Helping the mentally or physically ill, the elderly & the poor to fight Council PCNs.
Writing about blunders, democracy and profligacy at Barnet Council.
It is bad enough that you have an accident in the company delivery van but you then have to tell the boss that whilst it was waiting for the tow truck to take it to the garage, a PCN was issued to it.
You have to wonder if we are in a PCN target driven world (and not just within Haringey) when a traffic warden can't look at a vehicle like this and walk on by for a day or two to see if the van gets recovered.
Luckily this miserable PCN will bite the dust pretty quickly as the traffic warden mistook an X for a K and so has issued a PCN to a vehicle registration which does not exist and hence the PCN is a nullity. How Mr Mustard laughed as this is a shoe-in for cancellation.
Mr Mustard is a big fan of Haringey Council's parking department. They met 13 times in 2017 with the score being 12-1 to Mr Mustard (the one loss still hurts as in front of a different adjudicator he would also have beaten that PCN but never mind, he can charitably spare one PCN).
Things have got to change. Mr Mustard is now very busy in his professional life with work + travel exceeding 55 hours a week. There just isn't time for 30 hours a week of parking paperwork on top and any sort of private life.
In 2013 Mr Mustard's record shows that he fought 102 PCN to the end and only lost 3 of those. (That was before the advent of Moving Traffic & Yellow Box PCNs in Barnet which are much harder to beat).
In 2017 he fought 345 PCNs and lost 51 times so not at all shabby a performance (won 84%). The average citizen wins 50% of the time so it is always worth fighting as winning 50% of the time is the same, in the long run, as paying up at 50% all of the time.
As you will appreciate the amount of time spent helping you with your PCNs has quadrupled. This at a time when, since mid-October, Mr Mustard with his credit consultancy hat on has been collecting in more than £10,000,000 from 6,000+ debtors. The Administrator he has been working for (similar to a liquidator) has noticed the rapid progress made on debtors and put Mr Mustard in as part of the team for the next job. Thus Mr Mustard predicts that he will be very busy professionally in 2018. During December due to the pressure of work Mr Mustard became very slow at answering parking emails and was at times a week behind. Although he was lucky not to miss a deadline anywhere he very nearly did and this discomforts Mr Mustard.
The answer that Mr Mustard has come up with is to limit the number of PCNs that he manages. This will be achieved by Mr Mustard fighting the PCN, or offering advice, only in the following circumstances:
you are mentally ill
you have a physical disability or a blue badge
you are old*
you are impecunious i.e. living entirely on pension or benefits
the council have blundered~.
(*Some people are old at 65 and others who he has met aged 91 & 92 would give youngsters a run for their money. You need to feel old as well as be old to ask for help please).
(~You will be surprised how many blunders one council can make and keep quiet about. They will feature in a blog once fixed, anonymously if required).
All PCNs that are currently in progress will be completed. For example, Mr Mustard has
6 tribunal hearings on 3 January 18 followed by
8 on 10 January and
5 on 17 January.
There will sadly be a consequent drop in PCN related donations to North London Hospice. Mr Mustard asks all of his readers to donate to them anyway, to gives goods to the shops & to volunteer within the hospice or the shops if you have free time.
Don't just give in from now on and pay up. Assume that for PCNs stuck on your car the council will reject the first challenge and make the second one again once the Notice to Owner is received. If you think you are in the right then go in person to the tribunal, it can be fun, and argue your corner. You will win 50% of the time and the more you fight the better you get. You can get help on this excellent website, with a silly name, Pepipoo.
Mr Mustard would like to wish all of his readers all the best for 2018.
One day Mr Mustard hopes that he won't have to read stupid, immoral, money motivated and unreasonable council arguments in the parking ticket tribunal register. He suspects he always will.
So let us be clear here. You have parked your car legally before the restrictions started at 4pm. You have been held up in the bank behind a locked door, whether due to a mechanical failure or a robber waving a gun around we don't know, but whatever the reason you could not leave the bank to move your car.
Mr Brown will have made formal representations to that effect and Barnet Council, assisted or not by their contractors NSL Ltd, have refused the representations and made you take your argument to the tribunal where the adjudicator will have struggled to curtail his incredulity and judging by the shortness and simplicity of the written decision, it was arrived at very easily.
Barnet Council, in common with many others, simply have too much power. They are required to exercise their discretion in situations such as these without thinking about the money represented by the PCN. They simply aren't independent enough and are swayed by the prospect of receiving £110 from a motorist without the guts or time to fight. Luckily Mr Brown had principles & could be bothered to fight. Mr Mustard salutes you.
Although Mr Mustard is very busy working and really hasn't got the spare time for PCNs he can't leave wronged motorists without the necessary help.
A PCN was issued to a Scotsman for code 87: Parked in a designated disabled person's parking place without displaying a valid disabled person's badge in the prescribed manner. The photo above was taken by the traffic warden.
Although the clock is displayed and shows a time of about 11:05 it wasn't necessary to display it as blue badge holders park for fee all day in this car park. The gentleman in question had driven down from Scotland to visit his brother in Barnet General and then nipped up to the town centre where, after finding the PCN on his car, he was lucky to be spotted by a friend of Mr Mustard's on his way to band practice (he plays the tuba whereas traffic wardens just play the fiddle) who passed on the necessary mobile phone number.
