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news
Victoria_Street_West,_Grimsby_-_DSC07296.JPGYet another cyclist ordered to pay £500 for cycling through town centre, as council insists those who "have not followed the rules" will be "rightly punished"
Another cyclist has found themselves on the receiving end of a hefty bill for riding through the town centre, a council continuing to enforce a controversial cycling ban and warning that cyclists will be "rightly punished" and face "repercussions" if they "have not followed the rules".
The long-running saga in Grimsby concerns Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPO) that North East Lincolnshire Council introduced in 2019, and that have seen more than 1,000 fixed-penalty notices issued since then, the bulk of which have been for cycling on Victoria Street South and walking dogs along the main beach.
Some locals have accused the council's enforcement officers of targeting cyclists "they can get away with", meaning that "old and slow" riders are caught, while youths are still "racing up and down". Last summer, a female cyclist was ordered to pay over £1,100 in fines and costs, while numerous others have also received a hefty bill for their town centre cycling.
The most recent, relating to an incident on 30 August last year, but which has now gone through Grimsby Magistrates' Court, saw a 47-year-old cyclist, Joanne Grey, ordered to pay £534 in fines and costs after she failed to pay the initial £100 fixed-penalty notice.
In court, Ms Grey was proved guilty in absence having failed to attend and was ordered to pay a fine of £220, a victim surcharge of £88 and costs of £226.04.
Councillor Ron Shepherd, who has previously called similar fines a "great result for our enforcement teams", warned that cyclists will continue to be "rightly punished".
"These PSPOs are there for a reason. Not because we want to put them in place or to cause a nuisance, but to ensure the safety of the borough," he said. "These people have not followed the rules and for that they have been rightly punished. Others need to be made aware that we will not simply look the other way, those breaking these PSPOs will face repercussions."
PSPOs can be introduced by local authorities in a bid to crack down anti-social behaviour, through the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, North East Lincolnshire Council saying, "The act gave local authorities the power to deal with nuisances or problems which harm the local community's quality of life."
Cycling bans in urban areas are one of the more commonly seen PSPOs and are often justified as a means of tackling dangerous, anti-social behaviour by youths on bikes in town centre areas.
However, they are controversial because they impact anyone who may wish to cycle to shops or amenities in the area. There are also concerns about their effectiveness considering, as has been claimed in Grimsby, often the people whose anti-social riding the PSPO is brought in to tackle could not care less about the local authority suddenly banning their behaviour.
Active travel charity Cycling UK has long been a prominent critic of PSPOs, which it says have the effect of criminalising cycling, with head of campaigns Duncan Dollimore pointing out that the orders only discourage people from riding bikes into town.
The Grimsby PSPO has not been without controversy. In October 2022, the local council faced a backlash from residents after a pensioner was fined £100 for cycling through the town centre, with some accusing the council officers of targeting "old and slow" riders while ignoring youths "racing up and down".
Barrie Enderby, 82, told North East Lincolnshire Council he would "rather go to prison than give them £100" and that they could "stick it up your a*se", after he was fined for breaching the PSPO.
Following Enderby’s fine, unhappy locals launched a scathing critique of how the PSPO is being implemented, and claimed that council officers are not imposing the cycling ban fairly, and rather than cracking down on anti-social behaviour they are seemingly "targeting" people "they can get away with doing so".
In social media posts shared at the time, one person said they witnessed the incident which saw Mr Enderby fined and claimed that there had been "other young lads riding past" who officers "didn't bother to stop".
Another claimed she had also been "targeted", while someone else reported seeing "three youths doing wheelies and racing up and down" while a council officer "just stood [by]".
In one reply a local woman said: "Catching all the wrong ones... I sat and watched them all last week, only targeting the old and slow cyclists that aren't in anyone's way."
In June of last year four separate cyclists, ranging in age from 31 to 65, were found guilty of breaching the PSPO, with all four being fined £220 and ordered to pay almost £300 in costs, before a month later Lauren Cullum was ordered to pay £1,150.
In contrast, in the same week at Grimsby Magistrates' Court, Paul Berry pleaded guilty to driving at 50mph on a 40mph road. He was disqualified from driving for seven days, fined £60, and ordered to pay a victim services surcharge of £16.
Dan is the road.cc news editor and has spent the past four years writing stories and features, as well as (hopefully) keeping you entertained on the live blog. Having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for the Non-League Paper, Dan joined road.cc in 2020. Come the weekend you'll find him labouring up a hill, probably with a mouth full of jelly babies, or making a bonk-induced trip to a south of England petrol station... in search of more jelly babies.
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51 comments
https://metro.co.uk/2024/07/23/grimsby-inspired-north-korea-speaker-blar...
Grimsby..sums it up for me. If I had a bucket list to visit every city, town and village in the UK, this one would not make the list.
Good should be fined for possession of a bike . Saw a new idiot yesterday riding standing up through the town centre while a child about 4 was sitting on the saddle , great parenting
Strava or it didn't happen.
I would belive you but how is it possible they didn't hit you as they all seem to?
Not (made)up to your usual standard WWG, surely they were drinking a coffee with one hand and using a phone with the other whilst riding the wrong way down a one-way street as well?
I have up till now submitted at least a dozen videos of dangerous passes, some more dangerous than others and some, well, I'm lucky to be alive. I haven't even had acknowledged receipt of these let alone justice for any of these incidents. Yet cyclists are being told if you break the law expect to get punished. As a cyclist I have absolutely no problem with that, I don't filter, I don't jump red lights, I abide by speed limits, I even have £3000000 liability insurance., and yet when I expect justice, I get nothing!
I wonder what the fine in Grimsby for parking a car in a cycle path is? Extremely antisocial must have included driving in the cycle path. Got suspicion the answer is going to be 40 quid if you pay immediately.
