Exactly why did we give Capita £16.1m in advance to fund, inter alia, computers?

even the council computer room is done out in the corporate colour of teal?

You are all familiar with the story of how Capita were going to fund investment in I.T. for Barnet council and then they were given a £16.1m advance before the ink was dry on the contract.

Naturally, having lobbed Capita such a huge amount of ready cash, the least that you would expect from them is cutting edge service? Oh dear, it isn't happening.

The H: drive is nearly full (unlike Capita's bank account) and unless staff start deleting stuff (that they might well have a good need to store) the H: drive will be full in a few weeks, they have been warned in a memo.

Time was (and Mr Mustard's alter ego has been around since nearly the dawn of time, some would say, and he does remember 10mb hard disk drives, yes he does mean megabyte not gigabyte, those were the days) that storage space was expensive. Not so in 2014. You can buy a 4tb (terabyte, which is 1000 gigabytes, which itself is 1,000 megabytes) hard disk for £130 so that £16.1m we have chucked at Capita would buy 495,384tb of storage space.

Surely Capita can afford to buy at least a couple of 4tb drives?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Thought for the day

Some Sunday morning musings from Mr Mustard. 

Why do Penalty Charge Notices (parking tickets) have to involve money? 

They don't, is the answer.

What other choices are there?

You could get a conditional discharge. The offending driver signs an undertaking that they won't park again on a school zig-zag or on a double yellow, on the pavement etc and they pay £nil. This way the behaviour of drivers is improved and the problem of bad parking slowly starts to go away. The current system, whereby 165,000 PCN a year are issued in Barnet, shows that the stick doesn't work. Nudge theory should be given a go.

You could simply be given a warning, the equivalent of a yellow card in football. These PCN do exist, the code comes with a W on the front of it and the penalty value is zero. Mr Mustard had one in about 2005 when his resident permit expired as he hadn't received the reminder. Much more use should be made of these for contraventions such as expired permits, wrong voucher details scratched, overstays of just a few minutes, paid for the wrong bay or wrong registration number, parked with a single wheel outside of the bay etc, i.e. the more minor offences.

If you are a regular offender then you could be required to do voluntary work, say one hour for a Lower value contravention and 2 hours for a Higher one. In the alternative you could, if you are already work long shifts and have childcare responsibilities opt to make a charitable donation. Imagine how much extra resource this would provide to charities who could gear themselves up to manage this influx of extra hands and would probably even get regular extra hours from the drivers concerned when they see how valuable and rewarding the tasks are. Imagine the difference an extra 165,000 hours of volunteer time would make within the borough. (Mr Mustard doesn't incur parking tickets in Barnet and doesn't have much leisure time either, but he does have a monthly standing order to the North London Hospice and his time spent on getting PCN cancelled helps because the motorists concerned often make donations as requested by him).

As is the case with speeding the council should similarly run "How to park safely and legally" courses which a small fee is paid for, say £25 for a 2 hour course and if you attend one your PCN is cancelled. They could take place all over the borough at different locations and times (evening and weekends included). There are plenty of church halls, sports and social clubs which have meeting rooms and are inexpensive to hire. These would be useful for newly qualified drivers to attend.

On the carrot front, if you own a vehicle registered in the borough and don't get a PCN in the whole 12 months, you could be rewarded, perhaps by a free residents permit for CPZ dwellers or some free visitor or parking vouchers for those who are outwith the CPZ areas but need to use them now and then.

Naturally, if parking control is all about revenue raising and not about the free flow of traffic and safety, none of these ideas will be taken up. Given that the council read my tweets (I will trail this post with a tweet) and my blogs, they can't say they don't know about my ideas.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

No votes for Cllrs Gordon, Rayner & Scannell

Mr Mustard has a busy diary. He already had an almost full week of social engagements for this week when the cash parking meter task and finish group tried to ruin it. He managed to fit in the Tuesday meeting when evidence was being collected from the public but couldn't do the Thursday "decision" meeting as he had a PATAS hearing at which he represented a local resident at 6pm and dinner with a friend in borough market at 7pm. (The resident was also there and did a grand job of putting his own case forward, the adjudicator was won over in 12 minutes and cancelled the PCN and afterwards made a remark about the usual Barnet Council presentation of evidence not being very good, NSL do it for them).

Luckily Dan of the Barnet Bugle was on hand to record the meeting for posterity and you can find the video here.

