As a result sustained campaigning by this website and the local press, Ealing Council has announced that it will be refunding some yellow box junction tickets that were incurred since 20^th June 2008.

The significance of this date is that it is when Shaid Iqbal, Head of Highway Management and Ian Ransom of the Mouchel Group were informed in writing by the Department for Transport that they were not prepared to authorise the yellow box junctions that did not conform to the legislation, namely the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002.

The non-compliant locations are:

• Avenue Road & High Street
• Lower Boston Road & Uxbridge Road
• South Road & Hamilton Road
• South Road & Cambridge Road
• South Road & St Joseph’s Drive
• Broadway & The Mall

And there was some doubt over Uxbridge Road & Mansell Road

So, June 20^th is the date on which it can be proved beyond doubt that the members of Ealing Council knew they were operating outside the law and issuing Penalty Charge Notices fraudulently.

Prior to that date, in 2007, the Adjudicators at PATAS had been telling them that the yellow boxes were unlawful, and there is evidence to suggest the Department for Transport had advised Mouchel employees verbally that the above locations were considered unlawful as far back as February 2008.

But it really does not stop there. It is an established principle of British law that liability for any error does not start from the time that you discovered you were operating in error, but from the time that you started operating in error. If they found out they were issuing unlawful tickets on the 20^th of June, then by definition they were issuing unlawful tickets on 19^th June, and on the 18^th June, and so on.

In other words the fraud has been perpetuated from day one, since Ealing started enforcing these box junctions back in 2004. They must refund all the money collected at these locations, not just since June 2008. Until they do, the Council will have ‘dirty money’ on its balance sheet.

It’s time for a concerted effort. If you have a PCN from Ealing Council that was issued before 20^th June and you still have the paperwork then we would like to hear from you.

Send an e-mail to the address below with your PCN number, date of issue and the yellow box junction location, which must be one of those listed above to ealing@motoristslegalchallenge.co.uk.

The is ought to be a resigning matter, but no doubt as usual the guilty will survive and the innocent will suffer as a consequence.

If you have a case before PATAS for any of these locations then you must ask for costs citing London United Busways -v- Ealing. If you have received a decision in the last 14 days there is still time to get a claim in. You cannot claim lots, and you cannot claim for being inconvenienced. Usually you can claim back travel expenses, postage and stationary. OK, it may not seem a lot, but a large quantity of small claims will soon add up. Ealing will also bear the stigma of being one of the very few councils stupid enough to have upset the Parking and Traffic Appeals Service so much that they have seen fit to award costs – something that very rarely happens.

This is not the end of the story by any means. Watch this space…

Neil Herron outside the Royal Courts of Justice

Last Thursday 25th September the parking campaigner Neil Herron made an application to the High Court for permission to seek leave for Judicial Review.

This Judicial Review comes about as a result of 55 parking tickets that Neil took to appeal against Sunderland Council. Despite overwhelming evidence of non-compliant lines, signs and parking bays the appeals were refused. The Council won.

If the Judicial Review is successful it will -

1. Invalidate the vast majority of Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs) in the country;

2. Force Councils to ensure that all signs and road markings comply with the law before they can start enforcement; and

3. Demonstrate that the parking adjudication services are not independent of the Councils, as they claim.

This is the first time that anyone has mounted a legal challenge against what we all know to be the “tax farming” activities of the Local Councils. Neil’s success will result in the refund of millions of tickets.

Motorists are the most persecuted members of society. High fuel prices and tax, increases in the road fund license, congestion charges, road pricing, speed cameras, moving traffic violations and parking wardens.

I, for one have had enough of being ripped off. Anything we can do to stand up to the bullies and inject some common sense and fairness into the proceedings has my full support.

For anyone who has been helped or entertained by this website over the past two years – and there are many of you out there – head over to Neil’s website and make a donation. We must stand united in support of Neil. What he is doing, at great personal risk to himself, is for the benefit of every single motorist.

The website is called The Motorists Legal Challenge Fund and you will find full details of how to make a donation.

This is the beginning of the end for those Local Authorities who have been operating outside the law.

Make it Happen. Please Give Generously.

There is an aspect to the whole story which has not yet been covered in the media.