The motorist has done nothing wrong, he has clearly displayed a valid blue badge the correct way up. Now he has to fight a PCN and make a charity donation for Mr Mustard's help so will be out of pocket even if the PCN gets cancelled the instant that Mr Mustard's complaint goes in.
Mr Mustard has seen more instances recently of complete lash ups by traffic wardens. Service really needs to improve as being wrongly threatened with a £110 penalty is not cricket. This is another example of an instance in which the motorist should automatically be compensated for the inconvenience.
Yours frugally
Mr Mustard
Here is the council response:
The arrival time does not appear to Mr Mustard to be wrong (and the council don't actually know the time of arrival) but what usually happens is that the traffic warden looks to see if the clock time is later than the current time & if it is assumes that the motorist was trying to gain extra minutes. The snag with that thought process, if indeed it is one rather than simply mechanical, is that the rules say you just have to set for the quarter hour within which you parked, so arriving at 11:01 you can properly set your clock for 11:14 Note that there is absolutely no mention of compensation. The council do not have to compensate you by law for their errors so the council won't pay any. Bah humbug. When PCN laws get refreshed Mr Mustard will be pushing for automatic fixed sum compensation for council errors.
Above is Barnet Council's assessment of their performance faced with the worst snow fall for 20 years and it sounds pretty good. Mr Mustard doesn't remember any particular problems from that time, his work diary looking pretty normal.
You have to ask what has changed since 2009?
The depot has moved out of the borough (a shortsighted decision).
There has been a massive shift away from directly employed staff to outsourcing. The traffic wardens no longer work for the council so unless reusing them for salt spreading was in the contract (Mr Mustard has read it & doesn't remember seeing such a clause and certainly hasn't seen or heard of traffic wardens doing anything other than being as zealous as ever in issuing PCNs) that isn't going to happen. It would also need to be in the employee's contract. Refuse crews are still in house - others will hopefully know what they have been doing.
Winter planning was outsourced to Crapita - Coventry had it much worse than Barnet so the Capita staff at that location may not have made it to work?
Probably due to recent mild winters contingency planning hasn't seemed so important
Budgets have been cut left right & centre. Street scene has not escaped
Feel free to add other factors in the comments box.
Whatever the reasons we are all suffering the effects of the council's poor planning.
Q. Why do we pay council tax? A. To receive communal services.
Q. Are we getting them? A. No
Q. Can you get better service for less money? A. No
Yours frugally
Mr Mustard
Update 12 December 2017 at 19:54
No traffic warden has been out gritting pavements which they could usefully have done as we have 50+ of them and they couldn't issue PCNs on Sunday.
If you start with the notion that something is almost impossible then you are hardly likely to be brilliant at it. Perhaps it is this lack of conviction (apathy?) that has led to such a poor gritting performance this weekend in the borough of Barnet.
Mr Mustard does not think that Barnet Council have met their statutory duty this weekend as in some previous years the performance was more effective which demonstrates that a better performance is reasonably practicable.
Priority 1 roads were not regularly gritted. This evening coming home from his snooker match Mr Mustard found that buses on Barnet Hill were staying well out from the kerb due to lack of grip and that a pedestrian was walking in the road in the High St near Normandy Avenue because the footpath was an ice rink.
Priority 2 & 3 (=no priority at all) roads were not gritted as all Priority 1 roads had not yet been done. Priority 3 roads in this study were only gritted 2% of the time of Priority 1 roads. They have a snowball's chance in hell of being gritted.
'Clear snow early in the day when fresh' & 'Apply salt before night to prevent refreezing' are two piece of council advice that the council should take heed of.
What, you are wondering, has Ski Sunday got to do with a PCN?
It is that service is going downhill fast.
Mr Mustard's client, let us call her Miss R, parked her car near to her place of work and immediately paid for her parking at the correct location, which she knows well, and for the correct car (she may in fact only have the one). The payment was made at 08:34. The location being North Finchley, where the traffic wardens hunt in packs as their base is just up the road, a traffic warden clocked her car the moment she arrived. He/she checked for payment which of course takes about a minute after parking (you must not try to pay whilst still driving along). He/she then waited until 08:39 and issued a PCN for non-payment. Mr Mustard thinks they forgot to check for a payment at the end of the 5 minute observation period in their haste to clock up another PCN towards the non-existent target (something makes them really keen to issue PCNs).
Having found the PCN when she went to use her car a bit later, Miss R thought she wouldn't trouble Mr Mustard with such an easy challenge, she would make it herself. She duly did so and the council denied that any payment had been made for that car that day which is odd as Mr Mustard could see the payment in her on line account.
Mr Mustard therefore intervened and sent a complaint to parking management, who know that Mr Mustard is always serious and almost always correct, and has heard back very swiftly today (the complaint was only made on Saturday) and the PCN has been cancelled.
This response nails the lie that payments made to PayByPhone appear instantly on the hand held equipment of the traffic warden.
Whilst that is a quick and sincere apology, one small part of Mr Mustard's email did not, as per usual, get responded to. It read:
NSL back office have incorrectly stated that no payments were made that day. Motorists really shouldn't have to suffer two errors on one ticket, it is stressful, exasperating, wastes their time and costs them a £25 charity donation for my help.
The council really should compensate motorists when they have got it so wrong. You don't let motorists made even one teensy weensy parking error without expecting to extract a penalty of £60 or £110.
The blog for the last few entries has highlighted one cock-up after another. There is another good (bad) one (two) coming shortly.
