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Shameful attitude
• A MONTH ago, on a Saturday evening, a Bruce Springsteen concert took place at the Emirates Stadium. Islington Council, wishing to keep concert-goers’ cars out of the area, should have posted up a traffic management order imposing parking controls prior to the concert, and this within a statutory period. We are told it forgot to do this, and instead announced that Saturday match controls would operate.
As this was outside the football season, inevitable confusion ensued among drivers, but this was made even worse by the fact that match-day controls were at a completely different time of day to when the concert took place. In spite of this, parking attendants were deployed to issue tickets to anyone parking their car in a wide area of Highbury up to seven hours before the concert.
The unnecessary disruption to shopkeepers’ and other businesses’ trade on a Saturday afternoon was obvious, and the council has since apologised for its mismanagement of this event, saying it will treat any resultant appeals sympathetically.
I would have thought a letter to the owners of each vehicle withdrawing their ticket, and a refund of the fine to anyone who had already paid it, was more appropriate.
But no, we had the usual reply that, unless you write in with a letter of appeal, the penalty charge will have to be paid.
The attitude of “we know a lot of parking tickets are wrongly issued, but if you don’t write in you’ll have to pay the fine” prevails. This is shameful behaviour by the council, and flies in the face of its “common sense to parking” policy. It also makes the constant denial that it issues parking tickets as a means of raising revenue very hard to accept.
DANNY MICHELSON
La Fromagerie
Highbury Park, N5
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