When London Tribunals recommends that TFL cancel a PCN due to mitigating circumstances, how often are such recommendations accepted and PCNs cancelled?
Request ID: FOI-2518-2223 Date published: 25 January 2023
You asked
In line with the Traffic Management Act 2004, London Tribunals make the following point when detailing the appeal procedure for Penalty Charge Notices:
"It may be that the facts of your case do not amount to a ground of appeal and therefore the Adjudicator cannot allow your appeal, but you think that there are other compelling reasons why you should not have to pay the penalty. If the Adjudicator considers that there are compelling reasons such as mitigating circumstances, the Adjudicator may recommend, but cannot direct, that the Enforcement Authority cancel the Penalty Charge Notice or Notice to Owner. The Enforcement Authority then have 35 days to decide whether or not to accept that recommendation. If they do not accept it the Enforcement Authority must give you reasons and you will then have 28 days to pay the penalty charge."
In this scenario TFL would be The Enforcement Authority. Please can you tell me the following:
1) When the Adjudicator recommends that The Enforcement Authority (TFL) cancel a PCN due to mitigating circumstances, how many of these recommendations were made to TFL in the last five years, and what percentage of these were accepted and the PCN cancelled?
2) When the Adjudicator recommends that The Enforcement Authority (TFL) cancel a PCN due to mitigating circumstances, how many of these recommendations were made to TFL in the last year, and what percentage of these were accepted and the PCN cancelled?
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-2518-2223
Thank you for your request which we received on 4 January 2023, asking for information about London Tribunals.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. You specifically asked:
1) When the Adjudicator recommends that The Enforcement Authority (TFL) cancel a PCN due to mitigating circumstances, how many of these recommendations were made to TFL in the last five years, and what percentage of these were accepted and the PCN cancelled?
2) When the Adjudicator recommends that The Enforcement Authority (TFL) cancel a PCN due to mitigating circumstances, how many of these recommendations were made to TFL in the last year, and what percentage of these were accepted and the PCN cancelled?
I can confirm that we hold the information you require. However, to provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.
We have estimated that it would considerably exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request. This is because we would have to go through all London Tribunal refused appeals to manually check the detail. Whilst we do get the occasional ‘recommendations’ from London Tribunals, we do not record them separately but as a refused appeal in the same way as other cases. Therefore the only way to answer your request would be to manually review each individual refused appeal over the last five years, in order to extract any which fall within the scope of your request and then collate them.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. You might consider limiting your request to a narrower period of time, or specific cases.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Eva Hextall FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
