Today’s
Bexleyheath Chronicle reveals that council cabinet members and Moneybags Tuckley
spent £2,585 on a pre-Christmas meeting (junket) for themselves at the Flackley Ash Hotel in Rye.
The News Shopper carries the usual collection of parking stories and Bexley
council continuing with the same old dirty tricks that have been thrown out by
the Parking Adjudicator previously. Yesterday I was with someone who is on first
name terms with the Adjudicator for England (which is not the same as the London
one). From what I was told all the ‘momentary stop’ offences which Bexley is
so keen to capture on video and grab a still from to prove no
movement (clever eh?) are routinely thrown out by the Adjudicator for England.
Rather a long time ago I remember reading in The Shopper the story of a driver who dropped
off an elderly lady outside her own house and was done
for parking across her own dropped kerb. I always thought that was legal
if it was done with permission of the owner of the entrance and I have just got
around to checking that out. It is true. The
Traffic Management Act of 2004
says you can’t generally block pavement crossings but there are exemptions one of
which is “where the vehicle is parked outside residential premises by or with the
consent of the occupier of the premises”. The exemption does not apply to shared driveways.
There has been a small spate of parking complaints sent to to Bonkers recently
and the word used to describe Bexley council and their parking gestapo is
“Crooks” and given
the recent case
where they had cunningly snipped the photo evidence to make their case (slung out by
the adjudicator) one can only agree.