Mr Mustard is listening to the audio whilst writing this blog and he also had a slow motion version of the meeting when he surfaced at East Finchley and his tweets started to come through on his phone.

There was lots of talk about the known cost and where it would come from and about the difficulty in pinning down how much income and extra people it would bring in. They forget that the removal of meters caused the turnover of some traders to fall by 30% and so putting them back would reverse some of that effect.

Having looked at the costs, Paul Shea, the boss of Tally Ho Discount (a fine place to buy fruit and veg for much less than the supermarkets sell them for) thought they were overstated so, with a little help in presentation from Mr Mustard, he sent councillors a comparison of what he thought were more accurate costings and here they are:

Cash parking meters - break even estimate	Per council figures			Per Finchley traders
	Year 1	Year 2		Year 1	Year 2
	50 of	50 of		50 of	50 of
Purchase cost debit/credit & cash machines	192,500	192,500		192,500	192,500
Spread cost over life time, say 4 years	48,125	48,125		48,125	48,125
Signs, maintenance & ticket rolls	125,000	35,000		16,500	0
Cash collection cost	195,000	195,000		100,000	100,000
Cost per year - total	368,125	278,125		164,625	148,125
Cost per machine	7,363	5,563		3,293	2,963
Maintenance cost	611	611		611	611
Total cost per machine per year	7,974	6,174		3,904	3,574
Operative 52 weeks and 6 days a week = 312 days, so daily cost	26	20		13	11
Anything above this figure per day is profit	26	20		13	11

Now one of the things that Cllr Gordon was worrying about was where the money would come from to fund the parking meters.

There are two ways of looking at this. The simple one is that parking meters are like fruit machines, people put money in and never see it again.

The second, more formal answer, is that the Special Parking Account makes an absolute packet as you will see from the figures to 31 March 2013.

Year ended 31 March 2013	£
Penalty Charge Notices – parking	5,003,385
Bus Lane PCN	831,492
Permits	3,073,836
Paid for parking	2,945,682
Total income	11,854,395
Costs	4,661,253
Surplus	7,193,142

It is clear that there is plenty of money with which to fund the purchase of more parking meters.

This easily answers the question of Cllr Gordon "How are we going to find the money?"

and "Where are the cuts going to be made"

There can't be cuts in other services unless the council are banking on the money from the Special Parking Account to fund other things, which they clearly are. This is utterly wrong.

The meeting concludes without a decision as to whether to put cash parking meters back or not which was the whole point of the task and finish group. There were various tinkering ideas put forward which were not within the remit of the T&FG - what a joke. Cllr Gordon didn't want to make a radical decision, instead he has presided over a ridiculous T&FG.

Now that we are talking of procrastination, Mr Mustard has some to suggest.

Don't bother voting for Cllr Gordon in May 14, leave your decision until August 14. He will be standing in Edgware ward.

Don't bother voting for Cllr Rayner either in May 14, leave your decision until August 14. He currently represents Hale ward.

Don't bother voting for Cllr Scannell in May 14, leave your decision until August 14. She currently represents Edgware ward.

Whilst you are in the full swing of doing nothing Dean Cohen certainly didn't say anything in favour of cash parking meters when he appeared on Tuesday so leave your vote for him, if he stands again in Golders Green ward in May 14, until August 14.

Public service? Barnet? forget it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

If you think that the procrastinating councillors got it wrong, and you want to see cash parking meters in your High Street and car parks then do please email any of the 4 councillors above and tell them so. They are paid to listen to you.

Task and Finish (off the traders) Group

Look, pedestrians, probably spending money in local shops

Last night Mr Mustard attended, along with other local business people and concerned residents, an open meeting of the Task & Finish Group about the possibility of installing cash parking meters once again.

Very little notice was given of the meetings and local bloggers, activists and residents associations, as well as the local paper all spread the word.

There were five people who had asked to speak (Mr Mustard had misunderstood, he put his evidence in and rather thought councillors would decide who they wanted to hear from but no, you self selected) and they all spoke eloquently of the devastation to their businesses (Helen Michael of Cafe Buzz and Paul Shea of Tally Ho Discount (very good for fruit and veg), both of which businesses mostly get paid in cash so their customers evidently have it to hand) and of changes to their shopping patterns (residents Barbara & Bob Jacobson) which led them to go places where parking is easier to pay for or free. There was a fair bit of heckling when Gail Laser, who represents the traders of High Barnet was refused permission as she hadn't put in her request in time and Cllr Gordon managed to get himself into a bit of a knot by saying he had only heard of traders from North Finchley and then refuse for a spare 5 minutes of time to be given to Gail who some councillors, and most of the audience, wanted to hear from.

