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Manchester Licensing Accounts

Some of you are aware I have been looking at the Accounts of the Licensing unit. I have found, what I believe to be a large amount of money missing from those accounts.

I have written to the Chief executives office expressing my concerns. The letter I receive back was far from satisfactory. I have had my figures looked at by another organisation, National Private Hire Association. They agree my figures show a huge discrepancy. They also point to their formula, which they call the 250 test, which whilst simple, is brilliant. You take the gross number of vehicles, Hackney and PH, add them together, in Manchester's case that comes to 3640 vehicles. you now divide this by 250. This is the amount of working days in a calender year
This returns a figure of 14.56

Manchester Council have to administer less than 15 cabs per day. Manchester councils declared cost to do this administration is £1,750,329.00. You now divide that by 250 (days worked) and it returns a figure of £7001.
Manchester Council charge us a total of £7001 a day to administer 14.56 cabs a day. Not a bad job by any standards, I would do it I bet you would as well

This is obviously taking the P*ss, you might think,but I believe another £714,963.00 is missing from the accounts, over the last two years.

I do not want to be labelled a trouble maker, although I probably already am, but I must take this further. I am meeting advisor's later this week and I believe the next step will be to place this before the Local Government Ombudsman.

Is anyone shocked?

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IDFIMH

It's the same at every council,and until the trade in those areas grow a pair they will keep getting away with,well done but I bet the rest of them in your area are not helping you?

That someone's stolen almost three quarters of a million pounds from the accounts?

Yes, shocking, but I'd like to see something approaching a compelling case first.

And what's the point of this "250 test"?

Is it written down in proper detail anywhere?

The 250 is a simple comparator, it can only be used to assess different councils performance. There are 250 working days in a year. You then get the Council's DECLARED expenditure on Licensing. You divide that figure by 250, in Manchester you get £7001. That is the amount the Council spend per day of your money. You then add all your Hack vehicle and the private hire vehicles together. Manchester has 3640. You then get 14..4 or something like that. Manchester charge £7001 to administer 14.4 vehicles. The same test used against Liverpool's accounts, a similar City in many ways, shows that Liverpool administer 11.5 (approx, doing this off top of my head) for the sum of £3057 per day.

The 250 test works only to show the disparity between Council's, but it does work.

Manchester's problem is they have declared less income from there Hack and proprietors Licenses, than they have received, shown over a two year period to be £743.000.

The written Accounts are with the District Auditor.

I questioned this the other week when I renewed my badge, on the recipt it said Miscellaneous. Now if it said Licensing renewal then fair enough. Sussex said they would be drip feeding this through to other departments which I think is wrong.

All Councils see the cab trade as a cash cow, it's easy money for doing nothing.

Not the amount, the mere fact that money paid in by taxi/PH owners/drivers has gone somewhere else.

I think that is the norm.

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IDFIMH

So you're comparing:

Manchester spending £7,001 to adminster 14.4 vehicles per day to
Liverpool spending £3,057 to administer 11.5 vehicles per day.

I know, why not just divide the annual budget by the number of vehicles and that gives you the spend per vehicle and that is more readily comparable between authorities.

That's one simple calculation and provides a more easily comparable figure between authorities. All this 250 days stuff is completely pointless. It involves more calculations and the resultant figures are not easily comparable.

But even then the figures could hardly be called 'simple comparators', because there's so many factors to be taken into account that it's difficult to compare authorities, thus using the figures will have many in the trade jumping up and down about not very much at all.

For a start, are the annual budget figures just for vehicles, or are they for the whole licensing budget?

I am not comparing anything. This is the comparator used for years by the NPHA, of which I am not a member. The NPHA have used it many times, to great success, I do not care either way, there must be many comparators between Council's. I just say this one is simple, and it works.

So you said the 250 is a "simple comparator", you provided comparative figures for Manchester and Liverpool but now you're saying you're "not comparing anything"?




Well it works at a very crude level, but there's so many variables that it's pointless using the figures as comparators without further investigation.

I was merely trying to warn against anyone reading jumping to conclusions on the basis of such figures.

It certainly provides an interesting basis for further investigation, but that's about it.

It really has gone straight over your bin lid hasnt it dusty !

You say


All this 250 stuff is just your above calculation with amount of vehicles licensed per year divided by 250(working days per year).....Whats completely pointless in that !

You wanna climb back in your bin and put the lid on it

The difference is the pensions ! Each council is different BUT on average 40 to 60% of all monies received by councils goes to pay for the pensions of retired council employees therefore you gave to remove 40% of the fees paid to allow for the amount included in the fees to cover this

i.e. if you pay £200 for your plate only £120 is the admin charge £80 is going to pay the pensions of all those ex Lo's and admin staff who retired at 55 on a fuinal salary pension !

In Lincolnshire I believe that over 75% of all council income goes on pensions according to figures quoted by the FSB !!!

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

It's a bit like saying:

Taxi Driver 1 - I pay £6 per day insurance for 15 passengers

Taxi Driver 2 - I pay £8 per day insurance for 14 passengers.

Wouldn't a more meaningful comparison just be to compare their annual premiums?

This 250 test sounds like the work of people with too much time on their hands. I think the word is 'convoluted'.

You should swap your cable for a lid Andy.

So all the money they deducted from their salaries over the years wasn't invested so that they could have a pension at the end of it?

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Note to self: Just because it pops into my head does NOT mean it should come out of my mouth!!

Well it probably was, but council pensions tend to be based on the final salary (a percentage of that), so if the money invested underperforms then the money to pay the pensions has to come from elsewhere, because the pensions paid are fixed - the pot that they're paid from isn't fixed in value.

In years gone by pension funds were generally overperforming, so there wasn't a problem, but more recently it's been the other way round.

That's what the debate about 'final salary pensions' is often in the news - public sector workers get a guaranteed amount when they retire, and if there's not enough money in the pension pot for that then it's current tax payers who have to foot the bill.

Meanwhile, private sector pensions tend to depend on the size of the pot when the person retires - if the investment has performed well then they'll get a good pension and vice versa.

That's what a lot of the private v public sector hoohah is all about - the public sector gets guaranteed pensions and often taxpayers have to make up any shortfall, whereas a private sector pension will depend on things like the stock market etc.

Having said all that, I suspect Edders' figures are a tad exaggerated.