The mayor who runs the ULEZ was convicted, in his absence, over a car he says was never his.

The story

London mayor Sadiq Khan, who chairs Transport for London and its ULEZ policy, may appear in court in a bid to clear his name after being convicted of owning an untaxed car, a 24-year-old Nissan Micra, registered in his name and date of birth with the DVLA. Last month a magistrate used fast-track powers to fine him £220 in his absence, and told him to pay £85 costs plus £35.84 tax. Sources close to the mayor insist the car does not belong to him, saying, "It's a scam, and it's not the first time people have registered a vehicle with Sadiq." The DVLA said the prosecution went ahead after Khan did not respond to letters sent in January asking for confirmation he was the keeper, addressed to an east London restaurant owned by Gordon Ramsay. DVLA officials confirmed the case is being reviewed. To overturn the conviction, Khan may have to appear in court in person, since the Single Justice Procedure used to fine him allows a case to be decided on paper only, without the respondent or their lawyers present.

The reframe

A conviction was reached, a fine was set, and costs were added, all without the person named in the case ever being asked directly whether the car was his. The DVLA sent letters to an address that was, on the account given to Metro, wrong. The mayor did not respond, because the mayor never received them. The Single Justice Procedure, built to process minor motoring cases at volume, did exactly what it is designed to do: it treated silence as confirmation and moved the file to conviction.

Nothing about this process required anyone to establish that Sadiq Khan actually owns a 24-year-old Nissan Micra. It required only that a registered keeper's name and date of birth matched DVLA records, and that no objection arrived before the fast-track deadline. The rule was applied with complete formal correctness. Whether it was applied to the right person is a separate question the procedure was never built to ask, because the procedure exists to close cases, not to verify them.

The mayor now faces the prospect of appearing in court in person to contest a fine of £220, a sum smaller than most people spend fixing a genuine parking ticket, because the system that convicted him in his absence has no equivalent fast-track mechanism for un-convicting him. Conviction runs on paper. Correction requires a courtroom. That asymmetry is not a flaw specific to Khan's case; it is the ordinary shape of a process built to be quick going in and slow coming out, regardless of who happens to be standing on the wrong side of a database entry this time.