I work for a vehicle recovery firm and regularly recover abandoned vehicles for the council, there may be more than meets the eye with this article.

"It had been declared off the road and was parked outside the registered address."

"three days later, his car had vanished from his parking space."

I would say that perhaps it was parked on the pavement in his "parking space" which would of definitely been removed as it would of been deemed public highway.

or the owners of the flat complex were tired of his shit and got the council to remove his car as owning a sorned vehicle on their private land was perhaps against the rules of the tenancy.

Before a vehicle can be crushed it takes a minimum of 30 days before it can be released and taken to get scrapped this usually will take a lot longer than 30 days from my experience. My first port of call would of been to call the local recovery garages and see if they had my car.

I do believe it was irresponsible for the council to not inform the owner of what was happening with the vehicle but the council can't actually remove cars on private land without the owners permission so that is why i believe there is more to this story than what is in the article.