Algorithm generated fines

Question

In the UK, there was recently a case in the press about a driver that was issued a fine for driving in a bus lane. The photograph the Local Authority supplied as "evidence" was of someone wearing an item of clothing with wording that was similar to the number plate of his car.

Clearly, this fine was issued by software and no human being was actually involved in the process. Apparently this is acceptable.

My question is, this behaviour is so egregious, does the "offender" have the right to completely ignore the fine and all its auto-generated escalation correspondence, until an actual human being finally looks at it, realises the error and quashes the case?

If he did ignore it completely, and the first human to see it were a judge, would that judge 1) have sympathy for his situation and reprimand the Local Authority for wasting the court's time, or 2) take a dim view of his lack of action to get the case quashed at an earlier stage?

If 2), what if this item of clothing became fashionable and was therefore causing this person to receive hundreds of these fines every week?

EDIT: In response to @motosubatsu's answer, in particular my "fashionable item" aspect. I suppose by "fashionable item" I was intending to cover a larger topic which I could summarise like this: Suppose I want to annoy somebody as much as possible, what's to stop me from printing a t-shirt with their actual number plate on it, then walking around past all sorts of cameras, knowing that they will receive multiple fines every day and have no choice but to keep calling and explaining. After all, the council has no duty to make it easy for someone to get through on the phone, so, potentially, I could walk around bus lanes and car parks all day. I could get some friends to do this all over the country in different local authority areas and the victim could - literally - have not enough hours in the day to have to keep fighting false fines. Would they not have some recourse to sue for harassment or "vexatious litigation"?

Answer 1

I assume you're talking about this case: Bus lane camera mistakes woman's sweater for number plate.

No he couldn't just ignore it - because that doesn't actually result in it getting put in front of a human (judge or otherwise). Instead the fine would escalate and ultimately be passed to a collections agency. Only challenging the Penalty Charge Notice (as this person did) would get a human involved.

As a bonus, if the automated fine happens to come with a S172 notice to identify the driver ignoring that is an offence in of itself (irrespective of the original alleged offence), and in many cases carries a worse penalty (£1000 and 6 points IIRC).

what if this item of clothing became fashionable and was therefore causing this person to receive hundreds of these fines every week?

While it's unlikely to get to that stage - the item of clothing on its own wouldn't do it, there needed to be a specific partial-obscurement of the garment as well, it's not impossible, after all perhaps it's their favorite sweater, they always carry their bag like that and cut across the bus lane on their way to work etc. In those circumstances there's nothing legally that changes, I'd expect the poor vehicle owner to be on first name terms with the people at the council enforcement call centre in question sooner rather than later.

Re edit:

Suppose I want to annoy somebody as much as possible, what's to stop me from printing a t-shirt with their actual number plate on it, then walking around past all sorts of cameras, knowing that they will receive multiple fines every day and have no choice but to keep calling and explaining. After all, the council has no duty to make it easy for someone to get through on the phone, so, potentially, I could walk around bus lanes and car parks all day. I could get some friends to do this all over the country in different local authority areas and the victim could - literally - have not enough hours in the day to have to keep fighting false fines. Would they not have some recourse to sue for harassment or "vexatious litigation"?

In all honesty I don't know for sure what would happen in this scenario - I can't think of a similar enough case. But I would expect targeting an individual in this manner would qualify as harassment pretty easily and for which there are both criminal and civil actions that can be taken.

I suppose hypothetically you could argue that the "number plate shirt" is effectively being used to make false allegations that the car's registered keeper had committed crimes, which opens up avenues to prosecution for Perverting the Course of Justice or wasting police time. But I have no idea how likely that would be to be pursued.