That is the pernicious role of the private enforcement contractors engaged by many Councils to run their extortion businesses, for example NCP Services (owned by aggressive private equity investor 3i).

As you will know, Waltham Forest has agreed to refund every penalty illegally levied for an unlawful yellow box in Leytonstone. However, they have also now revealed that the council tax payers of the borough will not be getting a refund from NCP Services.

The contractor will get to keep the fee it received for each paid PCN. It also won’t have to pay anything towards the administration costs of re-contacting all those who were fined.

Waltham Forest is currently refusing to reveal how much is paid to NCP Services for each PCN. They say that disclosing the information might “weaken their [NCP's]competitive advantage”. Never mind accountability for wasting public funds. We wouldn’t want a £140 million pound private company to suffer a weakened competitive advantage, would we?

Let’s postulate that NCP gets 20 quid for each paid PCN. Let’s say that there are 4000 paid PCNs to refund for this box. That’s an ADDITIONAL £80,000 squandered for no good reason. A very expensive mistake. That’s ONE box. Big problem.

You can see why councils aren’t so keen to give refunds, and why Nick Lester repeatedly trots out the argument that refunds are not a good use of public money. No, they are not. That is exactly the point. But the nuance is that the fines themselves are not and never were public money, since that is money to which the council has no claim. The fees paid to NCP and others ARE public money, and that money is being irresponsibly squandered because of the nature of the commercial contracts into which councils have entered. That is maladministration, however you look at it.

It isn’t the fault of innocent motorists. It isn’t the fault of NCP Services either. You can’t blame a private company for aggressively pursuing profit. But the aggressive pursuit of profit has no place in law enforcement. It actively encourages non-compliance with unprofitable laws and completely destroys accountability.

Parking/traffic enforcement may seem like a parochial issue, but in fact these are important questions of democracy and the rule of law.

You have to believe me if I say that I am not deliberately conducting a campaign against Ealing Council. It’s just that the examples of their apparent incompetence are legion. The tragic consequence of this pointless bureaucratic incompetence is that it can, at best, waste our time, and at worst, it can seriously screw up peoples’ lives.

Take, for example the case of Louise who contacted this site some months ago when she received a visit from bailiffs demanding excessive amounts of money for two Ealing PCNs that she never received. The fact that she had moved home obviously figured in the equation.

Fortunately the system does have safeguards, and she filled an out of time Statutory Declaration in order to halt the bailiff enforcement action. In their wisdom, Ealing Council was unwilling to accept this Statutory Declaration, so (thankfully another safeguard) the matter had to be put before a County Court Judge to resolve the dispute.

Louise and I turned up at Brentford County Court last Wednesday, at the appointed hour, only to discover that her case was not listed. We made enquiries and established that Ealing had withdrawn their objection to the Statutory Declaration around two weeks previously. So why had they backed down, and why had no one informed Louise?

Having been at her new address for over a year now, Louise had stopped having her mail redirected. However, when she made enquiries, it appears that Ealing sent the letter of cancellation to her old address. Doh!

Each of the documents from the Northampton Traffic Enforcement Centre is clearly rubber stamped with a note which says : “ATTENTION LOCAL AUTHORITY, Please note Respondent change of address“.

So which bit of “change of address” don’t you understand Ealing? You are a Local Authority, aren’t you?

The letter apparently says that they are going to reset the PCNs and presumably re-issue them. So where will they send these re-issued PCNs? To her old address? In which case she won’t get them (again) and in six months time the bailiffs will be calling (again) and she will be taking a trip to Brentford County Court (again)…

In the words of the ‘Groundhog Day’ movie script:

Phil: Do you know what today is?

Rita: No, what?

Phil: Today is tomorrow. It happened.

[28th Sept 2008 - The appeal documents have been updated to reflect recent wins at PATAS]

Please note that the appeal procedure is in two stages:

1. After you receive the PCN you fill in the reverse side and send it back (but remember to keep a copy). Tick the box that says something like “The contravention did not occur.” Then write the reasons as “This box junction is not as prescribed by the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002. Unless it has been authorised by the Secretary of State for Transport it is unenforceable.“

2. Ealing will most likely send you a Notice of Rejection stating lots of reasons why they think they are in the right. Ignore it – it is rubbish. Fill in the PATAS form as follows:

Boxes 1 & 2 : With your personal details.

