Hi all, thanks in advance for anyone taking the time to respond.
I've just moved to a new flat in Lewisham and still sorting out the paperwork to be able to get a Residents' Permits. Instead I've been paying for tonnes of one-day/one-hour Visitor's Permits to park outside my flat when I have the car there. You can buy as many of them as you like, but the website is incredibly awful/buggy and you can't buy them in advance. This means I have to set alarms every hour sometimes for when my permit expires to buy a new one. In this case:
- 10:24am: Visitors Permit Expires. I go to the website to buy a new one, but every time I go to pay, the website freezes. It does this three times in a row, so I think the website is just having a problem, and I'll try again later in 10 minutes.
- 10:26am: CEO spots my car
- 10:33am: PCN issued
That's my mitigation. In terms of technicalities,
this spreadsheet helpfully let me know that Lewisham is one of the councils that don't give you any address to pay the PCN. I thought that should make it an open and shut case given the very clear wording of the
LLATFL Act 2003 (Section 4 (8)(vii)): PCNs must state: "the address to which payment of the penalty charge must be sent". But then I went to have a look at the Adjudicator decisions, and realised what a kangaroo-court the London Tribunals ETA are. I found decisions in that same spreadsheet where the adjudicator ruled against such appeals for some ridiculous reasons.
- 2200462211 : The adjudicator ruled in favour of Lewisham because the PCN contained *A* postal address --- even though that's not an address where you can send payments to. The law very clearly says an address to which payment of the penalty charge must be sent (???)
- 220048338A : The adjudicator ruled in favour of Lewisham, because the Appellant wasn't prejudiced (?), and a telephone number and website is "substantially compliant" with the act (?????)
- 2200527816 : The adjudicator allowed the appeal against Lewisham since they didn't include a postal address.
- 2230309960 : The adjudicator allowed the appeal against Lewisham for the same reason.
- 2200453549 : The adjudicator ruled in favour of Lewisham, because a website counts as an address --- a website address (?? clearly not what the statute intended), and you can apparently send money to a website (?????? As a software engineer, I can confirm that money can not be sent "TO" a website address), and that because of the Covid Pandemic you can not expect people to pay by cash or cheque (no amount of question marks can display the incredulity I feel)
I actually can't believe that these kind of inconsistent decisions can be come up with by adjudicators who are supposed to be Solicitors with 5 years of experience minimum.
I think I stand a good chance at informal representations stage, just with my mitigation, based on the enforcement guidance (
) where they say if someone is a Resident parked outside their own home in a resident's bay, if the renewal was delayed by administrative processes withing Parking Services (is it worth quoting that phrase verbatim when explaining the website freezing, or would that be too on the nose?)
I'm of course going to make representations, but am looking for advice for what I should say/mention in the representations and other tips/advice.
On a maybe unrelated point, when I view the address in Lewisham's Traffic Order View
here, the legend/details all appear to be consistent with what's on the road, but when you click on View Documents, it brings up a Schedule P20 PDF which is a map shifted on the wrong location that doesn't show the right location at all.
Once again, thank you to everyone who takes the time to respond.