Can I check, are UK citizens legally compelled to carry proof of identity when in public?
What happens should you be caught and you do not have proof of identity?
Do these wardens have the legal power to physically detain you?
No, and No. The police have Power to detain. Council officers do not. No one is under obligation to give their details or even to stop.
Yes - in Europe you commonly require ID on you (and many countries have special ID cards). Not here in the UK, home of the free (blue passports) - we are no longer a part of that; but we never had that system anyway (although some years back there was a bit of debate about it)!
Minor pedantry - I believe the consensus here on whether there's any legal requirement for you to give details to folks who aren't the police is that "it depends". I'm sure someone will pop by to fill in the details, I can't recall exactly.
Apparently it's being toyed with again, despite Changed Labour saying just a few weeks ago that it wasn't happening. As with lots of things, though, not much detail (what would it be for, would it be mandatory, would you have to carry it, etc.).
Based on news and my interactions with expats "minor pedantry" seems to the UK's core competency and export product.
UK soft power at work there!
Since the decline of empire we've come a ways! Although our exports have changed somewhat (less and less outright violence) perhaps we haven't completely lost our previous competencies in extortion and manipulation? (The best way was always to get the colonials to do it themselves - of course initially we did need to send in our earlier "colonials" the Welsh, Irish and Scots to do the wet work. Nowadays it's all nicer to just arrange money to do it, or simply provide our "world-leading" services for folks)?
If someone is warranted by the local police force then it is obligatory to provide your details when accused of an offence and a criminal offence not to; a warranted person can be a PCSO, a council warden or even an employee of a private security firm.
I've never understood why people accept these fines. If a PCSO or Council Warden orders you to stop so they can give you a fine, just politely decline and cycle off.
It's not that simple (as chrisonabike alludes to above). Some (but not all) of those Council Wardens do have the power to compel you to provide your details, and PCSO certainly too. What neither of them have at all, is the power of arrest (or no more than any other citizen).
A PCSO has the power to detain you for up to thirty minutes whilst waiting for a full police officer to come and arrest you if you refuse to give your details; a council warden, if warranted by the local police force, has no power to detain you but does have a right to demand your details if you've committed an offence and it's a criminal offence to refuse/ride away. By all means disobey them if you wish but be aware that it may have serious consequences if you are later identified (e.g. from bodycam footage), including getting a criminal record. It isn't as simple as just "ride away, they can't do anything" as many on here believe.
Rediculously high fines aside. I don't think people are going to want to hear this, but stories like this kinda make the case for some form of registration. How is a random pcso on foot going to chase down a spry teenager on a bike? They're going to target those they can catch until there's some way of tying a bike to an address. I don't like the idea but I can't see any other way of ensuring fair application of the rules we must all follow.
(Joking aside, I just discovered that a thing that looks a bit like a taser but fires a kind of lasso has actually been trialled in the US)
Not if you risk assess it. Rule breaking is rule breaking but the potential consequences are taken into account. Motor vehicles have the potential to cause significantly more harm than people-powered vehicles. Therefore, a higher degree of regulation (such as licensing / registration) is required.
Well, it works in North Korea.
As you allude to later - the police aren't. But ... mostly they never did! Why is this suddenly an issue now - has anything changed apart from our focus?
Plus ... they're also not going to chase down those in cars. And of course it's never the case that vehicles have been nicked, plates have been cloned (or drivers say they have) or that the registered keeper says "no memory of that" * / doesn't say who was driving / car is a fleet or hire one (same rules should apply but ...)
The police in many places do have powers up to and including "active stop" of vehicles etc. But it all takes time / money - in demand for other things. The nuisance youth / local crims and dealers mostly will always have an advantage due to a) numbers b) police actually do have other things to do with their time c) police have rules (mostly) d) why worry about your bike getting damaged or confiscated when it's not yours anyway?
(Have some stories of seeing this in action - and inaction - with local youth motorbike gangs).
I don't have a good "enforcement" answer (police on ebikes?). Indeed I think if you look it's always those who are mostly law-abiding the police are happier to pursue... However "fixing it so that people can safely cycle to / past the shopping district" would indeed mean that the police are then freed up to address the "more serious offenders" - should they choose...
* "I can't remember" appears to be a solid, valid defence - in Scotland at least - for most motoring offenses.
The majority of officers, both regular and PCSO, I see these days are rather large units whom I don't think even a middle-ager like myself would have much trouble outsprinting on foot, should pedestrians have numbers on their jackets in case they are stopped for a PSPO offence? If the authorities are determined to enforce their regulations they should provide adequate resources to do so, e.g. they could provide wardens/officers with bikes themselves (and encourage them to get fit enough to chase offenders) rather than trying to put the onus on law-abiding cyclists to carry registration. Additionally, your "spry teenager on a bike" is simply going to ignore any registration requirement and, judging by the inability of the police to control the use of illegal electric motorcycles, not to mention catch the estimated 600,000 drivers in the UK driving without a licence or with a suspended licence and the 1,000,000+ driving without insurance and/or MOT, would very likely get away with it.
And the cloned plates.
Just checked- it's as you expect: a bastion of Torydom. 2 local Tory MPs standing firm against the tide like Canute, Tory Council Majority all keeping drivers safe from the Terror-Cyclist menace etc. etc
Surely, just being a tory is "anti-social behaviour"?
I'm assuming you meant:
Surely, just being a tory is"anti-social behaviour"?
Yes
Thanks, edited. I blame reading the 490 page agenda for Thursday's council meeting.
The fair town of Grimsby's committment to safe and convenient cycling can be judged by pictures such as this one;
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5394991,-0.0929463,3a,75y,344.04h,86.3t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLN3Bv89hePuR9tscMK6nmg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu
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