Box 3 : It’s up to you whether you opt for a postal or personal hearing. A personal hearing shows you are serious.

Box 4 : Tick “The contravention alleged by the Authority on the PCN did not occur”.

Box 5 : Write “See attached documents”

Download one of the following MS Word documents and fill in your details on the first page. Print it off and send it with the appeal form to PATAS.

PATAS appeal for South Road/St Joseph’s Drive

PATAS appeal for South Road and Cambridge Road

PATAS appeal for High Street/Avenue Road

Any queries, please leave a message below.

Update 28th Sept 2008

These junctions are still unlawful. Note that it does not matter whether your vehicle was partly or wholly in the box you can still appeal. These boxes have no legal status. They are simply yellow graffiti on the public highway.

Apologies for the lack of posts to this blog over the last couple of months but my attention has been focussed elsewhere. The number of people seeking help rises by the week, and I am sorry if you have left a message and I have not responded. This issue is being addressed.

My colleagues and I have been occupied with making sure the Media are “on message” over the last few months. Their interest was awakened by the changeover in parking legislation from the Road Traffic Act 1991 to the Traffic Management Act 2004.

Back in January we had the BBC documentary “Road Rage” followed by the ITV offering “Parking Wars” in March.

More recently I was contacted by BBC Radio 4′s iPM team who wanted to do a piece on CCTV enforcement. I was able to take one of their reporters along to a meeting of the London Motorists’ Action Group to meet with (among others) Lord Lucas and Neil Herron. This went out on May 17^th.

I’m guessing that this must have sown the germ of an idea within the BBC News department, because shortly afterwards I was contacted by a researcher from the ‘Breakfast’ show who said that they wanted to do a piece on unlawful enforcement by Local Councils. I supplied her with lots of material, and I ended up dealing with queries at hourly intervals for most of yesterday.

The result was staggering. The message came across loud and clear in this morning’s programme: If councils want motorists to obey the law, they should themselves abide by the law. The story is summarised in this article Council motoring fines ‘illegal’ here on the BBC News website. As far as I know it was also picked up by Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live. When I switched on the radio in my car this evening it was the topic for the ‘Drivetime with Eddie and Kath’ phone-in programme on BBC Radio London.

That wasn’t the end of the story. Ealing Council (who else) rang up the Beeb to find out where they had got their figures from for the South Road & St Joseph’s Drive box junction. (An FOI request of course.)They also did not seem to know that there had been two rulings against this junction at PATAS (doh!). And how could the BBC possibly know that this junction had not received authorisation from the DfT? (Cos we talk to the DfT about these matters, which is more than Ealing does.)

So I was fielding more phone calls from the researcher.

But the best bit of news was that this item generated a TON of e-mail from viewers. It obviously touched a nerve with motorists and gave councils a real fright.

I leave you with this thought. The chances are that most PCNs are issued unlawfully. Do not assume that the PCN is correct – question it. You have been given a right of appeal – use it.

If everyone appealed, the system would grind to a halt. Wouldn’t that be nice…

At base level, this just comes down to holistic asset time-phases. You really can’t really fail when you facilitate third-generation paradigm shifts. But, you might want to consider transitioning relational collaborative infrastructures as well.

We all know that the Notices of Rejection are produced by stitching together stock paragraphs on a word processor. Since some of Ealing Council’s yellow box junctions have been ruled unenforceable at PATAS they have had to come up with some new esoteric wording to justify their continued highway robbery activities.

It’s all done by scaling standardized dynamic content in order to mesh extensible normalized resources, you understand.

Joking aside, this latest effort from Ealing Council is very telling. It demonstrates that the Parking Department is enforcing laws that are simply not understood by the people working there. Whoever approved this letter and let it out into the public domain is in need of some serious retraining.

Possible candidates are Philip Burns, Head of Parking or John Ioannou, Technical Services & CCTV Manager.

Let’s look at the best bits:

Your vehicle was observed entering and stopping in a yellow box junction.

So what? You can drive into the middle of a box junction and stay there all day so long as there are no other stationary vehicles around that prevent you from moving.

The regulations state that you must not enter a yellow box junction until your exit is clear.

