City set to refund £100k in penalty notices over lighting of bus lane signs

Newcastle City Council faces repayments totalling more than £100,000 after drivers were given fixed penalty notices in a bus lane.

The problem arose over obscured lighting on signs that showed the city’s John Dobson Street to be a bus lane.

One motorist successfully challenged a penalty notice with an adjudicator on the grounds that a sign gave insufficient advance warning of the lane.

A council statement said two issues had arisen over the disputed lane.

It said the adjudicator’s decision related only to the individual case brought since the Traffic Penalty Tribunal’s ruling was “not a universal decision covering individual appeals, nor is it a ‘landmark ruling’” since the tribunal is not a court that sets legal precedents.

Newcastle reviewed the lighting of the bus lane following the adjudicator’s ruling and found “that we issued 5,100 penalty charge notices during hours of darkness between February 23 and April 22 when bus gate signs were visible but not lit up.

“Having discovered this we are now taking action and will be contacting drivers affected to refund their payments.”

It said the problem with lighting had arisen because the council was working to new Department for Transport regulations which did not require the illumination concerned, but “which came into force later than we had anticipated”.

Mark Smulian