Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Mistaken congestion charge penalty
Back in December we received a penalty charge notice for non payment of the congestion charge saying that our car had been snapped in the Borough Road some days earlier. The driver told me this was impossible as the car had not been south of the Thames that day.
Looking at TFL's online record of evidence showed photos bearing an identifying tag giving the number of a "transportable ULEZ camera". The car looked like ours but the street seemed so unlike the Borough Road that I suspected some kind of mistake had been made.
According to TFL maps, the Borough Road is wide with both parking and cycle lanes on each side. Google street view shows the cycle lanes as green. On this basis, I repudiated the PCN. TFL asked for more evidence, eg had there been other such incidents, had I reported the registration plate as cloned etc. I said there had been no other such occurence and that their photograph was not a sufficient basis for troubling the police or anyone else.
TFL then asked for a sworn affidavit that the car had not been in the congestion charge zone. I replied that I was not willing to go the expense and inconvenience of doing this (during the lockdown when apparently even courts were not insisting on these) but if TFL would produce an affidavit asserting that our car was in the Borough Road, I would certainly respond in kind and also ask the police to investigate the veracity of their statement.
TFL maintained their position without responding to my repeated insistence that their transportable camera had not been where they claimed. This left me the choice of paying up or appealing to the adjudicator. I appealed saying that TFL had obviously mishandled the data and couldn't (or wouldn't) say where their camera had been.
One week before the date fixed for the hearing TFL dropped the case.
What are lessons? One of them is that we should give thanks for the existence of the European Convention of Human Rights which requires that where fines can be imposed by administrative officials there must be a means of appeal to an independent tribunal. We owe the existence of adjudicators to this international treaty provision. It doesn't prevent officials being obstinate or inefficient but it does mean they must be able to explain themselves. Another lesson is the sheer slog of having to deal with such cases probably leads officals to hope that their mistakes will not be challenged. I wonder whether our politicians keep track of how often this kind of thing happens. Backing down at the last moment is, in my view, a form of abuse that should be sanctioned if it becomes a habit.
Sadiq Khan is the ex-officio head of TFL, so he's the man to ask!
Tags for Forum Posts: appeals, congestion charge
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris on
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I seem to recall that an important court case (involving PCN's for parking infringements) determined that the law did not permit Local Authorities to delegate their power to impose penalties and that this forced a huge number of penalty charges to be refunded because they had not been lawfully imposed.
Since then I would guess that all such decisions have been signed of by council employees even where all the admin work might have been done by a contractor.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Dick, perhaps you'd best ask Mr Mustard. (Derek Dishman.)
Personally I'm several years out of date with the law on parking penalties. The basic principal used to be that Parking should not be run as a business to make a profit. And although it could not run at a loss, and if it did make a small surplus this had to be applied to transport related purposes.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanstanton/5347636284/in/album-72157...
However that requirement appears to have become old-fashioned, abolished or ignored with some local Councils deliberately planning and relying on huge surpluses to back-fill budget gaps.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanstanton/413759532/in/pool-751340@...Around 2007 - 2011, I repeatedly raised this whole issue and was unpopular with councillors who appear to believe that legal rules only apply to "the little people". (As U.S. property heiress Leona Helmsley once famously said.)
What we might call "The Helmsley Doctrine" is now the guiding principle in the U.K. (sometimes aka Donchoo-no-hoo-iyam?)
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Permalink Reply by Bob Ruggles on
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When Parking Enforcements and CPZ's come into force. It was Originally a In House Service
Enforcement and appeals
As was part of the team that monitored and dealt with appeals
But in recent years I has been outsourced
Seems returned Letters is also outsourced
Wonder why they need so many buildings and wage bill keep increasing when so many services are being out sourced.
So much about Labour being for Workers and keeping Jobs Local
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