Dan of the Barnet Bugle was doing sterling service as per usual, see his footage here, Mr Mustard showed his appreciation afterwards by buying him a pint of shandy in the Greyhound and shocked the staff by telling them that he had been under-charged. They totalled up his round again and accepted another £3.60 from him. You can't slip an obvious error by Mr Mustard.

When it came to the question of the whole galaxy of written submission, which councillors had probably all read in advance, Mr Mustard rather expected some open discussion of them. That was not to be. Instead Cllr Dean Cohen was allowed to the table to tell us how marvellous things were in High Barnet and Mill Hill and so on, based upon just one written submission, the one that partly favoured not having cash but in which it was pointed out that most of the provision in High Barnet is private car parking and takes cash. You couldn't make it up.

Anyone, then thank goodness Cllr Gordon said something which probably had the "Leader" Richard Cornelius groaning (Mr Mustard was in the front row and hadn't seen Richard come in from some other meeting) inwardly (Mr Mustard did invite Richard for a pint in the Greyhound but he had the missus with him, the Leaderene as she is apparently known so Mr Mustard offered to buy her a drink as well. Fighting back is very civilised in High Barnet but neither of them showed up). Anyway what Cllr Gordon asked aloud was

Is this (return of cash meters) economically viable?

How would it affect the budget?

What cuts would have to be made elsewhere?

If ever you wanted proof that Barnet Council is involved in illegal revenue raising from parking then that was it.

As an aside this morning a PATAS adjudicator asked Mr Mustard why he helped people with their appeals. He told her there were 9 reasons of which one was that the council were using parking tickets as revenue raisers (they all do that in London she said, whilst earning £50 an hour as part of the process!) and another that donations get made for charity. She described Mr Mustard's behaviour as strange which it may be but it also effective (although he was on a very rare review of an Appeal, which was granted, so the PCN was back in play for a second Appeal but his client blatantly parked where another person wouldn't have done and has probably done himself in despite the best efforts of Mr Mustard on the technical side).

There was one written submission which was sent to councillors but not to governance so it didn't get published. It is rather good so here it is in full:

To: 'cllr.b.gordon@barnet.gov.uk'; 'cllr.r.houston@barnet.gov.uk'; 'cllr.h.rayner@barnet.gov.uk'; 'cllr.j.scannell@barnet.gov.uk'; 'cllr.a.schneiderman@barnet.gov.uk'
Subject: Parking Policy (Cash Meters) Task and Finish Group


Dear Councillors

We are writing to you to implore you to bring back cash parking meters to our car parks and high streets.

Since November 2011 when the meters were disabled trade has been drastically down.

Time and time again first time customers who have made a dedicated trip to our specialist sweet and sugarcraft shop have been so frustrated that they cannot pay for parking and let us know that they will not be returning. You cannot expect people from other boroughs to register for pay by phone or risk searching for a scratch card vendor. They simply will not do it and to pretend that we’ve all got to move with the times is nonsense and ignores the facts: cashless parking is killing the high streets. This is not a situation where one solution is the fix and pay by phone and card payment methods are what is required in addition to cash payments.

In light of our current national economic circumstances the council should be doing all it can to help bring trade to our high streets rather than put up barriers. With the unfair competition from the expansion of out of town shopping centres and the redevelopment of Brent Cross (which have plentiful free parking) we need to make sure that the vitality of our local communities is maintained. The restoration of cash parking would be a start, periods of free parking such as free after three would then be a small step in the right direction.

Please bring back cash parking meters!

Yours sincerely,

Alice and Michael Kentish

Hopscotch

88 High Street, Barnet, Herts, EN5 5SN

There is another meeting on Thursday at 7pm at which the decision will be taken as to whether to recommend the return of cash meters or not. Please do go as Mr Mustard can't make that one.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Parking appeal software?

The next idea has been copied from the Springwise emails that Mr Mustard has signed up to receive.

Outsourcing painful tasks has been made infinitely easier with smartphones, especially through snap-and-send apps such as PaperKarma — which identifies junk mail and automatically unsubscribes users. Working on a similar concept, Fixed enables users to simply take a photo of their parking tickets and have them challenged in court by an expert team.

