The Dundonian wrote:
In the locked thread it was pointed out that Dundee City Council have in the past few years lost a couple of taxi licensing cases in the sheriff court.
In the last couple of weeks they've had to abandon a policy they had to fix a minimum price for drinks. They didn't loose a court case - this was also tried in Aberdeen and a licensee up there took them to court. The council lost so Dundee (and Perth) had to abandon the policy.
I don't know the exact details, but apparently it's first year law student stuff, so I would take anything Dundee licensing does with a pinch of salt.
Interesting, but contrary to what others may have said in the original thread, I never at any point said that the Dundee Licensing Committee were in the wrong.
Nor did I try to defend the driver who clocked his car.
What I did say was that from the little research I'd done it was obviously not clear whether the driver had committed any criminal offence or not.
The point is that the licensing committee were not there to decide whether the driver had committed an offence or not (which is for the courts to decide), but whether the driver was, in their opinion, fit and proper.
The concepts of criminality and fit and proper are not necessarily the same thing - it's possible for someone not to be fit and proper even if they haven't committed a criminal offence - if they had lied, for example.
But clearly no one has yet to come up with anything more concrete regarding the criminality of someone clocking a car (and not selling it in the course of a business), so presumably whether or not this constitutes an offence remains a grey area.