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PostPosted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:54 am 
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I can’t stand up or I will be in the way. Can people hear me alright? Ok, I will just sit here then. Well first of all, thank you very much for inviting us. It is very helpful to us that we are given the opportunity to meet people who have got front line experience as it were of the issues that we are trying to deal with on a legal basis. One of the key areas in this project is understanding the trade, understanding what you do and what your concerns are so I hope today will be helpful in that regard. I am going to talk for a little bit about, explain who the Law Commission are because it hardly obvious to everybody what we are. Firstly, we are an independent body, we are created by statute and, sorry I am going to have to stand up, it is a bit difficult to see you. We are an independent body created by statute in 1965 and our responsibility is the systematic development and reform of the law in England and Wales, we don’t cover Scotland and Northern Ireland but we do cover just England and Wales.

Now, our responsibility extends to the whole of the law so we have a number of different people working on different areas of the law, property law, family law, criminal law and so on but one of the teams that we have is the team which I am the manager of which is the public law team and we do essentially a series of projects which are largely about big bits of statute law which regulate or deal with important areas of public life and this is one of those. It is important to understand how we relate to the Government. We are kind of half in and half out of the Government, if you like. I am a civil servant but I don’t work for Ministers I don’t do what Ministers tell me I do what my Commissioners tell me. The Commissioners are not Civil Servants. The Chair of the Commission is a Court of Appeal Judge, Lord Justice Munby. The Commissioners are all senior either practising lawyers or academic lawyers and they don’t answer to a Minister either.

What we do however is our agenda is set by the Government, so the Government has to approve what we want to do. We can’t just decide that we are going to go and review the law of whatever it is off our own bat. The Government has to authorise us going ahead and doing that and in doing that they have to agree essentially the terms of reference or basis for the work we do, so they intervene at that point, they can tell us what to do at the beginning what we do after that is up to us so we are independent in the way in which we come to conclusions about how the law should be reformed. At the end of the process we give the Government the benefit of our wisdom and they can either accept it or not. They mostly do accept it but that is not invariable and certainly with a project of this size I would be astonished if they accepted everything we said at the end of the process. We have this system of programmes of law reform which go back to the 1960s, we are currently on our 11th programme of law reform and that is where this project, the project on taxis and private hire vehicles features. I want to explain a bit about how we came to do the project. As I said, this project is part of the 11th program of law reform.

That came out of a period of consultation from June to October 2011 where we simply went out and we told the world, as it were, what our criteria for selecting projects were, what sort of projects we might be interested in, not what subject matter, but they had to be the kind of thing that is not too political for us to do but at the same time something that can deliver real public benefit that we can have the resources to do, those sorts of things, and we got responses from a variety of people from Government departments themselves, from members of the public, professional bodies and lobby groups and so on. There were over 200 responses to that consultation. In that consultation the Department for Transport suggested that the law relating to taxis and private hire vehicles needed to be looked at. So they came to us and asked us to do it along with all these other projects that were being suggested. We then went through a process of sifting down the projects that we were interested in so I take a paper to the Commissioner saying we ought to keep looking at these projects but reject those ones and we finally came to the conclusion that one of those projects should be this project on taxis and private hire vehicles which is one of five different projects that my team is doing at the moment in February of this year and the programme itself came up in July of this year so it kicked off properly in July.

I am emphasising this because I think some people have thought, I am not sure whether we are part of the stitch up or whether it is the Department for Transport who are stitching us up and that might be true but I want you to understand the process by which we came to adopt this project. It wasn’t because somebody nobbled somebody in the back corridor it was all to do with an open process of consultation where they would be coming to us to ask us to do it and we were putting these projects alongside other projects in terms of whether we ought to do them or not. Now it is true that Government Departments are in a stronger position than other people in suggesting we do projects because it is more likely, if they are suggesting a project to us, that it will be implemented at the end of the process and what we want is we want to see what we have done being taken up by the Government and changing the law and we hope improving things. So there is essentially Government involvement at two stages during this process of getting to the project.

