THE long-awaited outcome of York's Coppergate saga should be revealed on Thursday by the national Traffic Penalty Tribunal, following a dramatic U-turn.

City of York Council will finally discover whether it has won an appeal against a tribunal ruling last spring that it had no power to fine car drivers caught on camera using Coppergate when they shouldn't have, it was announced on Wednesday.

The tribunal said earlier this week that its Chief Adjudicator had decided it would not be appropriate to release the decision until after next month's council elections.

But on Wednesday a motorists' watchdog,the National Motorists Action Group, condemned the delay, claiming the tribunal had no power to defer the decision, and the tribunal announced a U-turn soon afterwards.

NMAG director Peter Ashford claimed the tribunal was duty-bound by law to publish all decisions concerning parking and traffic appeals promptly after they were made, under the Civil Enforcement of Parking Contraventions (England) Representations and Appeals Regulations 2007.

He said the ‘Procedure Relating to Appeals' required that, upon the decision being given by the adjudicator, it must 'as soon as practicable' be recorded in the statutory Register of decisions and a copy of it must be supplied to the parties to the appeal.

"That duty is imposed on ‘the proper officer’ of the tribunal who is responsible for maintaining up-to-date the Register of all appeal decisions as soon as they have been made," he said..

The council has already been waiting more than a year for the decision - a delay which Mr Ashford branded yesterday as "shocking and inexcusable."

He said: "It was reported that the adjudicator assigned to the case became indisposed for personal reasons but the review application could and should then have been re-assigned to any of the many other Tribunal adjudicators.

"For this administrative failure now to be compounded by the breath-taking meddling of the Chief Adjudicator in the politics of York and its council is the last straw.

"The Tribunal has no scope whatsoever to permit any political considerations to interfere with its prescribed judicial procedures; what the Chief Adjudicator “considers to be appropriate” is of no concern to anyone.

"The council, Mr Rhodes, and the long-suffering residents of York are due a fulsome apology for the appalling delay in deciding the Coppergate appeal review. They are entitled as of right to immediate publication of the belated decision."

The council has set aside £387,000 paid in fines by motorists caught on camera using Coppergate in case it has to issue refunds to them.

The tribunal's bombshell ruling last spring on Coppergate also applied to Lendal Bridge, which led to the council ending its ban on cars crossing the bridge and its later refund of thousands of motorists' penalty charge notices for breaching the ban.

A tribunal spokesman said initially that Mr Ashford's comments had been "noted" but said last night that the decision would be made public on Thursday. The spokesman could not say whether that was as a direct result of Mr Ashford's intervention.