Taxi Driver Online

Council plans to get tougher on taxi firms hiring drivers with licences from outside the city

Council bosses are looking at carrying out a major review which could see every Nottingham taxi operator only using city council licensed drivers. Richard Antcliff, head of licensing at Nottingham City Council, said private hire companies are recruiting drivers with licences from as far away as Wolverhampton.

Mr Antcliff said some of the drivers not licensed in the city will be "plying for hire" - when they drive around the streets of the city looking for people to pick up. He said having every driver licensed by Nottingham City Council means the local authority has more power over those drivers who flout the law. Plying for hire has become a major issue in the city centre, especially at the weekend when Nottingham attracts thousands of revellers.

The city council's licensing team have been targeting drivers who obtain private hire licences from other councils such as Gedling, Rushcliffe and Wolverhampton and then 'tout' for business - also known as 'plying for hire' - on the streets of Nottingham. Private hire vehicles may only pick up passengers when pre-booked, rather than from a rank or being hailed down like a city hackney cab.

But the city council says around 200 drivers are regularly breaking the law and putting the public at risk, with a small minority using their cover to commit other offences. These can include charging high fares, and leaving the passenger uninsured if an accident was to occur while in the vehicle.

Mr Antcliff told the Post: "Private hire companies are using drivers as far away as Wolverhampton. We are going to review the operators' licence and put a condition in that they have to be Nottingham city drivers, meaning they have to be licensed by Nottingham City Council.

"We are not prepared to have [drivers licensed by] other cities and other towns coming into the city with different conditions committing criminal offences and us to be left powerless. "We have a duty to protect the Nottingham public. We want a tougher grip on it. The majority of drivers are absolutely fine but plying for hire is damaging the trade. It is putting the public at risk." He said that if the review, which is still in its early days, is enforced then the city council would have the power to suspend or revoke a licence.

He said it was acceptable for Gedling and Rushcliffe-licensed private hire drivers to drop off their fares in the city centre, but not to stay around. He said: "They are licensed in Gedling - go work in Gedling!" He said better relationships had been formed with Gedling and Rushcliffe Borough Council and the licensing team now has the powers to "check and challenge" drivers who are licensed with these authorities to see if they are breaching their conditions.

Private hire driver Azeem Hanif, 46, from Basford, is the chairman of the trade union - United Private Hire Drivers (Nottingham Branch) - which supports more than 100 private hire drivers. He said: "It is an interesting concept. Principally it is not a bad idea but it will be difficult to enforce.

"If Mr Antcliff makes this compulsory it will drive the operators out of the city. "There is a rogue element in the trade but he is saying it is the out of borough drivers that are causing the issue, it is closer to home. "There needs to be pressure on the operators who have a duty of care that their drivers are not plying for hire and damaging the reputation."

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IDFIMH

Not to many local drivers will be crying in their soup over that one.

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IDFIMH

So isn't this simply trying to reverse the situation ushered in by the Deregulation Act?

If so then isn't the council thus trying to thwart the express will of Parliament?

Good luck with that if challenged in court.

As I said in another thread, the local council cannot have a law that goes against a national law. Again, good luck in court.

doomed to failure

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

I think a good case can be argued in court in support of the council's actions/proposals.

Firstly I'm not sure parliament, when they considered and passed that Dereg section really foresaw the consequences of their actions.

Secondly there are also many laws which put numerous duties on councils to ensure the safety of the public through the licensing process.

This was outlined in detail by the B&H operator's QC in the Uber panel hearing.

When you have conflicting legislation the court will look at safety and what parliament actually wanted.

I very much doubt the absolute mess caused by the dereg act, and the spivs and Uber that have abused it, will win out in the end.

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IDFIMH

But as I mentioned above, there are numerous laws which put duties on councils to ensure safety.

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IDFIMH

the thing is this is a bit of a red herring every licensing authority has a duty to ensure safety and all have testing regimes which are broadly similar the argument that only the testing stations in your district/borough are testing to the right standard is a specious argument

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

Not so sure about that - Parliament is sovereign, so when there's a clear conflict between an Act of Parliament and something local, then the national legislation takes precedence. In this case the intention of the legislators seems fairly straightforward, and the legislation unambiguous - there's no doubt that Parliament wanted operators to be able to use non-local vehicles if the legislative provisions were met.

