How these photos helped beat greedy council’s £520 fine for stopping in a bus lane

Our reporter’s battle at the traffic tribunal shows how you could overturn an unfair penalty too . . .

AFTer eight months, countless letters, emails and phone calls — and a trip to a grand building in London where handshakes are deemed inappropriate — we finally had our parking fine overturned.

Like thousands of drivers every year, my partner, Chris, and I made a mistake.

Back in March last year, he pulled in outside our local railway station when picking me up late one evening. It turned out he’d stopped in a bus lane.

The signage was so poor, and the light so dim, that we had no idea.

In fact, the first we knew we’d done anything wrong was when a £130 fine landed on our doormat two weeks later.

It was a silly error, and we were quite prepared to pay the fine.

The problem was that, by the time that bill arrived, he’d picked me up at the same place three more times.

So, altogether, we faced a stonking £520 fine. The letter said if we paid within two weeks, we would get a 50 pc discount.

But £260 is still a hefty sum of money to us. And while we admit we were in the wrong, the punishment just didn’t seem to match the crime.

If we’d known about the first offence, we’d never have committed the others.

Furthermore, we hadn’t caused any harm and no accidents had occurred.

We tried several times to reason with London Borough of Merton Council, which had issued the fines, and all but begged the authority to reduce the penalty to the original £130. each time, it rejected our appeal.

Our protests meant that we missed the deadline for getting a discount and now faced paying the full £520.

Our experience is far from unique. every week, Money Mail hears from readers who have suffered similar frustrations when dealing with their local council about a parking ticket or driving penalty.

After their complaints are fobbed off, many people are then too busy or scared to take it further. They worry the fine will increase, or they’ll have to attend an intimidating court hearing. But this isn’t the case. You can go to an independent adjudicator — and, often, you don’t even have to attend the hearing in person.

here’s what we learned — you never know, it could be worth a go . . .

IF YOU HAVE A CASE, DON’T GIVE UP

GOInG into the final stage of the appeals process, I thought our chances of winning were slim. We had seen CCTV footage that Merton Council had provided and, in each video, you can see our car travel the full length of the bus lane.

We also felt beaten down by six months of rejection letters from Merton Council, which is adamant its signs are perfectly clear and prominent.

In its most recent three-page letter to us, it refuted each of our points so robustly that we wondered if there was even any point in continuing the fight.

It was also clear that our initial argument — that the fine was disproportionate and it was unfair to penalise us multiple times for the same offence — wasn’t garnering any sympathy.

‘The fact you did not notice the signage/road markings on four separate days suggests you may not have been driving with due care and attention,’ the letter read.

All in all, we were on the cusp of giving up.

But this was my first lesson. It would be easier for the council if you didn’t appeal to the independent adjudicator. So it waives a 50 pc discount carrot at the very beginning of the process to put you off.

If you pay within 14 days, you only have to pay £65 (per fine), rather than the full £130, which doesn’t feel quite as crippling.

In response to our first complaint, the council had posted us four identical rejection letters stuffed into one envelope — one for each fine. There were typos and the letters didn’t answer any of the points we’d raised.

If we had given up then and paid, we would still have received the 50 pc discount, as we had challenged the fines within 14 days of receiving them.

But that’s just the first stage of the appeals process. There are two more.

The next is to formally challenge the charge. You are sent a ‘notice to owner’ to arrive in the post, which explains how to do this.

You then have 28 days to explain why you think you shouldn’t have to pay and provide evidence.

From here on, you’re liable for the full fine if you lose.

At this point, the council seemed to take our complaint more seriously and responded with a comprehensive ‘ notice of rejection’ letter.

This left us with the final option of appealing to an independent tribunal, where our case would be assessed by an impartial adjudicator — a lawyer with at least five years’ legal experience. Their decision is final. The key thing to remember is that, at this point, you may as well go all the way. You have nothing to lose, as the fine won’t increase again.

The independent adjudicator does have the power to award costs to the council if it thinks you have behaved unreasonably, but this is very rare.

So, if you believe you have a case, don’t be deterred.

It is also your best chance of having the fine overturned. Until this point, your appeals will have been dealt with by the council itself. This will be the first time you’ve had an impartial audience.

YOU WILL NEED SOLID EVIDENCE

When appealing to the council, we had hoped someone with a bit of sense would agree that the size of the fine was too harsh.

But, if we were going to take our case to an independent adjudicator, we needed to compile a much more reasoned and evidence- based defence. We had mentioned in previous letters to the council that the signs or road markings couldn’t have been clear enough in the dark or we’d have seen them.

It was obvious that there was a bus stop on the road, but not the short bus lane in front of it.

This would form the basis of our argument, so we retraced our steps one evening to check exactly where they were.

