Newham Council are Cheats - #47

 

A thorough examination of the evidence by the Adjudicator but Newham Council was all at sea from the start. Every time an on street PCN is issued there should be a number of photographs which show the car registration and the car's position within a bay, the sign which applies and the car with the sign in context. The sign photo within the relevant bay doesn't exist in this case because the sign doesn't exist as the motorist affirmed.

Bog standard cheating by bog awful Newham Council.

The end. 

Newham Council are Cheats - #46

 

This is penalty charge notice law 101, liability can be transferred to the hirer by a bona fide hire company, not to the driver. It was either incompetent or cheating to chase Mr Ahmad and someone at Newham should have noticed they were in the wrong before there had to be an Appeal hearing.

Documents sent by some other councils tell the recipient that the person named is liable and not to pass the document to the driver of the day.

The end. 

You need to think when you drive - be rational

 

When the J Sainsbury supermarket came to North Finchley many moons ago there was a concern about the number of cars which would drive along Ravensdale Avenue, a fine residential road. Therefore, the road sytem was engineered to force traffic to enter and leave the supermarket car park via the High Road. 

Some people think they can drive up the wrong side of the road and they rightly receive their comeuppance (Mr Mustard does not condone dangerous driving).

 

Don't make dangerous manoeuvres.

The end. 

Newham Council are Cheats - #45

 

Mr Mustard helps a man who works in Newham and merrily parks in bays with defaced or non-existent signage as there is no legal requirement on him to park his car in a bay with a sign. Bays can be painted and not have a sign in order to control where vehicles park, what Mr Mustard calls a 'free bay'. How are you to know if a bay is a free bay or a controlled one? by the installation of a sign.

Vandalism of this nature may well cost council tax payers a lot of money in fixing them and in PCNs being unlawful if issued but the solution is not to issue PCNs with no legal basis, as Newham Council frequently do.

Mr Mustard has now beefed up his representations to Newham and they tell the council directly that they are breaking the law and it tries to head off the response they might otherwise send which include irrelevances. He also warns them about possible cost consequences should they reject. Sometimes it works.

In the absence of signage the council are acting unlawfully by issuing a PCN on an unsigned bay.

The previous issue of a warning notice to the vehicle (not necessarily to the same driver) does not substitute for legally required signage unless the council can tell me what law over-rides the above one.

The presence or otherwise of CPZ entry signs is a red herring. The sole purpose of those signs is to avoid having to locally sign single yellow lines. They are of no relevance or application to a signed bay. A cpz could easily contain 100 bays all of which could have a different restriction e.g. doctors bay, motorcycle bay, pay bay, residents bay, diplomatic bay etc and all have differently restricted times and/or days. 

It is vexatious behaviour by the council to issue a PCN given the lack of bay signage. Should the council reject this representation and thus necessitate an Appeal to the independent adjudicator I put the council on notice that an application for costs will be made should the Appeal be allowed.

On this occasion it worked:

The important information which could not be retrieved was a photograph of the sign because there simply wasn't one.

It does not explain why the motorist's own informal challenge was rejected, a fact which reinforces a widely held belief that councils reject the first representation because many motorists worry about the discount and so cough up after the first rejection even when innocent. The public also make the mistake of believing that everything a council writes will be unbiased and correct. They are in it for the money.

It was cheating to reject a good challenge and to have issued a PCN in the first place.

The end.

Redbridge Council try it on

 

The above still image from the council cctv is where the vehicle stopped, the car with the brake lights on. That was enough to get Redbridge Council excited, £160 more in the pot they thought, Mr Mustard didn't think so as there was pots of space to move forward. The PCN may have been issued by computer without a person watching the cctv or giving it much thought if they did.

Rolling back a few seconds, this was the situation on entry.

Mr Mustard made the representations against the PCN, a PCN that should not have existed.

oops, chopped the word 'spent' off the end whilst removing the client's name.

Redbridge Council put the system into reverse pretty quickly and cancelled. They could have written a more gracious and explanatory acceptance and naturally they ignored the hard part, about discipline and retraining.

Problems with some of these cases are that cars are leased and the lease company pays up and recharges the client together with an administration fee without considering if the alleged contravention is made out.

Don't stand for nonsense, give councils both (written) barrels.

The end.

Newham Council - in another world - one you don't want to be in.

