Dear LPG,

I want to tell a story and I promise that there is a moral…

It is one thing managing to get a disabled badge but, having managed to qualify, a friend of mine (who I will call Audrey for the purposes of this story) was told that, due to the fraud that surrounds them, she would need to pick the badge up personally once it was ready. 

This presented real problems, as you can imagine.  Audrey had qualified because she had so much difficulty walking any distance at all, but we had a good think about how we were going to achieve our goal and came up with a plan.

I am just a neighbour and 89-year-old Audrey does have family, but her daughter lives North of the river and has her own mobility problems.  It was also obvious that Audrey would need two people to go with her because that way there would be one to stay with her and another to join the queue at Lawrence house. 

Collection day came and we decided not to use my car because we were not sure where we would be able to park.  So we got a cab and I left the two of them parked in the car park at the back of Lawrence House while I joined the queue.  Queuing took about 45 minutes and the hands on the clock in the cab were going round fast, so while I waited in the queue, Audrey and her daughter paid the cab and decided to get another once we had finished our business. 

I finally got to the front of the queue and the lady behind the counter came to the back of the building and delivered the badge, but then we were left waiting at the back of the building having phoned for another cab, where it was cold and we were obviously in the way in spite of the security staff who went out of their way to accommodate us for the fifty minutes or so that the second cab took to arrive.

The three of us arrived home just short of two hours after we had set out and wondered if there was a better way to have achieved our goal on that day. 

I phoned the council and was told that we could have saved ourselves all that trouble. 

There was no need for a taxi and there would have been no charge for parking your own car in the car park at the back of Lawrence House.  All the driver has to do is inform security of the situation when they arrive and they will inform the correct advisors who would have minimised the wait without the disabled person or their companion needing to leave the car at all.  

So, the moral of the story is that if you are going to collect your blue badge it appears that the staff at the Town Hall have all bases covered.

I hope that what I have learned will help anyone who has to collect a blue badge in the future…

HN, Brockley