Wednesday, October 17, 2007 :
Camden Council
I see that there is another article by David Williams in the Evening Standard about the Boswell Street camera over which I went to war with Camden Council. I too lodged an appeal. The Parking and Traffic Appeals Tribunal eventually ruled in my favour, but only on the grounds that Camden had “lost” the video evidence by the time that the hearing came around and that I had done enough in my submissions to convince the adjudicator that one photograph alone could not be sufficient evidence to substantiate a moving violation of this nature (in the adjudicator’s words, whether or not one has “turned left” is a “question of fact and degree”).
It is interesting that in the case described by latest article, the driver’s defence appears to have been based on producing evidence that lots of other people commit the same violation, so the signs must be unclear (i.e. a mitigating factor), rather than the defence that I attempted to run (i.e. that no violation had occured at all because the sign had been complied with). My (in retrospect probably over–ambitious) argument was:
- in these circumstances, you HAVE turned left (the Penalty Charge Notice offence here is actually “failure to drive in the direction shown by a blue sign”) provided that you don’t turn right (the identical type of blue arrow sign on a mini–roundabout is a good analogy);
- this argument is bolstered by the fact that in performing the allegedly infringing manoeuvre, you have not travelled the wrong way along ANY of the streets designated as one–way by the London Traffic (Prescribed Routes)(Holborn) Regulations 1963, which is the statutory instrument imposing the one–way system that the that the signs on Boswell Street are supposed to be implementing.
Although he found in my favour based upon lack of evidence, the above argument was rejected by the adjudicator (despite 45 minutes of attempting to convince him!) but principled reasons for the rejection were not articulated.
So where does this leave us? The latest article states that Camden has apparently lost 20 of these cases at appeal, but won 91. Because decisions of the PTAT do not set precedent, Camden will no doubt leave everything as it is, continue to send out hundreds of tickets, of which a small fraction will appeal, of which about fifth or so will win (good preparation and a coherent argument of whatever nature probably being the determining factor).
Therefore, this remains a fantastic gravy–train for Camden until someone takes it to the High Court, which does set precedent, and demonstrates that Camden is wrong — either on the basis that the existing signs are unclear and unfair, or (less likely) that there is no offence being committed here at all. If only 20% of appeals to the PTAT succeed at the moment, and hundreds of tickets are issued a month, I would be led cynically to suggest that Camden is likely to go out of its way to avoid a case on this camera ever getting that far…
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