Bill of Rights and cmbc parking tickets.

[JOSH_IOU]

I refer to The Bill of Rights Act 1689, enacted and formally entered into Statute following the Declaration of Rights 1689. And draw your attention to the section that I have highlighted:

"That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void".

This states that a conviction is necessary before a fine or forfeit can be imposed. As you will be aware, the Bill of Rights is a "constitutional statue" and may not be repealed impliedly. As stated in the "Metric Martyrs" Judgment in the Divisional Court (18th February 2002) by Lord Justice Laws and Mr Justice Crane (I will paraphrase relevant sections 62 and 63):

62."We should recognise a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament: as it were 'ordinary' statutes and 'constitutional statutes.' The special status of constitutional statutes follows the special status of constitutional rights. Examples are the ... Bill of Rights 1689 ... 63. Ordinary statutes may be impliedly repealed. Constitutional statutes may not…"

I am not aware that the Act or Acts e.g. Road Traffic Act 1991, Road Traffic Act 1994, London Local Government Act 2000, etc] makes express reference to repealing the Bill of Rights Act 1689.

Therefore, it would appear that any Northumberland authority and its agents have no lawful authority to demand money for an alleged infringement that has not been dealt with by a Court of Law. Would this mean collecting parking tickets without a trial is against the Law?


I look forward to your response.


Regards

jamesrap


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in response to the above




Dear Mr jamesrap


Further to your email, please find below the response from our Legal Department.


The Bill of Rights Act 1689 has not been repealed however must be read to accord with development of the law because the UK Parliament is Supreme and successive parliaments cannot bind each other. Parliament has set out schemes for lawful collection of parking fees and has given authority to the Council to fix and apply a standard charge for infringement of its parking bylaws/orders, having said the standard charge is lawful, in this District, the person charged the same may refuse to pay and take the chance to be summoned to the local magistrates court, have his/her trial, when a conviction may be sustained, and the court hand down a fine and costs.. Thus there is no conflict with the 1689 Act because of the right to challenge.



If you require any further information or assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me at FirstCall Castle Morpeth.



Kind regards

dogs body for cmbc
firstcall Castle Morpeth

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What do you think?

[pt2537]

The Bill of Rights Argument was tried a while a while ago in an application for a judicial review by Robin de Crittenden.

he lost his application and the reason was pretty much as you have it there

[patdavies]

If this is a Fixed Penalty Notice, then the refutation in the letter is valid - you may make representation at a Magistrates' Court about the ticket.

However if, as I suspect, this is a Council with decriminalised parking and what has been issued is a PCN, then the Council's letter is an out and out lie since there is absolutely no method of appealing a PCN to Magistrates. Any appeal is first to the Council and then to the Adjudicator.


The reason that I believe that this Council is operating DPE is that an FPN for parking can only be issued by a Police Officer or Police Traffic Warden.

If this is an Excess Charge Notice (ECN) then it can be issued by the Council, but there is still no recourse to a Magistrates' Court - and anyway, and ECN is not a fine; it is a removal of discount.

[JOSH_IOU]

Just for the record this was for my girlfriend . (and the headache i developed friday night)

However This is a great disscussion topic so i posted it on here.

Thanks for the comments


James

[gyzmo]

There is a long discussion on www.swarb.co.uk forums on this matter which you may find of interest (beware they guy responsible for most of it does waffle a lot).