A traffic challan in Tripura: thirty-eight notifications about where to park, and none about what anything costs.

What Tripura publishes, which is a lot

Most pages in this series begin with a document and measure it. This one begins with an absence, so it is worth starting with what is not absent, because Tripura is not a state that ignores its roads.

It publishes a working transport department site with a form library, a fee structure, a tax structure, a tax penalty scale, district transport office information, PUC centres, a fare chart, driving school information and traffic signals. Its police publish a detailed account of how the traffic unit is organised. And it publishes thirty-eight dated notifications about parking in Agartala.

What we could not find anywhere is the one thing this series exists to read: a notification under section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act fixing compounding amounts.

Thirty-eight parking notifications

The Tripura Police traffic page carries two tables.

The level of detail is real. One row restricts parking on “Astabal Bridge to Lichu Bagan via Circuit House and Governor House”. Another distinguishes the southern side of Hawker’s Corner “D” Block as a two-wheeler parking zone and a four-wheeler no-parking zone in the same cell. Another covers a stretch of National Highway 44 from Bishalgarh Hospital to Jangalia.

We have read twenty-six jurisdictions and no other police force has published anything at this resolution. If you want to know whether you may leave a car on a particular road in Agartala, the state has told you.

“Please click for details”

The middle column of both tables is headed, word for word:

Nothing on that page is a link. We read it twice, including through the page’s own structure rather than only its text, and there is nothing to click.

Who issued them, and what kind of document they are

The file numbers tell you. They run in two forms: F.4(3)/DM/W/JDL/Vol-IV/2011/… and F.4(3)-DM.West/ZDL/Vol-V/2013/…. “DM/W” and “DM.West” are the District Magistrate, West Tripura.

These are local traffic-regulation orders, not compounding instruments, and they belong to a different family of document from the ones this series normally reads. A compounding notification says what an offence costs and who may settle it. A parking order says where a restriction applies. One cannot substitute for the other.

It is worth being clear about that because it would be easy to look at thirty-eight numbered notifications and conclude that Tripura has published its traffic law. It has published a slice of it — the slice that tells you what to do, and not the slice that tells you what happens if you do not.

The dates, and what they predate

The earliest is 29 June 2012. The latest is 19 February 2014. Every one of the thirty-eight falls in that window.

Which means all of them were made more than five years before the 2019 amendment to the Motor Vehicles Act, and more than a decade before the compoundable list changed in January 2025. Nothing about a parking order is necessarily affected by either — a no-parking zone is a no-parking zone whatever section 200 says — but it does tell you when this page of the police website last had work done on it.

Agartala in 2012 and Agartala in 2026 are not the same city. A list of restricted roads that has not been added to in twelve years is either a remarkably stable traffic plan or a page nobody has revisited, and we have no way of telling which.

A sentence introducing a table that is not there

The same page contains this, under the heading of achievements:

And then the next thing on the page is a different heading.

We mention it because it is the second time on one page that Tripura has told the public that information exists and not shown it. The parking notifications are named and not linked; the enforcement figures are introduced and not printed. Both are the signature of a page that was built properly once and has drifted.

It also happens to be the figure we most wanted. Fine money collected over three years, in a state with no published compounding schedule, would have told us something about what is actually being charged.

And it is the easiest thing on this page to ask for, because the police have already said in public that the figures exist. An application for them is not speculative; it is asking a department to produce something its own website announces.

The transport department’s own site

The Transport Commissioner’s organisation, in its own description, “deals with various transport related matters like issuance of driving licenses, registration of motor vehicles, grant and renewal of permits, collection of taxes/fees, road safety regulations and all other regulatory and enforcement functions assigned to it under the provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988”.

Its site offers Vahan, Sarathi, e-Challan and PUCC services, and a row of informational pages: Form Download, Fee Structure, Tax Structure, Tax Penalty, DTO Information, Road Safety, PUC Centers, Fare Chart, Driving School, Traffic Signals, FAQ.

Underneath those sit four more: Act, Rules & Policies; Notices / Order; Citizen Charter; Who Is Who.

Two of those four are worth a section each.

Where the Acts and Rules link goes

The “Act, Rules & Policies” link does not go to a Tripura page. It goes straight to the central India Code portal, to the Motor Vehicles Act’s entry there.

