Redbridge has issued 13,329 tickets at the Cambridge Park and Blake Hall Road box junction since 2023. Adjudicators keep allowing appeals against them.
Redbridge Council has issued 13,329 penalty charge notices at the yellow box junction where Cambridge Park meets Blake Hall Road in Wanstead since 2023, and collected £868,954 in fines from them. Over the same period, independent adjudicators have repeatedly allowed appeals against tickets from that junction, one of them finding that the markings the driver stopped on were “not lawfully placed”.
The figures come from a Freedom of Information response obtained by Graham Reeve, a chartered civil engineer who has written a report on the junction and sent it to this site. He sent a draft to the council more than two weeks ago, he says, and has had no reply.
“I consider the continued enforcement of a yellow box repeatedly found to have illegal markings, to be a matter of legitimate public concern,” he wrote. “The Council must immediately suspend the issuing of PCNs at this location and replace the full box with a ‘Half Box’ to conform with Government guidance and make it legally enforceable.”
The yearly split in the FOI response is 5,137 tickets and £260,242 in 2023, 4,610 and £343,550 in 2024, 2,739 and £209,482 in 2025, and 843 and £55,680 so far in 2026. The number of tickets has fallen every year.
What happened to the 13,329 tickets
Mr Reeve has since sent us the council’s full FOI response. It splits the tickets by outcome, year by year:
| Year | Issued | Paid | Cancelled by the council | Successfully challenged | Money received |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 5,137 | 3,015 | 137 | 45 | £260,242 |
| 2024 | 4,610 | 4,100 | 193 | 31 | £343,550 |
| 2025 | 2,739 | 2,276 | 66 | 26 | £209,482 |
| 2026 | 843 | 610 | 13 | 7 | £55,680 |
| Total | 13,329 | 10,001 | 409 | 109 | £868,954 |
Three in four tickets were paid. Only 109, fewer than one in a hundred, were successfully challenged, and the council cancelled a further 409 itself. That leaves 2,810 tickets that are neither paid, cancelled nor overturned in the figures; the response does not say what became of them.
Divided across the 10,001 tickets that were paid, the money comes to about £87 a ticket, which is what a penalty looks like when most drivers pay inside the discount window rather than argue.
Corrected 25 September: an earlier version divided the fines by every ticket issued and gave about £65 each; the FOI response shows 10,001 were paid, which makes it about £87.
The camera is the council’s own
The junction is enforced by an unattended camera. Redbridge publishes the list, and camera 1701, “Cambridge Park jc Blakehall Road”, sits in it under the heading “Box junction contraventions”, in the camera list dated 12 May 2025. There are 68 box junction cameras on that list, which is the scale of the thing across the borough.
Three lines below Cambridge Park in the same list is camera 811, “Chigwell Road/ Maybank Road”. That matters, because the Chigwell Road box has lost appeals on exactly the same point, twice.
What the guidance actually says
Yellow boxes are covered by the Traffic Signs Manual, Chapter 5, the Department for Transport’s own design manual. Paragraph 8.3.2 reads:
“Half-boxes, in which only half the area of the junction is marked (see Figure 8-2) are appropriate at T-junctions and other junctions where the traffic blocks back from one direction only. Half-boxes should be used only on the minor road side of the main carriageway to allow emerging traffic to turn right where the queue of traffic in the major road is to the left. A half-box on the side of the road opposite a T-junction generally serves no useful purpose. Even though it will create a gap in a queue of traffic, drivers turning right from the minor road will not be able to enter the box as the exit will be obstructed.”
Cambridge Park meets Blake Hall Road at a T-junction, and the box covers the whole width of the carriageway rather than half of it.
One qualification is worth stating plainly, because the report does not: the manual is guidance, not law. Its own paragraph 1.3.1 says “must” indicates a legal requirement while “should” indicates “a course of action that is recommended and represents good practice”. The markings themselves do carry legal weight, though. Paragraph 1.2.3 notes that not complying with a yellow box marking “could constitute a traffic offence under section 36 of the Road Traffic Act 1988”, and section 36 only bites on a sign that has been lawfully placed. That is the hinge the appeals have turned on.
Five appeals allowed
A driver who gets one of these tickets can challenge it to the council, and if that is refused, appeal to London Tribunals, whose adjudicators are independent of the council. Their decisions go into a public register that can be searched by date, appellant name and PCN number.
Ilford Today has read the full decision in appeal 2230304887, heard by adjudicator Sean Stanton-Dunne and decided on 2 October 2023. The ticket was issued for a car that turned right out of Blake Hall Road into Cambridge Park and stopped in the box behind stationary traffic. The adjudicator allowed the appeal on three grounds at once.
On the size of the markings: “In my judgement, the box markings do extend beyond the junction and do not meet the definition in Paragraph 11(6)(a) of Part 7 of Schedule 9. The junction is the width of the carriageway of the minor road which meets the major road and these markings extend well beyond that width, to the extent that a driver stopped at the lights has no visibility of the end of the box to the right.”
