5 March (Part 2) - Dishonest, incompetent, vindictive
One of many contacts made through this blog is John Watson who has been tangling with
Bexley council for 35 years. He gets the occasional mention in the local newspapers, he runs
the BCMG website and gets widely criticized by councillors for asking too many probing questions.
Some while ago he told me that he had received a ticket while parked in a
Bexley Pay & Display and he couldn’t see any good reason for it. Then last week
he showed me the correspondence file on the subject; it was more than an inch
thick! Flicking through the papers I noted that the photographs purporting to
show there was no payment ticket on display were a very strange aspect ratio,
unlike any camera I had ever seen. It looked as though they had been specially
trimmed to exclude the car’s windscreen shelf area presumably in an attempt to
pervert the course of justice. One however showed just a blurry glimpse of the displayed ticket.
Yesterday John took his file to The Parking Adjudicator. The Adjudicator was not
a happy man presumably fed up with councils wasting his time and bundled John
out of his room in pretty short time saying ‘They haven’t even managed to
demonstrate that any offence ever took place.’
I don’t know how much the stupidity if not vindictiveness of Tina Brooks the
parking manager has cost Bexley taxpayers but it probably compares unfavourably with
John’s Freedom of Information requests. How is it that a manager can be paid a fat
salary but is so hopelessly incompetent at her job that an adjudicator dismisses her
case file within a minute or two stating that it hasn’t even reached the most
basic requirement, i.e. showing that an offence has been committed?