According to David Hegarty, one of the co-founders of the San Francisco-based service, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency has around “1000 different parking rules [that] are horrifically hard to understand”, which leads to many tickets issued erroneously by under-pressure parking wardens. When drivers appeal, on average 50 percent have the ticket waived, but not everyone has the time or know-how to take their case to court. With Fixed, those with a ticket simply take a snap of the citation, upload it through the app, alongside details of why they think the ticket was wrongly issued — for example ‘meter broken’ or ‘signs unclear’. The app then automatically calculates the chance drivers have of beating their ticket while the team gets to work preparing the case. If they’re successful, users pay 25 percent of their ticket to Fixed. If they’re not, users must pay the fine, but they haven’t lost anything by trying.
Currently available in San Francisco only, could this type of service work in your part of the world?

If anyone wants to do this sort of thing for London, where there are the thick end of 5 million PCN issued every year (well at least until uncle Eric Pickles MP manages to kill off sneaky cctv tickets which will cause issue numbers to fall for a while) Mr Mustard will offer advice (income share acceptable) about how the process works and he can probably row in some other appeal experts as well.

There is a steady increase in people challenging (when you ask the council to cancel) and appealing (the Appeal is when you file a form with PATAS) their PCN but what we need is software to help us which would make us as well equipped as the council are and increase the likelihood of success and minimise the chances of missing a deadline.

Mr Mustard suggests that the appeal app could be called AppApp.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

PayByPhone locations

Mr Mustard asked for these uncontroversial numbers last year but they were asked for during the period when he was annoying the council too much by asking too many questions so they were deemed to be a vexatious question. Now the council have themselves published them and an email from the Barnet Bugle pointing Mr Mustard at them gave him the idea of converting the pdf (a completely useless way of publishing a table) to a spreadsheet, so here it is so that you can play with it (you can download it yourself and use a filter to sort the entries with)

former Parking Meter and relative Cashless Location numbers by MisterMustard

What you can gain from this is the ability to sort the list into different orders and count up payable locations by town centre. Mr Mustard can only find 2 locations where you have to pay in the Leader's ward of Totteridge and the greatest number (about 70) are of course in North Finchley which is treated as a parking piggy bank; one day it will be empty and then the council will be sorry.

What you can also find in this list is loads of secondary locations where payment should not be the order of the day but 4 hour free bays would be better (residents couldn't hog them and they would provide sufficient time for visitors to do most things and for the rest they could perhaps get a visitor voucher). Mr Mustard also wonders about allowing 1 hour free parking in any Residents Bay as for most of the day they are half empty.

Mr Mustard also wonders why we weren't allocated a discrete block of numbers so that when you transpose two digits, or get one of them wrong, you don't find yourself paying for parking in another borough or another country and the money at least ends up at the correct tariff in the correct bank account?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

rather than have Mr Mustard spend hours working out why you can only download as a pdf and not as the original xls document I uploaded, if you want an .xls version, simply email me at mrmustard@zoho.com and you will be sent one.

Worked it out. Go to scribd

scribd link for paybyphone locations xls download

select download and then choose .xls, simples

The Camden High Street cctv midnight parking cowboys

We are lucky in Barnet in that the council never got their act together well enough (or they might have made a policy decision not to do so) to enforce parking restrictions by cctv. They did trial a $camera car last year but didn't find it to be sufficiently profitable so didn't order one. Thus Mr Mustard isn't very experienced at fighting camera issued PCN but he had to have a go as one of his PCN regulars left Barnet for an evening and got snapped. Their car was in the front section of the bay to the left of shot underneath the word "market". It was impossible to tell from photos taken, at midnight at distance, if the driver's side front wheel was perhaps half an inch outside of the different pavoirs which you have to assume is the parking bay. Mr Mustard is of a mind with Eric Pickles MP on this matter and his determination probably showed through in this appeal letter, that or Camden phoned Barnet parking to ask who he was and got told that every single rejected appeal goes to PATAS and Camden decided not to waste £40 in fees as the PCN is now at £nil value on the Camden PCN website.

I represent (redacted) as per the attached authority letter.

I don't usually send copies of parking ticket appeals to Uncle Eric, as he is affectionately known by the Barnet Bloggers of whom I am one (he is of course The Rt. Hon. Eric Pickles MP and I write the Mr Mustard blog) but given that he is proposing to step in and save us all from the scourge of inappropriate cctv parking enforcement, I thought he might like to see this one and I have permission of the car owner to email him but not for any publicity.

