24 March (Part 1) - Courting trouble
Few will doubt that Bexley council’s parking services regard themselves as above the law, they admitted to
the retired policeman
that they don’t bother with such trifles as the first stage appeal and not so long ago the
Parking Adjudicator took them to task for only allowing 13 days for that appeal instead
of the statutory 14. When they are forced to consider an appeal they are
frequently unreasonable and totally lacking in common sense.
If it were not for readers I would not know that phone parking can involve
phonetics, speaking your registration number into a voice recognition computer
while standing by a busy road; a recipe for a goodly number of mistakes I would
have thought. A Bonkers reader tells me he has fallen foul of exactly that. His
registration number includes three Ls and one was missed by the machine. It took
his money without checking that the given number does not exist and when he
returned to his car it was adorned with a PCN.
Anyone with a brain would recognise what had happened and waived the fee but
brains are in extraordinarily short supply at Parking Services so now the case has
gone to court. Just how much of our money are these useless bureaucrats prepared to waste? I
am reminded of the comment in the News Shopper some four or five years ago.
Bexley council has been taken over by a mob of nasty, evil people who seem to
thrive on other people’s pain and hurt.
On
11th February a blog drew attention to a BBC report to the effect that the signs
Bexley tapes to lamp post when it suspends parking bays do not comply with the
regulations. They are not of an approved type and Bexley has not sought
permission to vary them. At
the following Public Realm meeting cabinet member
Gareth Bacon told councillor Malik that that didn’t matter, he claimed a court
had confirmed it. (N.B. This fact was not reported in the blog.)
Since then, John Watson of the Bexley Council Monitoring Group has received
FOI confirmation from the Department of Transport that Bexley has no dispensation to
use non-standard signs. The Parking Adjudicator has not
been supporting councillor Bacon’s assertion and the Barnet bloggers have been
covering this same issue. One has
reproduced a couple of very recent PATAS judgments.
According to PATAS their reference case covering non compliant temporary signage is Campbell v Camden.
Case reference 2090523567. (You may have to go to their search page and
input the number directly as the PATAS site is notoriously unresponsive to
direct page accesses.)
I think the key phrase may be: “The statutory instrument is
the TSRGD. The upshot is that the Council is required to prove the presence not
of any sign, however clear, but a sign that is either specified in the TSRGD or
authorised by the Secretary of State.”
PATAS is still inclined to follow this ruling and the Dept. of Transport confirms that Bexley’s
signs are unauthorised. Thankfully PATAS is not yet subservient to councillor Gareth
Bacon. It makes you wonder how he justifies
Mike Frizoni’s massive bonus.