Recent content by pedr

Any person with queries about immigration and visas in the UK is best advised to employ the services of a registered Immigration Adviser. These are the only people permitted to give such advice under UK law. The Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner has an Advice Finder tool on its...

Can you post copies of the paperwork you have been sent (with your name and names of any railway employees, as well as any reference numbers redacted)? Advice on how to proceed will be helped if we can see exactly what the paperwork sets out as the allegations, and the process being used. There...

A conviction which is punished by a fine is “spent” under the terms of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act after 12 months. Where the act applies - which is in most UK-based scenarios where someone has good reason to ask about convictions - a person can answer the question disregarding any spent...

Presumably the practical difficulty is that WMT may threaten to prosecute at least for the occurrence where the railcard couldn’t be shown, if they don’t get whatever payment they request. I think that would be improper, and this one event should be treated as a forgotten railcard incident...

There are, effectively, no precedents in the treatment of Penalty Fares. Appeals panels make each decision independently without publishing them or referencing others, and the courts don’t get involved - at least not to the level where they set even persuasive precedent. However there are a few...

The particularly useful data is surely whatever is recorded in railway databases and associated with the ticket number, rather than the information actually encoded within the barcode. In particular (and somewhat relevant to this thread) as far as I can tell, a passenger can't find out whether...

As part of their role in the administration of justice and influence over the criminal procedure rules, the judiciary of England and Wales could alter some aspects of the current approach to private prosecutions, though that would involve at least the agreement of the UK government and probably...

Also the term is 'without prejudice' and since train companies don't tend to use the civil court system it's of limited use, or perhaps even counter-productive in the context of attempting to convince a company not to exercise its right to bring a criminal prosecution, which is what these kinds...

I'm not sure this is true. They've indicated that the paperwork says that the hearing is of an application to reopen a case in the interests of justice. It's entirely possible that the procedures for that assume that the applicant knows what the nature of that case was, and is ready to explain...

One significant negative effect of messaging like this is that it's likely to lead Merseyrail staff to believe that actual e-tickets for journeys which can involve travel on Merseyrail services are not valid, so even though that's wrong, they might be unwilling to accept that they've been badly...

Merseyrail don’t actually mean that they don’t accept e-tickets, necessarily. They mean that almost all tickets purchased online for use on their services won’t be e-tickets, because they’ve arranged it so that those tickets can’t be issued as e-tickets. Those tickets are paper tickets bought...

The way the law works in these cases is that regretting committing a crime is not relevant when a court decides whether someone is guilty or not. It might reduce the punishment imposed, but not the fact of guilt, and the conviction that results. If TfL prosecute, which is very likely, the usual...

To try to spell out the (ridiculously confusing) reasons why it's important to know whether this was a Penalty Fare issued on the spot or not... There are two legal mechanisms which train companies and railway staff can use to respond to and pursue action in relation to ticketing...

Do the documents in post 72 relate to the same person? If so the notice of fine and collection order surely means that person has already been convicted of a criminal offence, so does it make a significant difference to plead guilty to the second offence?

There could be a somewhat plausible argument that if someone boards a train without a ticket at a station which isn’t a compulsory ticket area and then leaves the train in a compulsory ticket area, where they are detected, it would not be entirely proper to prosecute for both the byelaw 17 and...