First of all while we are developing the process and this would apply to projects that were proposed by people other than Government Departments, we will be talking to the Government Department and asking them to make a commitment that they are committed to doing something in this area of law, not necessarily what we come up with of course, because they don’t know what they are going to come up with but they are committed to the idea of law reform in this area of the law, and so the DfT were able to do that, and then, as I said earlier, the Lord Chancellor has to sign off the programme and has to agree the whole programme at the end of the process and so it goes through a process of approval within Government policy approval. This is an outline of the timing of the project, we are at the moment in the stage of pre-consultation and the development of the consultation paper. By pre-consultation I mean, frankly, events like this. We go out and we try and talk to key players in the field to get a sense of what people think is wrong with the law and to get a sense of, if there is something wrong with the law, it doesn’t go without saying that there is and if there is something wrong with the law, what sort of direction we should be thinking about, what issues we should be thinking about developing our proposals for the law.

The next stage in that is we have got an advisory group meeting in November, this month it is the 22nd of this month. Now these advisory groups, I think in a way the term advisory group is probably the wrong term for it because it is not a kind of organised group that is going to meet over and over again and have a kind of identity. Essentially it is a way for us to get as many stakeholders as we can from the different parts of the field into one room so that we can try out some of the ideas that we have got on them and you can say, the stakeholders can say, what is wrong and what is right about the way we are going. Now, often when we are doing law reform projects there is a kind of, if not a consensus about what we ought to be doing, there is usually a consensus about the sort of things that are wrong with the law and even if we are doing a project on, say, law of landlord and tenant, the law regulating rented property tenants’ bodies and landlords’ bodies will be at daggers drawn over lots of things but they will also agree about lots of things, about what is wrong with the law and that kind of thing.

I am getting the sense that that isn’t necessarily the case in the taxi world. No doubt you will correct me if I am wrong at the end when we get on to questions and discussions so that is an interesting point, how the advisory group goes is going to be interesting and helpful. We will have one meeting now where, as I say, we will try out the sorts of ways in which our thinking is going on the advisory group, we will see what comes back to us and we will have a discussion about it. The next stage will be the public consultation and that will be on the basis of a substantial consultation paper. We take the view that you get a better consultation, you test people’s views better, if you come out with a fairly concrete set of proposals that are well argued and explained but our consultation papers usually run to about 200 pages and I am trying to keep that down a bit to about 150 or something and then there will usually be a summary of about 15 – 20 pages and most people obviously tend to respond to the summary but the detail is there and we think it is important to have done a fair bit of thinking before we go out and consult because that gives people a structure that they can throw bricks at rather than just asking waffly open questions, you know, do people think that accessibility is an important issue which in a sense doesn’t inspire people to come back with well thought out responses of their own.

Now with a lot of consultation about, everybody consults these days, we have been in the forefront of consultations from when we were established. An absolutely critical part of any law reform project is the consultation period. I have been doing this job for far too long, I have done at least a dozen different law reform projects and I can’t think of one in which we didn’t make the important changes as a result of consultation and in most of them, frequently at any rate, we made pretty fundamental changes so it is a genuine and open consultation process. I know everybody tells you that including the Government, the difference is it is true and I can show you points that we changed fundamentally in previous projects. So we are aiming to publish it in April, there will be a three month consultation period so May, June and July will be the consultation period. After that we settle down and we’ll start thinking about what you said and what the other stakeholders have said in the consultation process and in meetings and so on and we will sit down and try and work out where policy should be going. I would emphasise that during the consultation period we are very keen to get out and to talk to people not just yourselves but also, perhaps, your members and other stakeholders and if you want to arrange, we are very happy to accept invitations to come to any event and if you want to set up events to discuss in detail our proposals we are very happy to do that. It will be very helpful to us as part of the process. We will then come to our own conclusions.

We will then probably have another advisory group at that point so that we can test run our final conclusions on people and then finally we will, we have got our own parliamentary draftsmen seconded to the Law Commission, they will produce a draft Bill. The aim is to publish the draft Bill and report, our final report with our final recommendations, in November of 2013 which will allow legislation before the end of this Parliament if that is what the Department for Transport want to do. How we go about it, well I have mentioned some of this. It has been borne in upon us that one of the key things with this project is to try and understand the trades themselves and how they work in practice and that is what we are trying to do at the moment. Now, I am sure we don’t know everything by any means yet and I am sure you are going to help us by telling us about how things work in practice, that is part of what this process is about. You can never tell how the law is used by just reading what the law is in the law books but that’s doubly true in this case. We will, however, look at the law in the law books and review the existing legislation with a view to developing provisional ideas for the consultation then the public consultation process leading to the conclusions and draft recommendations.

