Colchester Council has been forced to scrap fines issued to cyclists under its Public Spaces Protection Order, after people were wrongfully fined for actions including cycling on shared-use paths, cycling in cycling areas, and cycling slowly on a pavement to avoid a dangerous roundabout.
Colchester’s PSPO prohibits –
Using a skateboard, bicycle, scooter, skates, or any other self-propelled wheeled vehicle, including electric scooters in such a manner as to cause or is likely to cause intimidation, harassment, alarm, distress, nuisance, or annoyance to any person.
As we noted in our PSPOs report last year, there is a growing trend for councils to create broad, catch-all offences, that are far wider than the purported target of harmful or nuisance conduct. These laws prohibit anybody from annoying anybody else, or possessing anything that could potentially distress anybody else. For example, Caerphilly Council made it a crime to ‘be in possession of a potentially dangerous item’, which is defined as an item that an ‘authorised person’ believes ‘could be used to harass, alarm or distress any person’.
Most of these very vague PSPOs are not enforced, or else they are used to justify the police or council ‘moving on’ anybody they want to move on. Colchester Council went one step further, handing over enforcement of its cycling PSPO to WISE private security guards paid on commission. (See our Campaign Against Fining for Profit for more more details on this dubious practice, which means that the company is only paid per fine issued).
Unsurprisingly, in order to get income for their employer, WISE officers decided that they were ‘likely’ to be annoyed by a wide variety of cycling behaviours, and took every possible opportunity – and employed every trick in the book – to issue as many penalties as possible.
A Colchester cycling campaign judges that 50 out of the 62 cyclists fined in the first half of the year were wrongfully punished. After staunch campaigning and local publicity, the council apologised, instructing the company to scrap existing fines and to stop issuing penalties to cyclists.
This is one of the rare instances in which the shoddiness and corruption of both PSPOs and fining for profit were held up to scrutiny, and abuses corrected. There are dozens of councils with over-vague PSPOs, and there are dozens of councils who employ private wardens on commission to issue penalties. Abuse and injustice is rife across the UK. It is thanks to Colchester cyclists and the Colchester Cycling Campaign that this particular violation has been exposed and checked.