Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Haringey Revelaed as Nation's 2nd Harshest Borough for Parking Penalty Appeals
At the end of 2019, the Hey Car car marketplace submitted Freedom of Information requests to every city and borough council in the country to uncover just how inconsistent councils are when it comes to adjudicating on parking appeals.
Whilst in some councils 91% of appeals are successful, in others the picture is very different. Haringey is the nation's second harshest borough, allowing just 9% of appeals.
Data revealed that more than 350,000 parking appeals were submitted nationwide between January 2019 and September 2019 - with one in three (34%) succeeding.
The harshest councils were revealed as:
- Chelmsford (0.1% of appeals won)
- London Haringey (9%)
- London Greenwich, London Merton and London Sutton (12%)
- Leeds (13%)
- And London Waltham Forest (19%)
London motorists face very different outcomes depending on where they are caught parking illegally - with five councils featuring in the harsh list, but in contrast those issued with parking fines in London Lambeth can almost be guaranteed a successful appeal.
The places most likely to accept a parking appeal across the UK were:
- London Lambeth (91%)
- Milton Keynes (90%)
- Portsmouth (69%)
- Wigan (67%)
- Kirklees, Yorkshire and Coventry (both 60%)
The results of this FOI submission come just over a year after Haringey was revealed as the nation's ninth highest (and London's eighth highest) parking fines earner.
What truly rubs salt in the wound with this is that Haringey is also four times harsher than the notoriously tough operators of private car parks, Which? Magazine has just revealed:
A new report from Parking on Private Land Appeals (POPLA) has revealed 40% of parking ticket appeals referred to it between October 2018 – September 2019 resulted in cancelled changes.
Tags for Forum Posts: parking fines
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Those are very strange conclusions. That's rather like rating a police force by the number of arrests it makes rather than by the extent to which thy administer justice fairly. I'm not sure I'd want to live under the system you seem to support.
A parking enforcement system only effective in my books if it's properly targeted. If tickets are unfairly or improperly issued and the Council refuses to withdraw them, it's not effective.
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That's quite an assumption to make and there's zero evidence for it. In the absence of such evidence, we can only assume that Haringey's tickets are issued with average accuracy and fairness.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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Is there any evidence to say that Haringey's tickets are NOT issued with scrupulous accuracy and fairness ? Is there not evidence to say that Haringey's motorists flagrantly flout the regulations with no valid excuse ?
We just don't know.
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Agreed, that is a better analogy. And a conviction rate that is very high would worry me, if not you.
Currently in the UK, there's a conviction rate of 80% in the Crown Courts (and that's at a time when the Crown Prosecution Service passes through only 8% of cases to court). In Russia the conviction rate is above 99%. I'm not sure that's as a result of what you call 'effective enforcement'.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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I had a look at some of the names on the list and the ones in London with lowest levels of successful appeals have staff with body worn cameras. It was hard to find info on the ones with the highest rates of successful appeals except for Lambeth where they don’t wear body cameras. So perhaps there is a correlation between the level of evidence and success in appealing a PCN?
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That might be relevant more moving traffic offences, but I'm pretty sure that all councils now use photographic evidence to support their PCNs.
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Actually I’ve just glanced at the stats from London Council which go back a decade. Not sure where the stats the graph at the top of the page come from but they bear no relation to the ones submitted to London Councils
https://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/services/parking-services/parking...
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The stats in the graph apparently come from responses to FOI requests submitted by Hey Car.
If I'm understanding it correctly, the data you link to shows something different to Hey Car's data.
The HC data relates to appeals made to individual councils - appeals of the first resort, if you like. The LC data seems to show appeals made beyond the individual councils to London Tribunals (formerly PATAS). This is, as I understand it like the Court of Appeal.
The LC data shows that Haringey is in the bottom quartile for the number of its tickets upheld by London Tribunals.
I think my understanding is correct as the page you link to says:
Less than one per cent of these penalties are appealed through the independent Parking and Traffic Appeals Service (PATAS) known as London Tribunals since 2015.
The data seems to concern the 0.61% of all PCNs that appealed against. This matches with the level of appeals made to London Tribunals.
When you appeal to Haringey, you don't lose the 50% discount on the penalty, until 14 days after the appeal result. There's no such protection in making an appeal to the Tribunal. So, if you lose, your penalty in effect doubles, going from £65.00 to £130.00. This puts off many people from luancing a second-stage appeal.
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The research was reported by various national and local newspapers. Here it is on the Hey Car website.
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It’s pretty standard for these commercially sponsored research pieces not to publish the full dataset. So I’m not reading too much into that. Yes, I’d be far happier if it was proper academic research. But, I take it for what it is and see it as indicative, as a signpost. I’m neither minded to embrace it without any scepticism nor to rush to write it off, as some seem eager to do.
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Thanks for that. In that case , as the appeals aren’t decided by Haringey, I can’t see how it’s them being harsh. It could be down to
- the level of evidence to support the PCN at the final stage of appeal is more robust
- the authorities with high levels of appeals being upheld don’t bother contesting the appeal
- the authorities with high levels of appeals being upheld give out loads of dodgy tickets.
So the number may suggest that authorities with low levels of PCNs being successfully appealed give out a greater number of valid PCNs and/or have the evidence to back up the validity of the PCN.
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