As a design decision that is defensible: why maintain your own copy of a central Act when the Centre maintains one? In practice it has an awkward consequence.

There is also a narrower gap. India Code holds the central Act. It does not hold the Tripura Motor Vehicles Rules, 1991, which are the state’s own instrument and the thing a person is most likely to be looking for on a state transport department’s rules page. Those we could not find published by the state at all.

And where the Notices link goes

Nowhere. The “Notices / Order” link’s destination is a single hash character — the placeholder a developer leaves when a link has been built and never pointed at anything.

That is the link on which a state transport department would publish a section 200 notification. It is also the link on which it would publish anything else it had issued. It has never been connected to a destination.

The tax penalty scale, which is not a compounding scale

The department does publish one schedule of money, and it is worth setting out because it is easy to mistake for the thing this page is looking for.

That is a clean, proportionate, readable scale and we have no criticism of it. But it is a penalty on unpaid motor vehicle tax, calculated as a percentage of the tax, under state taxation law. It is not an amount accepted in lieu of prosecution for an offence under the Motor Vehicles Act, which is what section 200 is about.

The distinction matters here more than usual, because this is the only money table Tripura publishes and a reader could easily take it for the challan rates. It is not. If you are late with your tax, this applies. If you are stopped without a helmet, it does not.

Cited to a Bill

One small thing, recorded in the way we record every rendering oddity in this series.

Every row of that table cites its authority in the same words: “Vide Bill – ‘The Tripura Bill No. 7 of 2009’”.

A Bill is not law. It is a proposal, and it ceases to be a Bill at the moment it is passed and assented to, at which point it becomes an Act with a different number. Almost certainly the Act that this Bill became is what is meant.

We are not suggesting the charge is bad. We are noting that the department is citing, as the source of a financial liability, a document type that cannot be the source of one — and that a citizen who wanted to look it up would be searching for the wrong instrument.

Eleven amendments to the rules

Here is where Tripura becomes genuinely puzzling rather than simply thin.

The Tripura Motor Vehicles Rules, 1991 have been amended at least eleven times. We have records of the tenth amendment in 2021 and the eleventh in 2025. This is not a dormant rulebook.

Five days

Now put two dates next to each other.

Five days apart. Tripura had its motor vehicles rulebook open in the same week that the central list of compoundable offences changed, and amended it for something else.

We want to be fair about what that does and does not show. Rule 47A is about registration, and a department finishing one piece of work in January is under no obligation to anticipate a central commencement notification the following week. Nobody in India appears to have reacted to that change — we have now read twenty-seven jurisdictions and found exactly one government that told the public about it, which was Nagaland, eleven months later.

A state that has not lost the ability to issue instruments

But the coincidence does settle one question, and it is the question that usually hangs over a state with no published schedule.

When we found nothing in Nagaland, the charitable reading was that a small transport establishment has limited drafting capacity. When we found nothing in Puducherry, the same reading was available.

Which leaves either that one exists and is not published, or that one has not been made. We cannot tell which, and the difference matters enormously to a person being asked for money.

What we could not find, and where we looked

A page that cannot produce the central document owes the reader the search, so that the reader can judge whether the document is hidden or whether we were lazy.

• The Transport Department website, through every informational page it offers. Its Notices and Orders link is a dead placeholder; its Acts and Rules link goes to the central portal.
• The Tripura Police traffic pages, in full, read through the page structure and not only its text. Thirty-eight parking notifications, no compounding table, and the enforcement figures promised but absent.
• The state portal, which produced a 2018 transport notification — No. F.5(15)-Trans/2018, signed by an Under Secretary — fixing auto rickshaw fares and freight in the Agartala Municipal Corporation area under section 67. Not compounding.
• Search, directly, for a Tripura notification under section 200. What comes back is a row of commercial challan websites, which we do not use for legal figures and have not used here.
• The Comptroller and Auditor General’s reports on Tripura.

What the enforcement machinery actually looks like

The police page is thin on money and unusually full on organisation, and the organisation is worth a short section because it tells you who is likely to be stopping you.

Two details are worth pulling out for a reader holding a challan.

Eight breath analysers. Drink driving is section 185, which cannot be compounded anywhere in India. If a breath analyser is involved, nothing is payable at a counter and the matter is going to a magistrate, whatever is said at the roadside.

