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Should bailiffs be sent in to recover parking fines?
• IS such extreme action as sending in the bailiffs warranted to collect a parking fine (80-hour ordeal of parking fine victim, June 12)? Oriel Hutchinson was put to an enormous amount of trouble and inconvenience to recover her vehicle while her “debt” apparently grew out of all proportion, and she described it as the worst 80 hours of her life.
What would have happened if, instead of being someone intelligent, knowing where to obtain advice and capable of pursuing the matter until she recovered her vehicle, the victim had been less able? He or she might not have had a clue how to go about things.
Such a person might easily have ended up paying an outrageous sum or having the vehicle auctioned, all for a parking fine. Or the person might have been ill or infirm, perhaps with a heart complaint, and, faced with the bailiffs, who knows what tragedy could have resulted?
An expression including the words “sledgehammer” and “nut” springs to mind. More to the point, those authorised to wield draconian powers – and I include instructing bailiffs in that category – should have to face up to the consequences where they have used their powers irresponsibly.
Efforts need to be made to check that the information they are acting on is true, at any point in the process from the initial issue of the penalty. If the only result of an official’s reckless or negligent abuse of power is the payment of compensation (from public funds, of course) this sort of thing will go on and on.
Richard Lewis
Oakley Road, N1
• THE Islington Council spokesman quoted in last week’s article appears not to have read the file on this parking fine matter and gives a wrong and misleading indication of what actually happened.
I swore a statutory declaration stating that “I did not receive a notice to owner” and sent it to the court within 21 days of receiving the statutory declaration form from the council, as specified on the form. As for the “eight months” it remained unpaid, I have a letter dated November 27 last year from the quality and development officer at Islington Council parking services, which states that with regard to this penalty charge notice: “You must either make payment or file a statutory declaration when we send you the nessercery [sic] paperwork.”
The necessary paperwork, the statutory declaration form, was eventually sent to me on or shortly after February 17. Why the council took nearly three months to send the form I do not know.
When a court officer telephoned parking services at the council some time around 3.20pm and left a message on Friday, June 5, the day the bailiffs arrived, no one returned his call. On the Monday, at around 3.30pm, I telephoned the bailiff liaison officer at the council, who had apparently authorised the release of my vehicle, to check that I could still collect my car from the farm in Harlow, Essex, 22 miles away. I was told he had left for the day.
All in all, it was a nightmare for me. I discovered that the council uses bailiff companies to collect extremely large amounts of money and that some of these companies charge for items which are erroneous. This is unfair to Islington residents.
I would like to know if the contract between the council and Newlyn Collections is a “framework contract”. A procurement officer at the council told me that framework contracts are used because they provide “value for money”!
Oriel Hutchinson
Chair of Canonbury ward, Islington Conservatives
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