Time to spread the word ....

SodG24

Article in todays Sun :

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/4415251/1570000-drivers-received-125-parking-tickets-in-the-past-year.html

A shame they called them fines but at least there's the opportunity to comment ( as I have done ). Let's flood it with IGNORE advice :T

HO87

My goodness. It must be a slow week. Apart from the figures - which have been around for a bit anyway the rest of the article is yet another rehash - there isn't a shred of new information in it, but it is nevertheless an opportunity to spread the word. The purported quote from Norman Baker is the line he has been spouting consistently for the last year and moves the issue not one jot further.

However, does Mr Baker realise how responsible his much vaunted accredited trade body, the BPA (you know, the tool he hopes to assuage the public's fears over DVLA data access with) actually is? In fact, so responsible that the figures it provided to the DVLA (as part of the legislative impact assessment pre-Protection of Freedoms Act resulted in the acceptance of s.4, Schedule 4) of PPC cases pursued through the civil courts were so massively awry that one can only conclude that they simply guessed them or perhaps just took at face value the figures its members gave them. I mean, how on earth can you otherwise explain the numbers the BPA gave the DVLA, that a minimum of 36,000 cases* were taken to court annually with the reality - that just 845 sets of court claims were issued and only 49 actually ended up being heard by a judge?

The discrepancy between these figures and the truth might be described as being staggeringly and embarrassingly large. One wonders why? It couldn't possibly have been anything to do with securing the registered keepers liability clause?

* - I'm being charitable and using the lower figure because the actual numbers the BPA slipped to the DVLA was "between" 36,000 and 90,000.

Given how easy it was to obtain these figures (just an FOI application) one wonders why the DVLA bothered to ask the BPA rather than get the figures from an independent and unbiased source in the shape of the Ministry of Justice?