Two constables per post. We have no Tripura notification telling us which ranks may compound. In the states that do publish one, the floor ranges from Police Constable in Maharashtra to Inspector in Telangana, with Chandigarh, Assam and Meghalaya at Head Constable. Where that floor sits in Tripura is one of the things the missing notification would tell you.

A notification that shows how Tripura writes one

While searching for the compounding instrument we found a different Tripura transport notification, and it is useful precisely because it is ordinary.

Look at the shape of that. A numbered notification. A date. An express enabling provision, down to the sub-section and the clauses. A signatory with a designation. A schedule, and an annexure with a fare for every distance band.

What an auditor found, twenty years ago

The only audited look at this department we could find is old, and we are going to label it clearly before quoting it.

What it found, at the Joint Transport Commissioner’s office in Agartala and across the records it examined:

• 1,624 vehicles sharing duplicate engine numbers, and 116 with duplicate chassis numbers.
• 61,580 records with the insurance field left blank, and 1,465 records reusing the same insurance cover number across multiple vehicles.
• 8,917 vehicles whose registration had expired and was never renewed, as of December 2005.
• Short realisation of road tax of ₹7.94 lakh in the offices examined.
• ₹4.42 crore outstanding from 17,518 defaulting vehicles.

Why we include a twenty-year-old report

Not to suggest that is the position today. It almost certainly is not: that report describes a system two years into computerisation, and VAHAN in 2026 is a different thing from VAHAN in 2005. We have no current audit and we are not going to pretend an old one stands in for one.

We include it for one reason. The problem the auditor describes — records that exist but cannot be relied upon — is the same shape as the problem on the rest of this page. A notification column with no notifications in it. A sentence introducing figures that are not there. An Acts link to a file that does not open. A Notices link to nothing.

None of those is a scandal. Together they describe a state where information is generated and then not quite made usable, and it is useful to know that an auditor said something similar about the same department when the records were on paper.

The road accident figures

And now the part of this page that changed our mind about something.

Tripura’s Transport Minister gave these figures at a road safety awareness programme on 22 September 2026.

The third column is ours, computed from the first two. Everything else is as stated.

The minister attributed the decline to “coordinated efforts by the Transport and Police departments, enforcement drives and increased monitoring of road-safety measures”.

Forty per cent and nine per cent

Take 2023 and 2025 and do the two subtractions.

A forty per cent fall in road deaths over two years is a genuinely good outcome and one of the sharpest we have come across in this series. We are not going to be grudging about it.

But the two numbers are not telling the same story, and the gap between them is the most interesting thing on this page.

Survival, not prevention

If crashes had fallen by forty per cent and deaths by forty per cent, you would say: fewer crashes, therefore fewer deaths. That is prevention, and enforcement is one of the things that produces it.

That is not what happened. Crashes in Tripura are still happening at close to the same rate. What changed is how many of them kill somebody — from forty-five deaths per hundred accidents in 2023 to thirty in 2025.

We are stating this as a reading of two published series, not as a finding. There are other explanations — a change in what counts as a reportable accident would move both numbers, and so would a shift in the mix of vehicles or roads. But it is the reading the arithmetic most naturally supports, and nothing we read offers a different one.

The schemes that fit that shape

And Tripura has, as it happens, exactly the kind of programme that would produce a survival improvement.

A reward for getting somebody to hospital inside the golden hour, and cashless treatment once they get there, are precisely the interventions that reduce deaths without reducing crashes. We are not claiming they caused the fall — we have no evidence of that and neither, on what is published, does anyone else. We are noting that the shape of the programme and the shape of the numbers agree.

Two figures we are flagging rather than using

Two of the numbers above do not behave, and we are going to say so rather than quietly build on them.

This is the third page in a row on which a state’s own figures have needed this treatment. Mizoram reported 112 deaths in 124 accidents and we declined to publish the ratio. Puducherry gave us a 2013 government figure and a 2024 commercial one and we labelled each. The common thread is that no state tells you what it is counting.

What this did to an assumption of ours

Now the uncomfortable part, and we would rather write it than leave it for a reader to notice.

For twenty-six pages this series has treated a published compounding schedule as a sign of a well-run system. We have praised Chandigarh for a thirty-row schedule with an authority column, and criticised states that publish nothing. The implied argument has been: states that publish properly are states that are doing this properly.