On being able to see the box at all, after the council filed its own images of the approach: “the Council’s still images of the approach to the lights show that there is not a clear view for the driver approaching the lights. I agree with [the appellant] that a driver going through the lights on green may well not have time to see the markings and safely stop until it is too late.”
And on the full box at a T-junction:
“Clearly, there is no longer a requirement for DfT approval for the use of a full box marking at a T-junction but, in my judgement, paragraph 8.3.2 requires that the use of such a marking is justified, especially given the clear impediment resulting for drivers attempting to make the right turn out of the minor road. If the Council seeks to enforce PCNs against such drivers, then it needs to produce evidence showing the reasons for which it has both introduced and retained the use of the full box marking and, in this case, it has not done so. Although the Council refers to this ground of appeal in the case summary, it produces no evidence of why a full box was installed at this junction.”
Four days earlier, on 28 September 2023, the same adjudicator had allowed appeal 2230236641 against a Redbridge ticket from Chigwell Road at Maybank Road in almost identical terms. In that case the council did answer, saying a full box was installed because queueing did not happen in one direction only, and that the DfT had advised it that the 2016 regulations gave it full flexibility. The adjudicator was not satisfied: the change in 2016 removed the need for DfT approval, he found, but it did not “give Councils carte blanche to introduce full boxes as they wish. If it did, then the statutory guidance in paragraph 8.3.2 would be rendered meaningless.”
A second adjudicator, Edward Houghton, allowed a further Chigwell Road appeal, 2240473960, on 4 December 2024. His decision sets out the fairest version of the test: the manual “is not law as such, it is official guidance from the DfT and in my view if it is not followed there should be some good reason for that”. He found the council’s evidence took the matter no further.
These are not the only appeals from the junction, and most of the others went the council’s way. Mr Reeve says the London Tribunals register shows the majority of appeals against Cambridge Park tickets were refused. Adjudicators can only decide on the evidence put to them, he points out, and the refused appeals did not raise the half-box point; they relied on a wide range of other grounds instead, such as the markings being worn or impossible to see in the dark.
Mr Reeve’s report quotes two more decisions about Cambridge Park that we have not been able to read in full. In appeal 2250397, allowed in December 2025, the adjudicator is quoted as writing: “I cannot comprehend, nor has it been explained to me how it is possible for a box junction to be ‘substantially compliant’. Either the box junction is compliant or it is not.” In appeal 2260169146, allowed in June 2026, the adjudicator is quoted as finding that the markings where the vehicle stopped “were not ‘lawfully placed’ for the purposes of section 36 of the Road Traffic Act 1988” and “are not capable of achieving any traffic management purpose whatsoever”.
Why the tickets keep coming
An adjudicator’s decision settles the ticket in front of them. It does not bind the next adjudicator, and it does not compel a council to take a box out. That is the gap the report is aimed at.
“Council officers should have been aware of the regulations when the box was installed,” Mr Reeve writes, “but to continue to issue PCNs when three independent adjudicators have identified the yellow box as being non-compliant and not legally enforceable is completely unacceptable.”
He says most of the tickets will be for drivers turning right out of Blake Hall Road into Cambridge Park, which is the main flow through the junction and the movement the adjudicators were looking at, and that most drivers will simply have paid. He also says a ticket issued at the end of June this year was challenged to the council on the ground that the box is unlawful, refused in July, and has now gone to London Tribunals, where it is not due to be heard until February.
He believes the box has been shortened on the Cambridge Park side since the 2023 appeal, but says it is still hard to see where it ends when turning right out of Blake Hall Road, which is the visibility point the 2023 adjudicator upheld.
Redbridge Council has published nothing about the markings at this junction, and the camera remains on its enforcement list. The image at the top of this article is a camera still of the junction supplied with the report, with the section of the box the report says serves no purpose outlined in red.
What it means for you
- If you get a box junction ticket in Redbridge, you have 28 days to challenge it from the date on the notice, and there is a 50% discount for paying early, within either 14 or 21 days depending on the notice type, on the council’s pay or contest page.
- Camera tickets arrive by post, so the route is a formal challenge, called a representation. The council says it decides representations within 56 days, and replies to informal challenges within 10 working days.
- If the council refuses, the appeal to London Tribunals is free and independent. Every decision quoted above came from that stage, not from the council.
- Paying early closes the case. The discount is exactly why an arguable ticket often never gets argued: 10,001 of the 13,329 tickets were paid, and 109 were successfully challenged.
- Nothing here is a ruling that the junction may be ignored. Five drivers at two Redbridge junctions put evidence in front of adjudicators and won on it. A driver who stops in the box and pays without appealing gets no benefit from any of it.
More Redbridge coverage: parking in Ilford, Ilford roadworks and travel and Redbridge parking permits.
Have your say