Dangerous outbreak of commonsense solves a problem

Mr Bumble certainly wasn’t kidding when he said “The law is a ass.”

Among the stills from the lamentable video produced to "promote" Boston’s bid for £100,000 of funding to become a Portas Pilot was this one – which “celebrated” multi-culturalism by showing a car illegally parked outside its owner’s shop.
This prompted one of our regular readers to challenge a Police Community Support Officer – how amazing that he found one - whom he spotted ticketing a car parked on a yellow line to do the same with the vehicle in our photo.
However, the officer’s response was to say that he was couldn’t do this be cause it required a “real” officer to actually witness the vehicle moving on or off the spot – something which struck our correspondent as rather ridiculous.
He decided to take matters further - and got in touch with one of our local councillors.
And here is the story that emerged.
The area where the offending vehicle is parked is owned by Boston Borough Council – which apparently means that the police are unable to ticket it.
However, it now appears that Lincolnshire County Council also has a claim to the area - so, if the County Council ends up winning the rights  it could potentially be enforced by means of fixed penalty notice in the future.
Meanwhile, until ownership of the area is clarified, no parking tickets will be issued.
A penalty could be handed out when the driver of the car parks or drives off – the offence is one of driving over a raised curb and the footpath – but that can only be done if the action is witnessed by a police officer.
A real one – not a PCSO.
Fortunately, the councillor who looked into this particular incident took the refreshing and strictly non-politically correct  step of having a word with the shop owner, who has promised that he won’t leave the vehicle there any more.
But the fact remains that if further incidents occur  -  for example by other drivers using the space - nothing will be done until the council takes over the issue of fixed penalty notices once the verdict on who owns the land is delivered.
It reminds us of another episode that would be laughable were it not so serious,  which involved residents who are being plagued by anti-social behaviour involving users of an access path between Ingelow Avenue and Punchbowl Lane.
Although there were a host of commonsense solutions, no-one seemed willing to introduce them.
Gating the access was ruled out because Lincolnshire County Council doesn't have a policy on such things - together with other procedural reasons.
Fencing was ruled on various other technicalities.
It was felt that a loan of CCTV equipment would set a dangerous precedent -  in that everyone would  one -  and the police came up with the elegant suggestion that the crime taking place was not serious enough to warrant action.
The last we heard of that issue was four months ago.
Since then … nothing.
We wonder how many other problems that could be simply solved by the application of commonsense are lurking within the various committees and their reports with nothing being done, and taxpayer dissatisfaction ever mounting.


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