Key issues. Now I know that the policy of the Association is essentially pro status quo but really you want to argue that many of the key features of the current system ought to stay. That is a helpful starting point to know that that is where you are coming from. What I am going to do is, in talking about some of these areas, I am going to suggest the sorts of arguments that are going to be persuasive in trying to persuade us that you are right and suggest some of the sorts of arguments that aren’t going to be so persuasive. I am not excluding your views, you can agree whatever you like and I am sure you will but I am trying to give you a flavour of what the most effective way of putting the kind of case that I think you want to put will be. A couple of starting points there. Firstly our terms of reference refer to taking a deregulatory approach. Now that was something that was put in specifically by the Department by Ministers, I think, when we were discussing the terms of reference and obviously the Government that we have got at the moment and our previous Government is committed to essentially a de-regulatory agenda across the field. I will tell you what I think that means for us, what it means for us is that when we are looking at regulatory provisions, we are looking at bits of regulation we have to ask those bits of regulation to justify themselves.

Now very frequently we are going to come to the conclusion that they are justified but the starting point, the burden of proof is on whoever wants to say that we should continue to regulate this bit or that bit of the trade. A general point here is that this whole deregulatory move is based on the idea that, by and large, open competition in a capitalist economy is the best way of delivering goods and services. That is the general view and that is part of where we have to start. Now if that is the starting point then one argument that isn’t going to be so persuasive is that you need to have certain regulatory features in place because it guarantees your income. That is a perfectly entirely understandable and legitimate reason for you to want to make arguments but you are not going to get very far if you are relying on the argument that we need this to maintain our income. I wouldn’t go all the way with that by any means and one of the interesting points, one of the points that we put down as one of the things that guides what we ought to be doing is there is a need for stability in the taxi trade and one of the interesting comparisons between taxis and private hire is that taxi drivers tend to be in it for the long haul and private hire drivers very frequently aren’t, they come and go and that actually does have some significance if you are talking about good ways to regulate people because, by and large, people who are repeat players, people who are in it for their career are going to be more amenable to the regulation and the threat of loss of licence for instance is going to be more significant to somebody in that situation then it will be in a high turn over trade so these arguments are – this is not a blanket point and it is a point that I think you need to confront.

So, with that in mind, just running through these key issues and I am not going to say much about this because it is probably more helpful for you to come back at us when we get to the discussion phase of this. Firstly, one tier or two tier? Well, there are a lot of persuasive arguments being put by people that having the kind of two tier system we have got at the moment is a merely historical accident, that there is no fundamental difference between the sorts of jobs that vehicles carrying passengers do and we ought to have a one tier system. Perhaps a one tier system with knobs on. It is true to say that most of the versions of one tier systems that have seen proposed are not really one tier systems they are actually different sorts of two tier systems but very frequently the tier that is squeezed a bit tends to be your tier rather than the private hire tier, so there are strong arguments on that side of the fence.

There are however, also strong arguments on the other side of the fence. One of those arguments that we think is a particularly powerful one, is that the reason that we are regulating the taxi trade at all is because of certain features that an economist would recognise as justifying regulation. Why don’t we just let anyone drive a cab and do what they like, the way they have done for a while in Dublin, in Ireland. Well, the reason we don’t do that is because the customer can’t trust the vehicle, they can’t trust the driver unless somebody is making sure that the driver of the vehicle isn’t going to attack them and the vehicle isn’t going to fail to be fit. That would justify regulation of both trades, both private hire and taxis. However, the way that taxis operate with both hailing and working from ranks creates another and different reason for regulating that is because there is no real opportunity for the customer/provider price bargaining as it were in truth. Now you could say that there is some opportunity for that in private hire, there isn’t really when we are doing the core taxi trade stuff of plying for hire and working off ranks.

