Barnet Borough Council is getting so desperate to make money from parking fines that it’s erecting signs no-one can understand, then fining people for disobeying them.

Several visitors to the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley on Saturday, November 8, gathered at the pictured sign, nervously consulting each other about what it meant. Did it mean no parking? If so, why didn’t it say so? And from what time to what time? And how could the pay-by-phone bay be suspended when it’s not normally a pay-by-phone bay at that time on a Saturday night?

The rain was bucketing down, and we decided that surely no-one was going to go down the road ticketing all these cars.

At 9.21pm, according to my parking ticket, someone crept down the line of cars and presumably put a ticket on each of them.

The tickets weren’t displayed openly under the windscreen wiper, so you saw them at once. They were stuffed down the gap between the windscreen and the bonnet, so that in the dark we did not know they were there. I found mine the next day, when I cleared some leaves out and saw it screwed up underneath them. I could easily not have found it for several days or weeks, enabling them to levy an even bigger fine.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been caught out by signs that seem deliberately obscure, as though they were written in the hope of trapping motorists. There was obviously no need for a parking restriction in this spot, but if they wanted one, they should have put a clear, simple, unambiguous sign up.

I won’t pay it and I hope the other drivers who were parked alongside me refuse as well.

They can contact me by emailing francis@francisbeckett.co.uk

Francis Beckett

Windsor Road, Finchley