On a whim, I took some photographs of what you could see from the car on my smartphone. The pictures weren’t of great quality, but they show that when sitting at the traffic lights opposite the train station, the signs were not really visible to the driver or clear as to where the bus lane actually is.

The second point we planned to make was based on something the council wrote in one of its many rejection letters.

It admitted you are allowed to enter a bus lane in order to pick up or drop off passengers. The council claimed that, in our case, this defence didn’t stand up because we hadn’t exited ‘in the most direct route’ and were seen travelling the full length of the bus lane. But we thought we could argue that it was safer to stay in the same lane, as we were taking the next left just a few metres away.

If you live outside of London, appeals are usually dealt with online or via the telephone by the Traffic Penalty Tribunal. In Scotland, it’s the Parking and Bus Lane Tribunal for Scotland, and you can request either a postal decision or personal hearing.

In the Capital — where we are — they are handled by London Tribunals and, after submitting our evidence by post, we were asked to attend a hearing in person.

We had watched a video on the London Tribunals website about what to expect, so we knew the hearing would be held in an office, rather than a courtroom.

But we still felt as though we were preparing for a trial.

Our appointment was set for 9am on a Saturday in november. A representative from the council would not be attending. It had submitted its evidence in the weeks before and sent us copies in the post. They’d included photogra

aphs of the railway station, which meone had annotated in Biro ointing out the bus lane signs. But they had been taken from e wrong angle. We had pproached the station from a fferent direction, so we wouldn’t ave seen those signs. They were so taken in daylight, whereas we ere travelling at night. We spent the night before the aring rehearsing what we were ing to say and organising the aperwork we’d accumulated over e past eight months into a folder, we wouldn’t have to fumble ound for sheets of paper.

REPARE FOR OUGH SCRUTINY

ppeAls are heard at a grandoking building near Chancery ane in Central london. At the reception desk, we were anded an A4 piece of paper and rected to the waiting area. We read the instructions on the eet: ‘The Adjudicator is like a dge and will manage the hearing. u will not be asked to take an th when giving evidence but you ust tell the truth. If it is later und that you have not done so, u could be prosecuted. The djudicator should be addressed sir or Madam. Handshaking is t appropriate.’ Gulp. As we whispered through our ain points one last time, an mposing man in a suit ushered us into an office with a glass door. With the door ajar, I could hear someone loudly losing their case in another office across the corridor — ‘I am finding against you, I am finding against you,’ their adjudicator was practically shouting.

In our room, a man in a suit was sat behind a smart, wooden desk. He introduced himself as Jack and said that he had read through our appeal.

He was very polite and spoke with great precision as he explained that he couldn’t do anything about the size of our fine, as these were set by central Government. He could only decide if they had been fairly administered.

On the computer in front of him, he pulled up the CCTV footage provided by the council. We watched in silence as our car drove the length of the bus lane.

There was obviously no denying that we committed the offence, and we quickly admitted that the other videos were identical, so we didn’t have to watch them all.

This, he explained, left us with two issues to consider: the signage, and whether we stayed in the bus lane longer than was necessary to pick up passengers.

When he pulled up the council’s professional photographs, we hurriedly passed him printouts of our dark, blurry pictures showing the direction we had travelled.

We also pointed out the markings on the road were confusing.

He shot down my argument that the signs aren’t clear in the dark — apparently, they don’t need to be illuminated in a residential area with a low speed limit. It was agonising to watch him scrutinise first our photographs and then theirs, and then ours again. We held our breath as he debated out loud whether or not he thought we would have been able to see the signs. He did this because the hearing was being recorded. Finally, he said the photos the council had provided did nothing to disprove our claim that we hadn’t seen the signs or that they weren’t clear enough.

so, after 20 very long minutes, it was over. We had won, and the fines were dropped.

And largely because of two photographs we had taken almost as an afterthought.

If there is one thing to be taken away from our experience, it’s to gather as much evidence as you can to support your argument. You have an advantage in that you only have one case to fight. The council has hundreds, and so won’t be able to give it as much time and thought as you can.

Jack said that had our defence been hinging on our second argument — that we had only ventured into the bus lane as long as necessary to pick up a passenger — we would have lost.

It is clear from the CCTV footage that we could have exited the bus lane much earlier.

I couldn’t help but slap Chris’s leg with glee. As we left, we tried to show Jack a newspaper article about how much money the council had made from that bus lane in recent years. He was not impressed. The money goes towards the upkeep of the roads, he said, and if people don’t want to pay the fine, they shouldn’t commit the offence.

It was time to get out before he changed his mind.

Ross Garrod, cabinet member for street cleanliness and parking at Merton Council, says: ‘We take a firm, but fair, approach to enforcing traffic regulations and are completely transparent with motorists on where we will take action against driving that breaches these, as well as parking that clogs up our roads.

‘We maintain that it is clear from the road signs that motorists are not allowed to drive in this particular bus lane at any time of the day.’