That is actually quite a good reason for saying, well if you have got two different reasons for regulating the trade, you may not want to do it in two rather different ways depending on the time and the nature of the economic activity that we are talking about, private hire as opposed to taxis. So I’d say about one tier, two tier although a lot of people when they come in, certainly when I came into this I thought it is obvious really the one tier solution is the first thing you think of. I think there are strong arguments, and we recognise that there are strong arguments, for two tiers, I don’t think that is necessarily where a lot of other people are but it is very much an open door argument from your point of view so you, if you want to be justifying two tiers, you want to be justifying it on the basis that there is particular point about having higher levels of regulation of taxis than there is of private hire which means that you have got to have two different structures because you need more regulation of taxis because of these economic factors I am talking about.

Standards: this is one of the areas where the debate tends to concentrate around local vs national. A lot of people think that there should be simple national standards for vehicles and drivers across the whole country, essentially the issues are the same everywhere in the country really so you just have blanket national standards, you don’t need to worry there then about things like making cross border enforcement a lot easier, because you are enforcing a single set of standards and those sorts of arguments. There are arguments on the other side, there are arguments around the local nature of some taxi regulation. Perhaps that is a stronger argument when you are talking about taxis than when you are talking about private hire. Maybe there is a closer local connection with taxis we are working off ranks and hailing in an area that we got to know and, the reason that private hire, it may be, not so very different from one area to another so should we be talking about national standards or local standards or should we be talking about a combination of the two? Obviously if we do away with those local standards then we do away with things like colour standards.

You know, some of you might think that is a good thing or a bad thing but it would be quite a big change to the way in which taxis are perceived. It might be legitimate to have colour standards and other identifiers in different areas. I was reading a blog by your good Chairman about someone licensing a smart car in some obscure out of the way place. If you had local standards you can do that kind of thing if it is right for the locality, so there are arguments both ways there and there may also be arguments for both. There may be arguments for minimum national standards but variations on a theme in a local area.

There are all possibilities or you could just argue for pure local standards. Each is a perfectly legitimate argument to make. Enforcements, well the key issue there I think is the out of area issue and the straightforward way of dealing with that is to allow enforcement officers from local authorities to enforce against out of area taxis working in their area in other words in your area or you working in another area. There is no obvious legal reason why you shouldn’t do that, there may be issues about whether there will be a particular incentive for a local licensing officer to do that. There might also be an issue about whether there was an incentive for local licensing officers in some places to over enforce against out of area people. All of those sorts of issues are up for grabs.

There is another set of issues around whether there are enough powers for licensing officers and in particular we are being told that there aren’t enough powers against pure touts as it were about a licensing officer can demand to see your licence and it is an offence if you don’t show your licence to a licensing officer but if somebody isn’t a licence holder there is no power for a licensing officer to question him essentially to establish if that is the case. So may be there is a case for greater powers for licensing officers. Of course it may be possible for police to do that and it may be that in a lot of situations licensing officers are working with the police but there are certain powers that licensing officers don’t have that they think they should.

Accessibility, well there are issues around. Accessibility is partly about disabled accessibility which I know you have been very exercised about in the past, those are there. We can’t plausibly come up with a solution that says we don’t have to worry about disabled access to cabs anymore but it is important to keep what you mean by disabled access in the right perspective. If you take disability as meaning disabled in the legislative sense the old DDA sense now the Equality Act sense, it is a small minority of disabled people who have wheelchairs and a lot of people who are non-wheelchair user disabled people may well find saloon type vehicles better for them, more accessible for them than wheelchair accessible vehicles. So we have got to do the right job in terms of wheelchair accessibility but equally we have got to make sure that that is not being seen as being the only issue around disabled accessibility.