No they don’t. This is the advice given in rule 174 of the Highway Code. This is not the same as the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions which says “no person shall cause a vehicle to enter the box junction so that the vehicle has to stop within the box junction due to the presence of stationary vehicles”. I can’t see the words “exit” and “clear” anywhere there.

Those road markings are in section 150 of the Highway Code and you must comply with them.

Please get up to date. It was rule 150 in the previous edition of the Highway Code. It was updated on 28^th September 2007; five months ago. The road markings are actually prescribed in Diagrams 1043 and 1044 of Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2003.

Now comes the piece de resistance. The appellant had obviously said that the box junction needed to be authorised by the Department for Transport.

In response to your point in your correspondence, the authority given by the Secretary of Transport is given within the London Local Authority and Transport far London Act 2003.

The Secretary of Transport? Ruth Kelly won’t thank you for that. Perhaps that should be Secretary of State for Transport. And while we’re at it that should be Local Authorities, not Local Authority. If you are going to cite legislation then get it right.

The SoS for Transport does not confer any authority to use unlawful road signs in this Act. In fact, any authority given to legally extort money from the general population comes directly from Parliament.

In this Act it outlines that Traffic Management Orders are in place to allow Council Boroughs to enforce particular areas within their jurisdiction.

What are they talking about? A Traffic Management Order is not required for a box junction. Sure you can enforce loads of things as a result of this Act including “Failure to comply with notice requiring works to prevent soil or refuse escaping onto street or into sewer”. Wow!

Within this Act it states; “All road markings placed on a highway or road to which the public have access must be either prescribed by regulations or authorised by the Secretary of State for Transport…”

They just don’t geddit do they? What this says is that if your road markings do not comply they are unenforceable. A perfect own goal if ever I saw one.

This was obviously written by a Technical Enablement Leader who was trying to transition semantic standardized precision in order to obfuscate the reality of the incomprehension.

If you ever get one of these Notices of Rejection from Ealing you can be assured that it is a complete load of rubbish.

This article was written with the assistance of the Gobbledygook Generator on the Plain English Campaign website. It must be similar to the one used by members of the Ealing Council Parking Department.

Hillingdon Council has a problem with moving traffic enforcement. The PATAS statistics for July – September 2007 shows that, of the nine cases scheduled to be heard during that period, Hillingdon withdrew from every single one. Yes, that’s right; they failed to contest all the appeals to PATAS.

If my recent experience is anything to go by, then they are continuing to act in the same vein. I have helped a number of people with Hillingdon PCNs. One was cancelled after making representation. The remainder were taken to appeal and Hillingdon withdrew a few days before the hearing.

As of now, I have one more case scheduled for March 11^th. I’m taking bets on whether this one will be cancelled.

How can they get away with this? As I have said before; every council must be prepared to stand up and justify every single PCN issued when challenged.

Right now, the message being put out by Hillingdon is that if you challenge the PCN it is certain that it will be cancelled. What are you waiting for people? Take advantage of this special offer while it lasts.

So why are they so useless at enforcing their PCNs? A quick look at the parking section of the Council’s website gives a few clues. For a start they are crass enough to use the image shown here. Oh, and they believe that they can levy parking fines on motorists. I’m sorry people, but you have to go before a court and be found guilty before you can levy a fine.

These are Civil Penalties imposed by the State on its unwilling Subjects.

Well, for the time being these are not being imposed in Hillingdon.

Following a couple of recent cases at PATAS, this junction has been ruled as unenforceable, so that should put a serious dent in their finances.

To cut a long story short, the road markings do not conform to Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002. That being the case, they have the legal status of graffiti. This yellow box serves absolutely no purpose other than to raise revenue.

The two cases that have been decided so far are Nelson –v- Transport for London (2070524104) and Donley –v- Transport for London (207055326A). There are more in the pipeline. The good thing about these cases is that I was only involved in the latter. If two people put forward the same argument to two different Adjudicators, and they reach the same verdict, then it presents a very strong persuasive argument the next time around.

As with all non-compliant boxes you make representation against the PCN by ticking the box that says something like “The contravention did not occur.”

You then write the reasons as “This box junction is not as prescribed by the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002. Unless it has been authorised by the Secretary of State for Transport it is unenforceable. “

If/when the representations are rejected come back and leave a message. I will supply the necessary arguments for an appeal to PATAS.