a carrier bag full of unfinished applications over to Crapita or they could be stuffed in a filing cabinet in a forgotten corner. No-one wants to admit that if it were the case. Whatever the truth, handover does not seem to have been a slick one.

Now this is where the numbers get very interesting. Mr Mustard put them into a table, like this:

Month	In hand	Applications	Issued	Backlog
From 12 May	0	3,075	3,708	-633
June	-633	3,021	2,019	369
July	369	3,067	2,541	895
Aug	895	2,514	2,595	814
up to 12 Sept	814	985	1,278	521

So in the first month Crapita sent out 633 more permits that they had received requests for. Such efficiency. More permits for less money, or some such nonsense!

Then in June & July far fewer permits were issued than requested. the reason for this may be that, Mr Mustard is told, the council database from in-house days, was not passed to Crapita or if it was they didn't convert it from the existing format into their preferred format.

This is why every person who tried to renew on-line found that their unique identifier had changed and they had to phone or email to get the new one. That is at least 12,000 residents who have had their time wasted. Mr Mustard knows, he was one of them. The council are at liberty to issue new unique identifiers to everyone but should send out notification of them in advance so that the transition for the resident is seamless and stress-free. It would also be an example of that rarely seen notion in Barnet, public service.

Mr Mustard then asked about the number of permits which had not been issued.

The combined answer is 842 which should be the same as the 521 at the top of the page. Perhaps there were 321 handed over form the council to Crapita that no-one took note of? That would mean that Crapita only issue 312 permits that no-one had requested. Perhaps lots of Capita CSG / Re employees gets given one on the quiet?

The answer to the date of the oldest permit application in hand but not yet issued was 1st August as a response was awaited from the customer, possibly to prove something afresh that he proved last year and which wasn't handed over.

If that is the case the permit that Mr Mustard was consulted about (and the related PCN the challenge to which was refused) which was requested and paid for in April and not yet issued (as at 3 September) so that must be the fault of Barnet Council not of Crapita unless it was in the unknown applications that we handed over after all. It doesn't seem very clear does it? the duties of each party. Maybe that was because no-one agreed in detail with Crapita what their duties were before gifting them the work as with blue badges where an Operating Level Agreement was only being cobbled together after the fact?

Overpaying Capita?

Mr Mustard saw in August 14 a Delegated Powers Report about extending the contract with Civica to refund all of the c. 12,000 Residents who are due a refund following the Judicial Review.

Note that in 3 months Crapita claim to have received 8,602 applications, or approx 34,000 in a full year. As 10% of the borough is thought to be inside a CPZ the 12,000 figure looks to be far more accurate than the 34,000. I do hope we are not paying Crapita per application processed and that if we are that someone at the council is properly checking the invoice. One for you Mr Reasonable at next year's armchair audit of the Annual Accounts?

Permit reminders

Finally we get to permit reminders. These are valued by residents who rely on them and have done for over 20 years. When the council fail, residents don't notice the expiry until the wake up call of an unfair PCN.

So it is impossible due to the lack of Crapita management functionality (it isn't the fault of a computer system) to know if the contracted for service was paid for or not. Why should the council pay for it then (they will already have done so of course). If this is also paid for by the item (although email reminders should be pretty cheap) then have we had value for money.

If this is what Crapita are doing in the simple sausage factory processing environment of parking permits and visitor vouchers what sort of complete mess are they getting more vital and complicated services into.

Why does any local authority use them? they are a false economy (if they are an economy at all). Only 9 more years? It feels like a life sentence.

There must be hundreds of ruthlessly efficient local companies who would gladly have tendered for this contract, if it had been offered on its own, and would have supplied local knowledge for free as well as providing local employment and loyalty.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

No, No = Yes

Mr Mustard is persistent and not easily put off.

You need to be the same if you are challenging a PCN.

It is a game of brinkmanship and Mr Mustard will go to the wire because once you have forgotten about the 50% discount you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. You will have read Mr Mustard's guide (top left of the blog if you haven't you naughty reader) and know there are three rounds. Here are the arguments advanced in the three rounds of a recent PCN:

Round 1: informal representations in response to a PCN.

You have issued a PCN for failing to pay in Percy Rd. I have seen a PayByPhone receipt for parking in Percy Road that day, for £1.20. Payment was made for this vehicle at 16:30

Accordingly, the alleged contravention did not occur.

Secondly, the sign in the council's photographs is not authorised for use on its own, only as a sign plate in conjunction with a standard pay-and-display sign. The council has therefore not properly signed the location in accordance with the Secretary of State's authority and may not issue a PCN.

Please cancel the PCN.

Response: The council are not able to cancel your PCN.

Round 2: formal representations in response to a Notice to Owner (they may look familiar: you can quite properly make the same representations as before).

You have issued a PCN for failing to pay in Percy Rd. I have seen a PayByPhone receipt for parking in Percy Road that day, for £1.20. Payment was made for this vehicle at 16:30.

Accordingly, the alleged contravention did not occur.

Secondly, the sign in the council's photographs is not authorised for use on its own, only as a sign plate in conjunction with a standard pay-and-display sign. The council has therefore not properly signed the location in accordance with the Secretary of State's authority and may not issue a PCN.

Please cancel the PCN.

Response: We do not believe it would be appropriate to cancel.

Round 3: filing an Appeal at PATAS (you should be suffering double déjà vu).

You have issued a PCN for failing to pay in Percy Rd. I have seen a PayByPhone receipt for parking in Percy Road that day, for £1.20. Payment was made for this vehicle at 16:30.

Accordingly, the alleged contravention did not occur.

Secondly, the sign in the council's photographs is not authorised for use on its own, only as a sign plate in conjunction with a standard pay-and-display sign. The council has therefore not properly signed the location in accordance with the Secretary of State's authority and may not issue a PCN.

Please cancel the PCN.

Response: The Council has re-examined all of the evidence and on this occasion has decided to not contest your appeal. The PCN has been cancelled due to a processing error.

Is it odd that the processing error was not noticed at rounds 1 & 2?

The challenge that was made at all three stages was the same.

All the council have achieved is wasting £40 on a PATAS Appeal as that is payable as soon as the Appeal is lodged regardless of whether they contest it or throw in the towel as they did in this case.

The PCN was only worth £60 so the council are really out of pocket on this one. They should probably accept all formal representations against lower level (i.e. £60) PCN as otherwise they will; lose money as if half are upheld they have an average income of £30 with a cost of £40 giving a net loss of £10 per PCN. Smart.

So now you know not to be put off by whatever seemingly definite "no" answer the council give you, twice, they may simply be bluffing to try and get you to cough up quietly and they might just throw in the towel when the going gets tough.

Mr Mustard has never yet failed to progress from round 1 to round 3 so when answering his round 2 representations the council should bear in mind that a "no" answer means they will have to write a cheque for £40 and they will almost certainly have zero income to show for it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

N.B. the wrong bay was paid for and the road was the same as was the tariff so although the paid for wrong location is usually a losing argument Mr Mustard was intending to show that the Traffic Management Order had not been breached. He also had another argument he had not previously advanced as a reserve for the day of the hearing (without needing to produce any further evidence).