The Ombudsman's final decision
Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s refusal to issue Mr X with a parking permit for a residents parking zone which he does not live in.
The complaint
Mr X complained that he was refused an application for his visitors to park in a residents parking zone on a street adjacent to where he lives. He says it is unfair that some residents are eligible for the scheme and he is not. This causes inconvenience for his visitors who have to park elsewhere or is his own off-street space requiring him to park elsewhere.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
We investigate complaints of injustice caused by ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. We cannot question whether an organisation’s decision is right or wrong simply because the complainant disagrees with it. We must consider whether there was fault in the way the decision was reached. (Local Government Act 1974, section 34(3), as amended) The Ombudsman investigates complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We do not start or may decide not to continue with an investigation if we decide: there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or we could not add to any previous investigation by the organisation, or further investigation would not lead to a different outcome.
(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6))
How I considered this complaint
I considered information provided by the complainant.
I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment
Mr X lives in a recent development which opens onto an existing street. The street is part of a residents’ permit parking scheme which allows residents and their visitors to park there. Mr X says he needs visitor permits for his own family to visit because there is only a single space within his private development for each resident.
He applied to the Council and it rejected his application because he does not live within the designated residents’ parking zone. The zone was created by Traffic Regulation order and applies only to residents who live within the streets named in the order. His address is a later development which was required to be built with its own off-street parking to reduce demand on street-parking within the residents’ zone. If the Council was to issue additional permits, they would be legally invalid and would further reduce the limited on-street parking for residents.
When considering complaints, we may not question the merits of the decision the Council has made or offer any opinion on whether or not we agree with the judgment of the Councils’ officers or members. Instead, we focus on the process by which the decision was made, and where we find fault in that process, we then determine whether or not it has caused the complainant a significant injustice. This means we will not intervene in disagreements about the merits of decisions.
In this case the Council advised Mr X why it could not issue a permit for someone not resident within the scheme.
Final decision
We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s refusal to issue Mr X with a parking permit for a residents parking zone which he does not live in.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman