Motorist's landmark parking ticket win

A leading Wolverhampton health specialist has won an historic legal victory after challenging a parking ticket issued to him by an officer that was powerless to do so.

Clive Westwood, chief biomedical scientist in the Department of Histopathology at New Cross Hospital, was hit with the £30 fine after allegedly obstructing the highway when his car broke down outside his Coseley home. But the penalty was issued by a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO), who the 53-year-old father-of-three did not believe had the right to impose the fine.

Now Dudley magistrates have backed him and dismissed the case in a landmark ruling that could have national implications for the work of PCSOs.

Mr Westwood said today: "I feel very relieved. It is like suddenly finding a cure to a toothache that had been nagging away for months.

"It was only a £30 penalty and many people might have just paid up but it was a matter of principle for me. I knew it was not right.

"The public are very ignorant about the powers of the PCSO and it appears that those powers are being misused and misinterpreted either deliberately or not."

He ran into trouble when his Citroen broke down outside his home on February 1. It was repaired within hours but by then the passing PCSO had put the fixed penalty ticket on the vehicle.

Mr Westwood said: "I went onto Google to check the powers of a PCSO. These were listed but did not include the power to issue a penalty notice like the one I had received."

Last Tuesday magistrates accepted the argument of Mr Westwood that a PCSO had the power to remove a vehicle that was allegedly obstructing the highway but could not issue a fixed penalty notice to the driver.

Crown Prosecution Service spokesman Stuart Cave said: "The offence was dismissed by the magistrates in this case and we are now trying to discover the reasons for their decision."