That is not the end of accessibility as an issue, there is also an issue around rural areas and whether you need to be able to create licensing zones for instance that would effectively force cabbies into an area where they would have to service a rural population. It’s not going to work if they can’t make money out of it so that that would have to be put right but at the same time a lot of people are arguing that taxis are particularly important for mobility in rural areas and that the regular structure ought to encourage that. The legitimate argument-taxi economics don’t stack up. You could take the line, I am not saying that anyone has particularly, you could take the line that, looking at it like that it is just finding a way of subsidising people who want to live in nice rural areas. There are arguments to be had on both sides of that and another key accessibility issue is this night time economy issue, this issue about clearing the streets of drunk young people when the clubs throw out and that is where a lot of the enforcement issues become very acute because that is when there is a real incentive for touts, PHVs to be out trying to pick people up off the street and pure completely unlicensed touts trying to operate but it is a real challenge, I think, because the people who are going to be arguing two tier one of the things they are going to be saying is there may not be much of a hailing market generally outside London but the one point in which there is an on street hailing type, ranking type market is at that particular point, the point in which people are being thrown out of the pubs and clubs and are not getting rides home but that is a strong argument for the one tier people who say we ought to have PHVs picking people up off the street legally at that point, so you know you are going to have to work out what the answer to the argument is.

Finally on the licensing process itself, the actual way in which we dish out licences there is a national/local issue. Should you be issued with your licences once you have gone through the correct processes by the local authority area or is it really a national function that should be dealt with on a national basis or might you want to look at that in different ways for the two halves of the trade. Might there be a difference between PHVs and taxis in terms of licensing? These are all issues where we certainly haven’t come to, we have got our own views within the team, we might have different views but we certainly haven’t come to anything remotely resembling conclusions and those are the kind of areas that we will be putting to the advisory group I hope in a bit more detail and a bit more advanced preparation, as it were, when we have the advisory group meeting and these are the kind of arguments that I think you need to be lobbying in at us. Finally there is a blog there which I quite accidentally got put on the power point with quantity controls. Now I know this is something that a lot of taxi drivers feel passionately in favour of but it is also something that the de-regulators have got very strongly in their sights.

As I understand it the number of areas that have quantity controls has diminished enormously in recent years it was I think the OfT reckoned it was about half areas by the time they did that review of it in 1998 is it? Sorry 2003 it had gone down to about a third and people say it continues to go down. Nevertheless, it is a very emotive issue and a very important one. If you are going to justify controls, quantity controls, I said at the beginning you have got to work out what the justification for these things is because if you can’t then the burden of proof isn’t discharged. If you don’t justify a piece of regulation then you are not going to get it. Well one way of justifying it is in terms of congestion and that is the key issue. It is what an economist would call an externality. You have got to stop people getting in because you have got to control the quantity of cabs because it is imposing a burden on people outside the cab trade, as it were, which is other users of the streets and that kind of thing. So you have got to do it on the basis of pure congestion, that congestion is bad for our cities, it is economically costly and so on.

There is also the issue of over-ranking but that is a bit of a harder argument for you. The argument for you is, we need quantity controls because we can only get x number of cabs on the rank. Well one answer is there should be more ranks or one other answer is we ought to have some broader approach to ranking and people talked about effectively ranking from legal parking, you know you can park as if it were a mini rank as it were. Further, an economist would be harder-nosed still and say if there isn’t enough room on the ranks you should be riding around trying to get hailed fares and if you are not getting hailed fares exit the market! That is what competition in a capitalist economy is all about. So there is an argument, I am not saying there aren’t arguments around over-ranking, but you are probably better to concentrate on the arguments that say congestion is costing everybody else money and you get these great pictures don’t you sometimes of the whole of the centre of the town that looks like it’s congested with a load of cabs of a particular colour. Those are the sorts of arguments that we are going to make work for quantity control but it is very high on the list of things that anyone coming in to it from a sort of outside from a deregulatory prospective is going to want to be gunning for.

That is a quick whip through some of what we see as the key areas. I will emphasise at the end, I was having a chat with some people just before coming in and they were making the point that what happens if you decide the law doesn’t need changing? Well if the law doesn’t need changing we will come to that conclusion, we will say it and the Law Commission certainly has done in the past. I think it is highly unlikely that there is nothing in taxi law that needs changing and I think it is highly unlikely that the current form of taxi law will not need changing but you could have a new Taxi and Private Hire Act, which brought the law together in one place, brought the language up to date and made it more accessible but didn’t actually change very much in practice and didn’t change the systems. Now that would certainly be on the cards if you could persuade us it was the right way forward.