Here is what Uncle Eric said recently:

"We want to rein in these over-zealous and unfair rules on parking enforcement, so it focuses on supporting high streets and motorists, not raising money."

This caused some panic, by the looks of it, although they used the word "concern" at London Councils (they wrote on behalf of every London Borough but three don't use cameras for parking contraventions, namely Barnet, Greenwich and Kensington & Chelsea and well done to them) as their Transport & Environment committee wrote to Eric's colleague, the Rt Hon Patrick McLoughlin MP on 20 November 13. In their letter London Councils trot out the usual trite nonsense about cctv being mainly used near schools, bus stops and major junctions.

Let's see where are Camden using it. Oh, in Camden High St, at 1 minute past midnight. No school open then is there? no bus stop and not at a major junction. I've just put the postcode of the Hawley Primary School into the Camden council website to find the nearest cctv camera. It's this very one (21C) in Camden High St. Just down the road there is another one. Neither of them can see the school. Is there a camera that can monitor the school? No.

I tried another Camden School at random. I chose Fitzjohn's Primary School, postcode NW3 6NP and the nearest camera is 600m away from where the school isn't visible.

I tried a third one. The Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children, postcode N1C 4PF, whose children must be particularly at risk of being involved in an accident with a vehicle. Is there a camera monitoring the school? No, the nearest one is 300m away in Crowndale Rd.

What should your camera operator be looking at for at midnight? I would suggest that violent behaviour (probably following alcohol intake) would be a better use of the resource. Your cameras are identified on your website as being for public safety. Issuing a PCN for trivial or non-existent parking contraventions does not fall under that heading.

Well done anyway. You have provided Eric Pickles MP with the perfect evidential riposte to the London Councils' letter.

Anyway, all of the above is comment to which your reply is not required or desired. Now I'll get to the substance of the representations.

Representations.

1. The contravention did not occur.

It is impossible to tell from the still photographs or the video evidence if one or more wheels of the vehicle is on the footway or not. Close to where the vehicle was stationary for a short while, note the headlights are still on, is a time plate

which permits parking overnight between the hours of 6.30pm and 8.30am the next morning. The problem comes in defining what area the parking sign relates to as there are no white lines to indicate the extent to which parking is allowed. Perhaps motorists are expected to guess that the area in smaller pavoirs, in the shape of an elongated trapezoid, is the area in which parking is permitted, but guessing should not be the order of the day on the public highway. Motorists are entitled to be clearly informed as to restrictions. There is no evidence that there is a wheel on the footway, in a part where footway parking is not allowed.

2. Is it carriageway or footway?

If the council are going to claim that the surface in the shape of a trapezoid is the carriageway, then I would argue that given that there is a kerb, that it isn't a carriageway, but in any event, unless the council has some sort of exemption from using the relevant markings from the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002 (please send me a copy if there is such an exemption) there is a failure to properly mark out the parking area.

If the council are going to claim the area of the trapezoid is part of the footway then where are the signs that mark the start and finish of the permitted areas and the white lines to indicate the bay? The footway parking area is not properly signed.

3. Ambiguity

I am a lay person but I believe that ambiguity is normally construed against the causer so Camden Council should not profit from the confusion it has caused at this location and the PCN should be cancelled.

4. Trapezoid parking bay layout not legal?

I have seen only rectangular bays and parallelograms (for parking nose into the kerb at an angle) in the TSRGD 2002. Is this shape of parking bay legally allowed?

5. De minimis

If the council manage to prove where the footway starts and finishes their evidence does not clearly show a wheel on it and even if an adjudicator could work out from the evidence that perhaps the driver side front wheel is outside the trapezoid it can only be for a trivial amount (de minimis) and the law does not concern itself with trifles and so I ask for the PCN to be cancelled on that basis. The London Councils CEO Handbook says at page 54 that no PCN should be issued unless there is clear photographic evidence of an entire wheel outside of the bay.

I look forward to hearing from you that the PCN has been cancelled.

Yours sincerely



Mr Mustard

c.c. The Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP (by email)

(Camden Council would have been sent this letter by email but they don't provide an address to which representations can be made).

Feel free to cut and paste any part of this argument for your PCN appeal at this location or any similar one where the same argument applies.

Mr Mustard thinks it would be hard to find a clearer example than this one, of a council (Camden probably no better or worse than others) using cctv for revenue raising from motorists rather than for crime prevention or detection.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard