Private Hire Monthly August 2004 Opinion
Let us now turn to dear old London.
Transport for London have perceived a problem with the legislation; some unscrupulous operators in London have taken advantage of a ‘loophole’ to use unlicensed cars on a contract basis - ie. We have a contract with a hospital to ferry patients about; therefore we are not taking the general public, so we don’t need a licence.
Some ever-so-naughty councils have, as it were, jumped on the bandwagon and said, "Whoopee! If we don’t use licensed vehicles, we can accept tenders from unlicensed practitioners of minicabbing, and consequently get a lot cheaper tenders than those who have to pay London’s wonderful licence fees. "
Something had to be done. I have always been of the opinion that Transport for London had more than enough power under section 32 of the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998, but TfL’s legal advice was that it was a problem for Government. Because of the issues involved, and the stalemate which has existed between TfL and the DfT, the Minister decided to pick up this crown of thorns - the resulting consultation document will be found on
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/d ... =10672&l=2
Perhaps it would be a good opportunity to correct any number of anomalies which, because of their age and size, need plugging, cementing, sewing up, refurbishment - and no, we don’t mean re-writing all the legislation... although that would be nice as well.
The point is that as we see it, in order to engineer this change in the legislation for London, it will have to be piggy-backed, and that means it will have to be slipped in to another relevant Act to piggy-back its way to market. Prime examples of this could be the roof sign legislation shoved on the back of the 1980 Act; the deregulation of taxi numbers stuck on the back of the 1985 Act. The question is: when will the next Act of relevance come along? Will there be a bit of a Transport Act to stick the M6 stretcher on it? And what about car sharing and carpool lanes? What about all the councils queuing up to stick everybody with congestion charging?
In actual fact there is quite a bit of a wish list out there. We’ve got a few wishes of our own: we would love to get rid of cross-border hiring stuff. We are told it is but a sentence away; the problem is, we need a piece of paper to write the sentence on. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get rid of section 75 contracts, and ensure that only licensed vehicles carry passengers? What about a re-definition or appraisal of when a volunteer car is not a volunteer car. Those two would link very well with the loophole-closing legislation in London.
And last but not least for this issue, folks, is the growing problem of the stretch limo. It is now nearly two years since the Department for Transport wrote to all local authorities, telling them that stretch-limos cannot be used for more than eight passengers, and therefore they are not PCVs. Because they are not PCVs but are carrying passengers for hire and reward, our conclusion to that letter was - well obviously these vehicles must be licensed as private hire vehicles.
But has this happened? Pretty obviously and widely - no, it has not.
Let me ask you to perform an exercise. Go and pick up your latest copy of the Yellow Pages. Turn to the taxi pages, or the chauffeur page, or the limousine page, and I will not be amazed if you say, Wow! There’s more stretch limos than taxis or private hire.
Well, it certainly seems that way... Members in Brighton, Bury and Harrogate are seething with rage at their authority’s apparent indifference to the dangers which users of these vehicles are facing.
Are you in the same boat? The Association members in Brighton, Bury and Harrogate would like to extend an invitation to all of you who have had enough of this growing problem. In the absence of any action by local authorities in many areas, there is a growing movement to take matters into their own hands. This could take the shape of local prosecutions for the use of these vehicles without operator, vehicle or driver licences.
If such cases were pursued with vigour, we would then be in a strong position to extend the prosecutions to having wrong or, because of the use to which the vehicle has been put, inappropriate insurance .
However, our barrister has come up with an even better solution: we formally ask these councils to license these vehicles, and if they refuse, then we judicially review that decision in the public interest.
So readers - if you are in an area where stretch-limos whiz about with no licences, and you would be interested in supporting this initiative, why not drop us a line; send us an e-mail; give us a ring
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