17 January - It’s all about the money
Rather
late in the day @tonyofsidcup has found his photo of the
motorbike which Bexley
Council refused to prosecute despite it being an obvious hazard to anyone coming
around the corner with their head in a phone or with a white stick. (The lighter
coloured paving is clearly part of the highway despite it being private land.)
My guess is that CEO’s in Bexley are not allowed to exercise discretion as permitted by
established case law but are under instructions not to touch vehicles parked on
private ground with the proverbial barge pole.
You can be pretty sure that every PCN would be challenged on those grounds and
would end up costing the Council money in Adjudicator fees.
There is no compulsion on a Council to pursue parking offences; Bexley told me
that they do not pursue the 50 centimetre rule because it causes too many
arguments and it seems more than likely that they do the same with private land
issues. I suspect that Deputy Director Kim Durrani is being economical with the truth when
he says he is concerned about imposing unnecessary financial burdens on riders
and drivers for trivial reasons. Surely everyone will see that for the BS it is.
Since when has any Council been concerned about imposing financial burdens?
I don’t know why he can’t come out with the likely truth; that there is no money in
issuing PCNs on private land which are almost 100% certain to be challenged, but the truth as I rediscovered in
the case of his
fellow Director Kevin Taylor is not something that comes easily to senior
managers in Bexley. BiB has become a 15 year catalogue of such dishonesty.
In an attempt to get nearer to the truth I have suggested to @tony that he submits an FOI
asking how many PCNs have been issued for private land parking in 2024 and how many were challenged.
Not issuing such tickets is not in my view a completely unreasonable policy but a policy of rarely if ever telling the
whole truth is.