That does not make the publishing states wrong, and it does not make Tripura right. What it does is expose that we had been running two different arguments together as though they were one.

What a published schedule is actually for

So let us separate them properly, because the distinction is the most useful thing on this page.

We should have been saying that all along, and on this page we are. A state can run safe roads without publishing its schedule, and Tripura appears to be doing exactly that. It is still true that a driver in Tripura has no way to check a figure, and that is a real thing to lose, on its own terms, whatever is happening to the accident statistics.

The two are not substitutes. A government owes you both.

What you can check when there is no schedule

Which brings us to the practical part, and it is shorter than you would expect because the useful check does not come from the state at all.

The statutory maximum for the section charged is fixed by the Motor Vehicles Act. It is the same in Agartala as in Chandigarh. It does not depend on a state notification, a website, or whether anything has been published. And it is a hard limit: an amount above it cannot be a lawful compounding figure anywhere.

Those are the Act’s figures, not Tripura’s. A state may compound for less — most do, on some rows — and may not compound for more.

Note the last two rows especially. The three-month disqualification under sections 194C and 194D is real and it is not displaced by paying, because section 200(2) keeps section 206(4) alive through compounding. Chandigarh is the only schedule in twenty-seven jurisdictions that writes it into the table. In Tripura nobody is going to tell you.

What cannot be compounded anywhere

This part does not depend on Tripura at all, which is why it is worth knowing in a state that publishes nothing.

Section 200(1) of the Act lists the offences that may be compounded. If the section on your challan is not in that list, no officer in India may settle it at a counter and the matter belongs to a court. The common ones outside the list are:

• 185 — drink driving.
• 187 — failure to comply after an accident.
• 188 — abetment of offences under 184, 185 or 186.
• 193 — agents and canvassers without a licence.
• 197 — taking a vehicle without authority.
• 199A — offences by juveniles.
• And all of section 184 except the handheld-device limb.

We proved that from the Act itself on our Nagaland page, where we set out the substituted section 200(1) word for word.

And the three that arrived in 2025

On 13 January 2025, serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 substituted section 200(1), commenced by S.O. 227(E). Three provisions became compoundable for the first time: 177A (contravening the central driving regulations), 192B(3) (registration obtained by false documents) and 201 (obstructing the free flow of traffic).

No state in this series has published an amount for any of them. In most states that is a gap between an old schedule and a new list. In Tripura there is no schedule for the gap to be in.

If one of those three is on your challan here, the question — under what instrument is this amount specified? — is as well founded as it gets.

If it is a parking challan in Agartala

This is the one situation where Tripura gives you more to work with than most states, and it is worth knowing how to use it.

The thirty-eight notifications are listed by road and by number. So the first question is not “how much?” but “which notification makes this a no-parking zone?”

1. Identify the stretch of road precisely — the lists are written by stretch, not by sector.
2. Look for it among the twenty-six no-parking rows and the twelve parking rows. Several roads appear in both lists in different parts, and several are restricted only for two-wheelers and light vehicles.
3. Note the notification number and date against that row. That is the document that creates the restriction.
4. If the road is not on either list, that is worth asking about: the restriction may come from a later order that the page has not been updated to include.
5. Ask, in writing, for a copy of the notification that applies. The page says the details are a click away; they are not, so they have to be requested.

An order is not an offence

One distinction that matters for anyone thinking of arguing about a parking challan.

The District Magistrate’s notification creates the restriction. It does not create the offence. The offence of breaching it comes from the Motor Vehicles Act — ordinarily section 177, the general penalty where nothing else is provided, at five hundred rupees for a first offence.

That is why the notification number is worth having. It establishes whether the restriction applied to that stretch of road, in that form, on that date. If it did, the offence follows. If the stretch is not covered by any notification the state can produce, the question is a real one.

And it is also why the ceiling is five hundred rupees for a first offence unless some other section is being used. A parking matter is not a licence matter.

Reading your own Tripura challan

1. Read the section number. In a state with no published schedule it is the only thing that fixes anything.
2. Check whether it is compoundable at all. If it is 185, 187, 188, 193, 197, 199A, or section 184 other than the handheld limb, nothing should be payable at a counter.
3. Check the amount against the statutory figure for that section, from the table above. That is the only check available here, and it is the one that works everywhere.
4. If the section is 177A, 192B(3) or 201, note that those became compoundable only on 13 January 2025 and no state has published an amount for them.
5. If a licence consequence attaches — 194C, 194D, 190(2) — know that paying does not remove it, because section 200(2) keeps section 206(4) alive.
6. Keep the receipt and read the section printed on it. That section decides what a second offence costs.

