Shambolic council parking fiasco

Sunderland Echo
Letters page
Friday, March 10, 2006

Yet another detractor (Barrack Room Lawyer, Echo Letters, March 2) is desperate to shore up Sunderland Council's crumbling and shambolic parking fiasco and is yet another one hiding behind anonymity.
I don't think the Echo's readers are that easily duped. They can see what the agenda is and will have their own suspicions as to who is behind the rebuttal and disinformation operation.
First of all, the legal views of the Barrack Room Lawyer refers to were not mine but that of the National Parking Adjudication Service in the case of Macarthur v Bury, whereby tickets without date of issue (as well as the date of contravention) were deemed to be prejudicial.
Barrack Room Lawyer states the adjudicator did not conclude such a ticket was void.
If that is the case why did Sunderland City Council's legal team, upon sight of the NPAS decision, advise Parking Services and NCP to change the wording of the tickets immediately?
More importantly, why were the tickets not changed for some five months and why did NCP continue to issue, despite the explicit instruction from the council?
However, there is another adjudication body which handles decriminalised parking offences in London.
The Parking and Traffic Appeals Service (PATAS) has recently adjudicated on the case of Moses v Barnet.
Again, as in the case of Sunderland's tickets up until recently, the tickets in Barnet only stated the date of the infringement, not the date on which the ticket was issued.
The adjudicator, Timothy Thorne, argued that "this was against the law".
So there we have it, Mr Barrack Room Lawyer. An adjudicator, Timothy Thorne, not Neil Herron, has stated that a ticket without a date of issue is against the law.
Dare I rest my case?