 

Mr Goodson (not his real name) received a PCN and thought that it would be quickly cancelled so he made his own representations. He was wrong and so Mr Mustard took over at the Notice to Owner stage. Mr Mustard re-used his grounds as well as adding his own.

1    The PCN was for the wrong contravention. Newham Council did not create a restricted street, they suspended the use of a bay. Councils often get this wrong.

2    The Notice to Owner did not contain a postal address to which to write so was non-complaint 

3    The informal challenge made by Mr Goodson was as follows:

On Sunday 13 April 2025, at 3.25 pm, I had to urgently take my 77-year-old father to the hospital following a sudden episode of rectal bleeding. He suffers from a neurological condition resembling dementia, making it impossible for him to manage hospital interactions independently. I am his primary carer and was the only person available to accompany and remain with him.

Due to this emergency, I was not able to return home before the bay suspension came into effect. At the time of leaving, there was no plan to stay overnight and the decision to stay overnight was only taken due to medical necessity and hospital advice.

The car was parked lawfully in a permit holder space on 13 April. The suspension began on 14 April. When the emergency occurred, I had no reasonable opportunity to relocate the vehicle, and no one else was available at the household to move it.

Please exercise your discretion. A hospital document is attached.

Please cancel the PCN for any of the three reasons advanced above.

Now Mr Mustard rather thought that any reasonable human being would cancel the PCN due to the medical reason being an unavoidable emergency but he was wrong. 

The Notice of Rejection contained the following:

Mr Mustard was outraged by the response but getting mad doesn't help. He had already lined up his arguments to pick apart the obvious flaws in the council's logic (or failure to understand reality) but decided to keep his powder dry and obliterate Newham Council once they had produced the evidence pack and the full glory of their unreasonable position was there to shoot at, so the Grounds of Appeal were short, but carefully targeted:

The tribunal appeal had been made on 1 August 2025 and because of a temporary adjudicator shortage was listed for hearing on 12 November. On 7 November Newham Council suddenly decided they didn't want to fight Mr Mustard at the tribunal and filed a 'Do Not Contest' form and cancelled the PCN because:

Therefore there was no traffic management order when Newham Council rejected the informal challenge. 

There was also no traffic management order when they rejected the formal representations made by Mr Mustard. 

This probably does count as a PCN which Mr Mustard could have written up in the Newham Council are Cheats series but it is in a special category all of its own.

Councils don't think of PCNs as having been issued to a human being, they are just a number PN12345678 etc, just a job to be done and when this one is finished there will be another, another and another.

Mr Mustard has to spend some of his time dealing with the physchological fallout reassuring a motorist that everything will turn out all right (and Mr Mustard is fortunately right 85% of the time).

Mr Mustard was confident, provided he didn't get a green adjudicator who might not yet fully grasp the law, that he would win the day on his wrong contravention argument alone. However, Mr Mustard is the veteran of 2,000 PCN fight in the last 7 years so has all his ducks in a row but the motorist may only have had one or two in that time so doesn't know how strong his case is and motorists are inclined to think that councils must be honest, they may be in other areas but often not in PCNs.

Here is a short exchange of emails:

Motorists should not be put under this much strain by councils who reject what turn out to be perfect challenges. The trouble is there isn't a body charged with oversight of their day to day actions. It is assumed that a council will act fairly as Lord Mustill stated in a House of Lords decision:

Where an Act of Parliament confers an administrative power there is a presumption that it will be exercised in a manner which is fair in all the circumstances.

It is high time a supervisory body was formed to make sure this is the case.

The end. 

Newham Council are Cheats - #44

 

It is evident from google street view that this is a location where signs get damaged and by the evidence of this motorist removed altogther.

Fairly rourtine cheating by Newham Council. There was not a sign in the bay where the car was parked so the 'traffic warden' (CEO / officer) took a photograph of a sign in a different bay, one which unless you are informed by signage as to the rules may well have different ones.

Newham Council must know by now, this being one of dozens of cases Mr Mustard has written about that cpz signage does not set the restrictions for parking bays but only for unsigned yellow lines.

They removed the car to the pound so the traffic warden cheated, the back office cheated in rejecting perfect representations and in opposing the Appeal to the independent adjudicator who wasn't having any of it.

The end but not of cheating at Newham Council.