What is worth asking Tripura in writing

Four questions, and all four arise from the state’s own pages, which is the strongest footing an application can have.

• Whether any notification under section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act has been issued for Tripura, and if so its number and date.
• Whether amounts have been specified for sections 177A, 192B(3) and 201 since 13 January 2025.
• Copies of the parking and no-parking notifications listed on the police traffic page, which that page describes as available on clicking.
• The fine money collected and prosecution reports submitted over the last three years, which that same page introduces and does not print.

The last two are unusual in this series because they are not speculative: the state has already told the public that both exist. An application costs five hundred rupees, which is the least we charge for anything, and in this state it is the only step that moves the position at all.

What we would actually tell most readers

Read the section, check the amount against the Act’s figure, pay it, keep the receipt.

That is not a shrug. In a state with no published schedule the statutory maximum is a genuine protection and most challans sit comfortably under it. If the amount you are asked for is at or below the figure in the table on this page, you are not being overcharged relative to the statute, whatever Tripura has or has not published.

Arguing at the roadside achieves nothing here or anywhere. The two arguments worth making in writing are that the section cannot be compounded at all, and that the amount exceeds the statutory maximum. In Agartala there is a third: that no notification covers the stretch of road in question.

Where Tripura sits after twenty-seven jurisdictions

On what it charges: unknown, and that is the finding. We cannot place Tripura anywhere on the floor-and-ceiling spectrum this series has built, because it has published no figure to place.

On what it publishes: a strange mixture. More road-level detail than any other police force here, and less about money than almost anyone. A functioning departmental site with two of its four document links leading nowhere usable.

On drafting capacity: demonstrably present. Eleven amendments to its Motor Vehicles Rules, the latest in January 2025, and thirty-eight District Magistrate orders in under two years. Whatever explains the missing schedule, it is not that nobody there can write one.

On outcomes: among the best in this series. Deaths down forty per cent in two years, from 261 to 157, and a survivability improvement that reads like trauma care working.

Five north-eastern states, five different answers

Tripura is the fifth north-eastern state in this series, and putting them side by side is more useful than it sounds, because they are routinely treated as one place and they have done five entirely different things with the same provision.

Five neighbours, one central provision, and not two of them have approached it the same way. Assam charges the maximum everywhere; Meghalaya wrote a rule instead of a table; Nagaland has the document and keeps it; Mizoram publishes two documents that contradict each other; Tripura publishes everything except this.

If you drive across that region you are crossing five legal regimes that look identical from a car and are not. The one thing that holds across all five is the Act’s own maximum, which is why this page keeps coming back to it.

What this page cannot do

It cannot give you Tripura’s compounding amounts. We could not find them, and we will not invent them or borrow them from a commercial site.

It cannot tell you which officers in Tripura are authorised to compound, for the same reason — that information lives in the same notification.

It cannot tell you whether a particular challan is good. That depends on facts we have not seen and a court we are not in.

And it is no use at all for an accident, an injury, a claim or compensation — though if that is why you are here, the Rahaveer and PM RAHAT schemes described above are real and worth asking about immediately, and an advocate is worth finding today.

What that correction became

The figures on this page made us withdraw a claim: that publishing a compounding schedule is a road safety measure. It is not, and nothing we have written since has suggested otherwise.

That correction turned out to be the most load-bearing one in the series. It is now set out, with the four others, on our state-by-state comparison page, which keeps a consolidated record of everything we have had to put right about our own work — three statutory figures, a “fastest in India” claim, a misattributed statutory ceiling, a withdrawn finding about one state’s schedule, and this one.

The corrected position, which that page states as the settled one for the whole series, is the one this page arrived at: a schedule protects the person being charged, by letting them check a demand against a published figure and by turning a grievance into something that can be substantiated. Safety belongs to enforcement, road design, and what arrives after a collision — which is exactly what the numbers on this page were describing.