As Roy says in another post, if there's a clear conflict then the national law wins, and local rules are always subordinate.

And as Edders says, the other issues are red herrings - plying for hire is a plying for hire problem, and only indirectly related to the cross-border thing. Ditto different standards - that was obviously always going to be the case, and the problem here is a more general one rather than related to the cross-border issue per se.

Don't think the other duties of councils to promote safety are really relevant if the Act of Parliament is clear and unambiguous - again, these are not directly relevant to the intention of Parliament, which was to enable cross-border working.

Of course it's a mess, but the mess can only be cleared up by Parliament - local authorities can't effectively overturn the clear will of the legislators, however desirable that many seem.

As for Brighton, don't know the details, but I took it that the problem with Uber using cars from other areas was about a breach of trust, essentially - they said they'd only use Brighton cars for whatever reason, but weren't obliged to by law, but when they reneged on their promise then that became a breach of trust thing, thus relevant to fitness and propriety.

I'm guessing that Brighton never had a provision specifically forbidding cars from other areas (ie what Nottingham is proposing) precisely because there are no legal powers to stop them. If there had been, then presumably the council could have taken specific action against Uber the minute they started using out-of-area cars.

Of course, that's not to say that Nottingham couldn't ban out-of-area cars and face no challenge. As we all know, councils do lots of things that could be legally challenged, but for various reasons they get away with it. And of course, for PR reasons (rather than strict adherence to the law) Uber are now rowing back slightly on using vehicles across borders, so who knows how it will all pan out.

But, in the final analysis, Parliament may have enacted extremely bad law, but only Parliament can overturn it.

They'll find something to stop the out of district cars working for private hire companies licensed with Nottingham City Council. The Council have a right to protect the public.

But it is national law that ensures councils take into account safety matters when dealing with licensing matters.

It's only local laws which define what councils do to fulfill their national duties.

I really doubt a court will go against a licensing authority when the decision is solely down to safety issues.

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IDFIMH

The dereg section was sold as a minor change that would allow firms to pass on work, from time to time, to cars licensed elsewhere. Maybe if a car broke down a long way from home or a firm that has a little sub office outside of the area.

It was never sold as whole sale change to the taxi licensing system.

There are 100s possibly 1000s of judgments which include the words 'not what parliament had intended', and in my view, if challenged, this case would be another one.

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IDFIMH

Agree with absolutely *everything* you say, *except* that when a law is clear and unambiguous, then to that degree what Parliament intended is self-evident, and there's no need to look into the background of the legislation to work out what was intended. When something is ambiguous then the courts can look at the evidence to deduce the precise intention, but in this case the evidence points in the other direction.

Thus looking at the Brighton decision letter, the section about using out-of-area cars amounts to several hundred words, but there's no suggestion that in doing so Uber is breaching the provisions of the legislation. So the letter says:



This is consistent with what I said yesterday about a breach of trust and how that's relevant to fitness and propriety. Instructively, the letter also says:



That final sentence is a bit odd - essentially it's asking Uber if the council can use a condition banning out of town cars.

Which is presumably because Brighton has no specific powers to ban out of town cars, for the reasons I outline above. So essentially the Nottingham proposal is do what Brighton self-evidently thinks they have no power to do, thus consistent with what I said earlier.

As I said yesterday, if local authorities had prima facie powers to ban the use of out of town cars then they'd have presumably done so long before now, and the likes of Brighton would have taken some sort of enforcement action long before the operator licence renewal process.

Many many times on TDO I have been mean to councils and pointed out that some of them make crazy illegal decisions.

What I will say in reverse of that is Nottingham is not a little back water, and the proposals outlined in the article would not have arisen out of a whim by a junior LO or clueless Councillor.

But even if they had, then the proposals would go before more senior staff and licensing lawyers both internally and externally.

So I do take on board what has been written by others above, however in my mind I think the council has got a good chance of beating any appeal, if it comes to that.

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IDFIMH

I think the council were asking Uber if they would consider using only B&H cars in B&H, in the same way they only use London cars in London.

If Uber had said yes then the council might have allowed them to keep their license, as that was what Uber said they would do in 2015.

They could have dealt with the data breach issue with a formal warning.

But in essence B&H council have removed the license from Uber in B&H because the council can't enforce their licensing requirements on cars not licensed by them. That's not a million miles from what Nottingham want.

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IDFIMH