Taxi Driver Online

This is quite an interesting piece in TaxiPoint. But when I saw the headline, immediately wondered when the term 'GMB' would appear. Took a while, but it is there

Quite a long piece, and most of it is well-worn territory for folks on here. And all those fancy made-up terms, capital letters and the rest give it a certain amateur hour flavour [eg ‘Triple Intended Use Policy’ (Triple IUP)]

But spot which big issue isn't mentioned


CROSS-BORDER WORKING: How a national ‘Intended Use Policy’ could help enforce the triple lock rule

https://www.taxi-point.co.uk/post/cross ... -lock-rule

...so while the effective norm in pieces like this is to blame the Deregulation Act 2015 for all the cross-border/out-of-area stuff, the piece above doesn't even mention it, and effectively implies that nothing much has changed in terms of the legislation, regulation and rules for decades.

But, in a nutshell, I think it's fair to say that the 2015 Act merely facilitated or further enabled cross-border/out-of-area working, rather than initiating it from scratch.

So to that extent there's nothing incorrect about the TaxiPoint/GMB piece - the whole thing has been going on for decades. But the 2015 Act (and, at the same time, the influence of a national brand like Uber, and advances in booking and despatch technology) did make a difference, particularly in terms of scope and scale

So it seems very odd to entirely omit mention of the 2015 Act.

Kind of reverses the normal paradigm for pieces like this. Or something like that

The solution could be as easy as the above, although I would insist that councils not only had the powers to revoke, but had a legal duty to revoke.

Set the % at a sensible level, maybe 50-60%, and that would allow cars to still undertake work outside their licensing area, but not allow them to work permanently outside.

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IDFIMH

rutland has an intended use policy but does it stop x border ?

Correct answer=NO

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

Delving back through bus licencing laws a fe years ago unravelled some intersting cases, especilly in the days when buses were licenced as Hackney and stage carriages. A couple of cases I've been personally involved with found that it is the intended use of the vehicle that counted.

One was a rail replacement bus service in Manchester, buses were drafted in from London, driven by office staff with the appropriate licence rather than full-time bus drivers who, by then, had run out of hour. The DVLA or whatever they were called in those days were involved when they found what had happened. Ho ho, no tachos fitted or used. London to Manchester is bout 200 miles, 5 or 6 hours drive in a double decker. It was deemed that the buses were going to be used on local bus services as most rail replacements are these days, drivers following a timetable. Therefore the final use was local bus.

Another was when I got nicked for driving a small coach in a bus lane in Northampton in 1974. Corporation buses used it, Unite Counties did, as did National Express, but not the local coach company I worked for. It went to court 5 times IIRC, representing myself. Mags found that I was going empty to collect college students so couldn't got down that road. I argued that corporation buses wet empty along that road to and from their depot. Another adjournment and they found that had I been working a regular service I could have used that road. But my students were not paying separate fares, the college was paying for it as a private hire, I couldn't use it, fine £10. It is the ultimate use tat counts.

I'd suggest that the same principle would be applied to taxis and PH operating out of area on the off-chance may well invalidate insurance. Different if the journey is pre-booked.