What we could not establish

• Any section 200 notification for Tripura. Not found, anywhere we looked.
• The Tripura Motor Vehicles Rules, 1991 in full, or their enabling clause. So we could not run the test we ran on Goa and Puducherry, where the rules’ own enabling clause showed section 200 was not among the powers used.
• The text of the eleventh amendment of 8 January 2025, or of the tenth of 2021. We have the first from a secondary compliance source and could not reach the second at all.
• The thirty-eight parking notifications themselves. Numbers and dates only.
• Fine collection figures. Promised on the police page, absent from it.
• Whether the PM RAHAT figure is lakh or crore, and whether the 413-accident figure for two months is on the same basis as the annual series. Both flagged above.
• A current audit of the transport department. The only one we found is from 2006.
• The authenticated consolidated text of section 200. Still not served by India Code, as established on our Chandigarh page — which is also where Tripura’s own Acts and Rules link sends you.

Added later: somebody printed the table you promised

The sharpest thing on this page is the sentence on a Tripura police page that introduces a table of fine money collected and is followed by no table. We called it the most annoying omission in the series, and we meant it, because that figure is the one nobody publishes.

Then one did. In Arunachal Pradesh — a state with no compounding schedule at all, where the district transport office names a taxation Act as the only state statute it administers — the police of Lohit district published an annual report containing exactly those two numbers: 3,782 motor vehicle challans in 2025 and ₹42,18,800 collected, described as the second-highest in the state.

Those divide. The answer is about ₹1,115 per challan, which is our arithmetic and not the state’s, and it is the first time in this series we have been able to say anything about what is actually charged rather than what a document says should be.

How this page was put together

The Tripura Police traffic page was read in the browser rather than fetched, because a direct fetch returned the text without the page structure and we needed to know whether the notification column contained links. It does not. Both parking tables, the column headings, the file numbers and dates, and the sentence introducing the absent enforcement figures are transcribed from that page. The Transport Department site was read the same way: its menu, the destinations of its Acts and Rules and Notices links, and the six rows of its tax penalty page, including the citation to a Bill. The eleventh amendment to the Tripura Motor Vehicles Rules, 1991 — its number, date and effect — is from a secondary compliance source and is labelled as unverified; the tenth amendment source returned an error. The 2018 auto rickshaw fare notification, No. F.5(15)-Trans/2018 under section 67, is from the state portal. The audit findings are from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on the Government of Tripura for the year ended 31 March 2006, Chapter VI, which we opened and verified as Tripura’s before using — the previous page in this series nearly used an audit chapter belonging to a different state. The accident figures, the severity calculations aside, are as stated by the Transport Minister at a road safety programme on 22 September 2026 and reported in the regional press; the deaths-per-hundred-accidents column and the forty-versus-nine comparison are ours. Statutory figures are from published texts of Chapter XIII of the Motor Vehicles Act, and the substituted section 200(1) is as we set it out on our Nagaland page.

We did not use any commercial challan website as a source for any figure on this page. Where a state figure did not behave, we printed it and said what would settle it rather than quietly dropping it. Where we changed our own mind, we said so in its own section rather than silently adjusting earlier pages. The people named are named by office: the Chief Minister, the Transport Minister, and the Under Secretary who signed the 2018 fare notification. No private individual is named.

When a document stops being the answer

A case already filed. Compounding stays available after prosecution begins, but once a court is involved you want someone who appears in it.

A non-compoundable section. If your challan cites 185, 187, 188, 193, 197 or 199A, there is no counter outcome to negotiate towards and the matter starts in court.

A licence at risk. Sections 194C, 194D and 190(2) carry a three-month disqualification, and section 200(2) means paying does not displace it.

Anybody injured. Stop reading. Find an advocate today, and ask about Rahaveer, PM RAHAT and the hit-and-run compensation while you are at it, because those are real and time-limited.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.

What we charge

Nothing to ask. Nothing to be introduced to an advocate. Every document shows its price on its own page before you commit.

Tripura is the clearest case in this series for an RTI application at five hundred rupees, because four specific, answerable questions arise directly from the state’s own published pages and two of them ask for documents the state has already said exist. Where an amount needs challenging rather than a document requesting, a written reply does it; for the plainer requests there is a simple application.

An advocate’s fee is between you and that advocate. None of it reaches us.

And the admission this series has now made twenty-seven times, which is as true here as anywhere: most people reading this should check the figure against the Act, pay it, and get on with their day.

Questions people ask