Harrow Council has warned it may terminate its relationship with enforcement partner APCOA after a £1,000 fly-tipping fine was wrongly issued to a five-year-old girl.
Harrow Council’s leader, Cllr Paul Osborn, said he was ‘very disappointed’ after learning about the fine to the child.
In November last year, Harrow Council’s new enforcement team ACPOA sent a Fixed Penalty Notice (FPN) addressed to the young girl to her home, which claimed that she was ‘witnessed by a uniformed officer […] committing the offence of fly-tipping’. However, it later transpired that parcel packaging with her name on was found on a street away from her home address, and she was not seen doing anything deliberate.
Harrow Council later rescinded the fine, but the issue was once again raised at a recent Scrutiny Committee meeting on 7 January, where Cllr Osborn was pressed on what had been done to ensure there were no repeat incidents. Cllr Antonio Weiss asked how the service will be better managed to prevent ‘clearly erroneous fines’ from being issued and the enforcement team doesn’t ‘damage the reputation of the council further’.
Cllr Osborn responded that he was ‘very disappointed’ that the fine was issued and suggested it was done in a way that ‘didn’t follow the processes that they have been told to follow’. The girl’s father was left ‘seriously concerned ’ about the potential financial impact of the fine and the ‘undue stress’ it was causing his young daughter.
APCOA has been the enforcement partner since 1 July last year as part of a tri-borough contract with Ealing, Hounslow, and Harrow. So far, the team has issued 2,756 FPNs for a range of environmental crime offences, according to Harrow Council.
At a Cabinet meeting last year (17 December), Cllr Peymana Assad claimed that many other residents have also raised queries about fly-tipping fines they have been issued and called for an explanation as to why they have been met with ‘systematic unresponsiveness’.
Addressing the concerns at the recent Scrutiny Committee meeting, Cllr Osborn said: “We are talking to [ACPOA], we are also talking to Ealing and Hounslow because it’s a tri-borough agreement. We are talking to them about their experiences with APCOA, they have both had some concerns – albeit in different ways to the ones we have.”
He added: “There is a process we go through within a contract where we have issues. We have made it very clear to them that their current actions are not acceptable and if they continue on their path we will seek to terminate the relationship with them.”
The council’s Managing Director, Alex Dewsnap, added that, whilst they need to be ‘slightly careful’ about discussing contracts in a public meeting, what Cllr Osborn said is ‘not out of step’ with what APCOA would expect as the council’s feedback given to the company has been ‘robust over a number of months’.
APCOA was approached for a comment but did not respond ahead of publication.
