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Im sure Brummie will find this interesting.Enjoy
IN THE LINCOLN CROWN COURT
AT LINCOLN
Before Judge Richard Pollard
D.C.Parsons
Appellant
v.
South Kesteven District Council
Respondents
Judgement
1. This Appeal arises from a decision of the Grantham Magistrates
on 22 January 1996. The Appellant has an interest in a hackney
carriage licence. His case is that conditions in his licence are
unlawful, for reasons set out hereafter. Although the Magistrates
held that he was a "person aggrieved" they refused him any
relief.
2. The first issue that arose on this appeal was whether or not
the Appellant is a "person aggrieved" within s.77 of the Local
Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. We gave our full
reasons yesterday for holding that he is such a person.
Essentially it is impossible to obtain a hackney carriage licence
from the Respondents unless the applicant has a taximeter
installed in his vehicle. We concluded that that amounted to a
"condition attached to the grant of a licence", within s. 47 of
the 1976 Act. As will become apparent later we also conclude that
the requirement to have a taximeter means that the Respondents
inevitably thereby enforce their Table of Fares.
3. A Council is entitled to impose such "conditions" as it
"considers reasonably necessary", s. 47(1) of the 1976 Act. In
this case the Council had considered it "reasonably necessary"
to require the installation of taximeters as a prerequisite
(which we deemed a condition) for the obtaining of a hackney
carriage licence, that being in their judgement necessary to
balance the interests of the public on the one hand and the
providers of the service on the other.
4. The Appellant's complaint is twofold:
(i) that the Respondents' decision was such that no reasonable authority could deem such a condition "reasonably necessary";
(ii) that the Respondents have, in any event, no power to impose such condition over the whole of their area.
5. To understand those arguments it is necessary to look at the
history and geography of the respondent's district and then to
look at the history of the legislation governing the grant of
hackney carriage licences.
6. South Kesteven District Council is comprised of the old urban
districts of Grantham, Bourne and Stamford, together with the surrounding "rural areas". It covers a total area of 360 square miles. It is one of the creatures of the 1972 round of local Government re-organisation created down by the Local Government Act 1972.
7. The history of hackney carriage licensing dates back to the
Town Police Clauses Act 1847. Under s.37 of that Act
commissioners were authorised to license such carriages "within
the prescribed distance, or, if no such distance is prescribed,
within 5 miles of the GPO of the town." Section 68 empowered the
commissioners to fix the fares charged by licensees. The
commissioners have been replaced by local authorities. By Section
171 of the Public Health Act 1875 the phrase "within the
prescribed distance shall, for the purposes of this Act, mean
within any urban Council".
8. Under the Local Government Act 1972, Schedule 14, para. 24(b)
the general extension of the powers of the old councils to the
new was made inoperative in relation to Hackney Carriage
licensing, that schedule stipulating that such licensing was
limited to the old urban areas.
9. Under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976
a local authority was given the means of formally administering
its licensing controls, by s. 47, cited already (para 3 above).
The Respondents applied these provisions to its old urban areas.
That is admitted by both sides (see admission 15 and Document
12).
10. A table of fares was thereafter introduced regulating the
Hackney Carriage fares in Grantham, Bourne and Stamford and
everyone proceeded on that basis.
11. The Transport Act 1985 extended Hackney Carriage licensing
powers to the whole of a Council's the area i.e. in this case to
the whole of the area administered by the South Kesteven District
Council. There is no other possible interpretation of the plain
wording of that Section. If there is any doubt about the meaning
of that Section it is immediately resolved by reading the
Circular from the Department of Transport at Paras 1 to 4, 7(c)
and 9 (Document 22). That Act also set up a potential system of
shared fares.
12. The Respondents, empowered so to do by the 1985 Act, applied
the licensing provisions of the 1976 Act to their whole district,
i.e. the rural as well as the urban areas. This was done by
resolution of the Council, as is again agreed under Admission 17,
and see Documents 13 and 14. Thereafter they instituted a Table
of Fares which was to apply to any journey within the District.
That was last updated in 1993.
13. The difficulty for licensees in such a vast area is that they
might have to travel 10 miles (the "dead" miles) before they can
"start the meter running" and it is this that is the Appellant's
grievance. We are told that the trade continued to charge above
this structure (without deliberately flouting it) to allow for
the fact that they cannot charge for the "dead" mileage. In
effect they carried on charging for the "dead" mileage on rural
pick-ups. It was only when an ultimately unsuccessful prosecution was launched that the present disputes between the - trade and the Council erupted. The Council finally climbed down in June 1996 and deregulated the trade, laying down only a "default tariff" but otherwise leaving it up to the parties to agree on a fare. The "default tariff" allows for a booking fee to make up for the "dead" miles.
14. We have concluded that the Council was empowered by statute
to regulate hackney carriage licences within its whole district
and decided so to do and that, therefore, the phrase "prescribed
distance" of the 1847 Act is replaced for present purposes by
"the whole of the area of the South Kesteven District Council".
15. We are satisfied that the Respondents have power to regulate
the hackney carriage trade within the whole of its area and may,
therefore, if it can do so in a reasonable way, regulate fares
within its whole area. The fact that it may be difficult to
construct a table of fares that is fair to all is a problem that
they and the trade are going to have to face. We can have no say
in how that is achieved. It may be that the Table of Fares will
have to differentiate between urban and rural fares, it may be
that the present system of allowing a "Booking Fee" in defined
circumstances is appropriate. That is a matter for the Council,
so long as it acts reasonably.
16. We are also satisfied that to impose an old urban fare
structure over a vast rural area was unlawful in that no
reasonable authority who applied its mind to the situation (and
we doubt that this one did) could expect the trade to cope with
that, given the inability to charge for the "dead" mileage. That
would mean that someone travelling 2 miles within Grantham would
be charged the same as someone travelling 2 miles within the
country, even if the taxi had had to travel 5 miles to pick them
up. For that is the fundamental nature of hackney carriages.
They can only charge from the point of pick-up (whether they
obtain the fare by plying for hire, sitting at a stand or by
answering the phone. In that last event the hiring is a private
one but the fare is still limited to the Table).
17. We believe that it is sophistry to say that we can look at
the requirement of a taximeter but that we cannot look at the
Table of Fares. We reject the contention that the Table can only
be looked at by way of judicial review. We cannot make any sense
of the appellate jurisdiction given to the magistrates and to
this court without looking at the Table and its inevitable
effect, particularly as the Table has effect, for the purposes
of the 1847 Act as if it were included in hackney carriage
byelaws (s. 65(5) of the 1976 Act). Taximeters are meaningless
without a Table of Fares. The real effect of the Respondent's
condition that there be a taximeter was that the council were
imposing a condition as to the fares that could be charged.
Indeed they must have thought that when they commenced their
prosecution of a driver for not imposing their fare structure.
18. We therefore conclude that it cannot have been "reasonably
necessary" to impose such an unfair fare structure. The
Appellant is justifiably "aggrieved" and we find in his favour.
Subject to argument we are minded to order the Respondents to pay
his costs, here and below.
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