You might think that there are some things that you do want changing on reflection. Maybe you have got issues that you would like to see enforcement change, maybe you would like to see ranking relaxed or something, I don’t know but the options are between absolutely no change at all and we will leave the 1847 Act, the three different systems and all the rest of it, we could leave all that in place, that is an option but you could also have an option which is simply to modernise and tidy up, maybe do one or two things that we think are right but not disturb the basic pattern. That is a perfectly respectable line to take but you are going to have to argue it on a basically regulation has got to justify itself kind of basis.

The next step, well as I said earlier, the advisory group is on the 22nd and we are looking forward to that. I read the evidence session from the Select Committee where people from the taxi trade inside and outside of London and from the PHV trade were queuing up to say “don’t take any notice of what the last bloke said.” I don’t know if it will be entirely like that or not but it will certainly be interesting. Then it’s a question, as I said earlier, of policy development working with Commissioners to come to the conclusion that we come to. I should make the point that we go to our Commissioners with all of our proposals and they question us very hard about it and I have never been to a Commissioners meeting where you didn’t change it so it is not a rubber stamping exercise, it is a tough process and then on to the consultation process. Right, well those are our contact details, that is me and Jessica who is behind me who is the lawyer who is working full time on the project and we will be very happy to take any questions or listen to any points and don’t feel you have to formulate questions first to make a point.

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 1:48 pm 
Seems like a balanced man, lets hope he listen's to those that do know the taxi trade and puts PH back where it belongs.....servicing people who have phoned them.


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 4:23 pm 
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I'd like to read what, if anything, they have said to the private hire companies, associations, unions

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 4:26 pm 
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toots wrote:
I'd like to read what, if anything, they have said to the private hire companies, associations, unions



I think you'll find they might not be as transparent as the NTA.

CC

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:13 pm 
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Quite clearly the chap ain't a mug.

My view is that big changes are ahead.

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 11:10 pm 
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captain cab wrote:
toots wrote:
I'd like to read what, if anything, they have said to the private hire companies, associations, unions



I think you'll find they might not be as transparent as the NTA.

CC


You could well be right but it would be nice if they were. Have they already met with private hire etc?

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 9:00 am 
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toots wrote:
You could well be right but it would be nice if they were. Have they already met with private hire etc?

But who is the 'Private Hire'?

Most certainly not the NPHA or the London PH 'Spivs' Association?

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 9:05 am 
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Sussex wrote:
toots wrote:
You could well be right but it would be nice if they were. Have they already met with private hire etc?

But who is the 'Private Hire'?

Most certainly not the NPHA or the London PH 'Spivs' Association?



They appear to be the ones invited to the meeting on 22nd November.

CC

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 4:27 pm 
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captain cab wrote:
They appear to be the ones invited to the meeting on 22nd November.

I wish them well then.

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 6:29 pm 
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Sussex wrote:
captain cab wrote:
They appear to be the ones invited to the meeting on 22nd November.

I wish them well then.



your mob are invited :shock:

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 9:20 pm 
What point is there when the body doing the business doesn't know who they supposed to be looking at, if they are going to speak then best they speak about their side of things, like slave fares, long shift patterns, discounts so customers can pay later ffs, meters and the insistance they use one, not sitting near venues unless on legal business, not using a bus lane they aren't entitled to, etc etc.


Hey Mark, maybe not you personally but so you can get my feeling, imagine you are on the Palace Pier with a bag of chips, look up and you will see what PH has become.


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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 10:44 pm 
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captain cab wrote:
your mob are invited :shock:

Not quite sure they are my mob any more. Image

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 10:47 pm 
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Doom wrote:
Hey Mark, maybe not you personally but so you can get my feeling, imagine you are on the Palace Pier with a bag of chips, look up and you will see what PH has become.

Haven't got a clue what you are on about, and care even less.

But I can tell you that the PH trade in my area is better organised and run than the hackney carriage trade.

If you manor is a mess, then you might need to look a bit nearer to home to find out why.

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 11:10 pm 
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Sussex wrote:
Doom wrote:
Hey Mark, maybe not you personally but so you can get my feeling, imagine you are on the Palace Pier with a bag of chips, look up and you will see what PH has become.

Haven't got a clue what you are on about, and care even less.


Seagulls crapping on you? :lol:


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PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 11:14 pm 
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Dusty Bin wrote:
Seagulls crapping on you? :lol:

They wouldn't dare. [-X

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