Council caught out for issuing illegal parking fines - again

And again, there are fears that hundreds of similarly invalid Penalty Charge Notices have been paid by unsuspecting residents.
The ruling is the latest in a series of blows to the credibility of the council’s car park charging policy.
In this instance an adjudicator at the national Parking Penalty Tribunal ruled that the council wrongly penalised a Newbury man whose residents’ permit had expired.
For, instead of correctly fining him £50 for not renewing it, the council tried to impose the maximum £70 charge for failing to display a permit - when its own photographic evidence showed that he had.
The adjudicator upheld the appeal and threw the charge out.
The victim - a Buckingham Road resident who asked not to be named - said: “The council sends out no expiry reminders, so they can catch lots of people out. So at least 40 per cent of residents in my road alone got penalty notices - how many of those were illegal like mine? It could be hundreds across the district.
“It’s either incompetence or greed. I only bought the permit in April and I assumed, because it cost the same as a 12 month permit, that it would run for 12 months. In fact they all expire at the same time, in January, so it would be easy to send out reminders.”
A spokeswoman for the council, Peta Stoddart-Crompton, said reminders were not issued because of the cost and resources that would involve.
In September the council admitted illegally issuing parking tickets in Kings Road, Newbury.
A former traffic warden whistleblower claimed officials had known for years that the signs did not comply with regulations but that motorists had continued to be wrongly targetted.
The council said it could not refund victims because it had no record of payments made.
The same month, a town centre parking policy consultation document appeared to advocate potentially illegal charges.
In it, a council officer agreed with the assertion that implementing on-street parking charges for 16 town centre roads was “a positive way of generating additional revenue.”
Director of national motorists’ organisation the RAC Foundation, Stephen Glaister, said: “The law is explicit – parking charges are about managing congestion, not raising revenue.”
Speaking about the latest case, Ms Stoddart-Crompton pointed out that the adjudicator had referred to the “duty upon permit holders to ensure a valid permit is displayed, when taking advantage of the scheme,” and added: “We have not been made aware of any other individuals who have been wrongly charged the higher amount for not displaying a valid permit, since no previous decision has raised this issue, or suggested the charge was the wrong level.
“The work which would be involved in reviewing every permit holder’s history since 2009 (when the council took over responsibility for on-street parking) and establishing whether they had paid an excess would, in our view, be an unsupportable use of council resources and council tax payer’s money.”