Fixed penalty notice

In recent years, this has taken the form of using them to give police and public authorities in England, Scotland and Wales a realistic weapon against anti-social behaviour. They are designed to reduce paperwork on police and council officers by allowing low-level anti-social behaviour to be dealt with on the spot. Newer types of notice exist for disorder, environmental crime, truancy and noise. A fixed penalty notice is not a fine or criminal conviction and the recipient can opt for the matter to be dealt with in court instead of paying. However, if the recipient neither pays the penalty nor opts for a court hearing in the time specified, the penalty may be increased by 50% and registered against the recipient as a fine. It may then be enforced by the normal methods used to enforce unpaid fines, including imprisonment in some circumstances. In Hong Kong, fixed penalty notices are issued for minor offences such as smoking, littering, parking and allowing engines to idle. Fixed penalty notices were originally introduced for parking and motoring offences, currently continuing in Great Britain under powers provided by the Road Traffic Act 1991 as well as in Northern Ireland; in many areas this style of enforcement has been taken over from police by local authorities. Some other motoring offences (other than parking) can also be dealt with by the issue of FPNs by police, officers of the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency or local authority personnel. A fixed penalty notice issued by local authority parking attendants is backed with powers to obtain payment by civil action and is defined as a penalty charge notice (PCN), distinguishing it from other FPNs which are often backed with a power of criminal prosecution if the penalty is not paid; in the latter case the 'fixed penalty' is sometimes designated as a 'mitigated penalty' to indicate the avoidance of being prosecuted which it provides.