Last week, we shared a video of a Civil Enforcement Officer issuing a parking ticket to a marked police vehicle, despite the fact that Officers spoke to the civil enforcement officer before he issued the penalty notice in an attempt to try and prevent everyone’s time being wasted.
However, despite the police officer speaking to the civil enforcement officer, he still went ahead anyway and gave the police car a ticket, much to the bemusement of the bystanders who were filming the ‘encounter’.
After a bit of delving around, we found out that the contractor being used by Nottinghamshire County Council in order to enforce the parking restrictions in the area concerned is a company called ‘NSL Services’.
So we tried to call NSL Services in order to find out why one of their staff had taken it upon himself to issue our colleagues with a parking ticket, despite the fact that the emergency services are EXEMPT from parking restrictions.
How are the emergency services supposed to do their job, if they have to spend hours driving around looking for parking spaces – it makes no sense!
And this is why they are exempt from parking restrictions as the ‘powers that be’ realise that our brave emergency services should be able to park wherever they need to in order to get the job done.
Unfortunately, however, you have to call a premium rate number in order to speak to someone from NSL Services and our budget does not quite yet stretch that far.
We did also tweet NSL Services in order to try and engage with them, but our tweet was ignored.
So instead, we spoke to Nottinghamshire County Council and we found their staff to be extremely helpful and friendly – which is always nice.
We asked them about the ticket and asked why NSL Services had deemed it fit to issue a fine to a marked Police vehicle.
They told us that they would get back to us, and they did!
A spokesperson, on behalf of the Council said:
“The Notts Parking Partnership employs NSL Services to supply civil enforcement officers (formerly known as traffic wardens) to enforce parking restrictions in the county.
“Notts Parking Partnership was formed to ensure that parking enforcement is provided consistently and fairly across the county.
“The partnership consists of Notts CC and the seven district and borough councils across the county.
“Peter Goode, traffic manager for Nottinghamshire County Council said:
“We regret that this penalty notice was issued inappropriately.
“It has been cancelled and the police have been informed.”
Fair play to Notts CC for actually taking the time to give us a response and for getting the parking ticket cancelled.
Hopefully not only will it free up a bit of time in relation to Officers now not having to fill out mountains of forms in relation to getting the penalty notice quashed, but hopefully there will be other Civil Enforcement Officers out there who will read this.
Our message to the small minority of Civil Enforcement Officers who believe that marked emergency vehicles should receive parking tickets, is that on every occasion we have taken up a story where emergency services personnel have been issued with a parking ticket, it gets ‘boshed’ (our word for cancelled).
I would like to point out, that we often get messages from Civil Enforcement Officers who share with us their own displeasure at the sight of their colleagues being filmed giving penalty notices to emergency vehicles.
So, although there seems to be a small renegade bunch of Civil Enforcement Officers who seem to enjoy giving parking tickets to emergency vehicles, the vast majority of them deplore this common-sense-defying act.
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