Taxi Driver Online

Looking at our LA's licensing accounts I've noticed an expenditure of nearly £50,000 for 'CRB checks'.

Drivers are charged £50 for the council to do the CRB's which is made up of the agencys cost plus the councils admin fee, so where has the cost to the council come from ? Is there a charge to the council by the agency for processing checks ?

Ours is £36 Sasha.

Maybe you are funding every CRB check done by the council.

Unless you have 3000 licensed drivers (assuming a three yearly check), then you council is well and truly at it.

Keep asking questions.

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IDFIMH

An enhanced check is now £44.

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Grandad,

Presumably the expense represents the fees paid by the council to the CRB and the council's own admin costs?

The fees charged to drivers will be shown as income, so in theory the two should roughly cancel each other out.

Dustys correct, the council paid the money to the CRB people and listed it as an outgoing, however they forgot to list the money paid by drivers for the CRB's as an incoming amount. So it looked like the council had incurred costs of £50k for CRBs when they actually hadn't incurred any costs at all.

By trying it on with some creative accounting licensing have made a complete balls up of the situation meaning it now looks like the accounts are going to have to be re-written. For example there are 3x as many PH as there are HC drivers, however the listing under 'income from HC licences' is nearly £3.5 MILLION and the 'income from PH licences' (3 times as many remember) just £14k !

So how does the income from 600 HC licences at £120 equate to £3.5m a year ? Well it appears if there's a cost that doesn't fit into any other category, or there is no category for, it gets attributed to HC licences. And if someone renewing a PH badge asks for a dual PH/HC one it's not counted as PH but HC. And it appears that the income from CRB payments is included under the HC licence category.

However if you add up ALL the possible income from every source (HC badges, PH badges, pit tests, medicals, CRBs etc) it falls well below the £3.5m income for just the HC licences, and the council is at a loss to explain how, they think an extra '0 has been added by mistake and that means all the accounts are now being gone over again.

They can cost £200 but our lot will still want them doing every year.

So Sasha if you're saying there are 600 HCs and there are three times as many PHs then that makes 1,800 PH, so 2,400 vehicles altogether.

So if income from all HC/PH licensing fees is £3.5 million then that equates to £1,458 per vehicle. Seems on the high side but since this includes vehicle licences and driver licences (presumably at least one per vehicle) and sundry income including medicals, CRBs, vehicle testing and all the other bits and pieces then an average of a grand a motor doesn't seem too unrealistic. £1,458 certainly seems on the high side, but certainly not impossible. There's also income from PH ops licences as well, presumably.

On the other hand, it just can't be a question of an extra zero being added to the income figure, because that would mean an average of only £146 per vehicle which is clearly nonsense.

Thus £3.5 million seems on the high side, but £350,000 is impossibly low.

But there's not 2,400 vehicles, that's the total number of PH/HC licences. I said that even if every badge holder had a vehicle and you added up all the costs it wouldn't come to £3.5m, the income from pit tests is listed under its own category and of course the fee for medicals doesn't go to the council.

So really if it says 'income from HC licences' it should just be the HC drivers licence and nothing else (the pit test covers the vehicles licence), and that's why I'm wondering how they reached this total. The LA's now saying that part of the cost has come from the sale of a building when the licensing dept moved, but haven't given a cost of the new premises or what the existing building was sold for.

So basically if you ask the LA how much income came from just HC drivers licences they say they don't know - because rather than being 600x£120 it's some at £120 and some at £12 for the PH who dual badged. And of course they don't keep any records of how many dual badges there are just the total number of PH and HC badges !

The only actual figure you quoted was:

"So how does the income from 600 HC licences..."

Thus I assumed you meant vehicles.




Sorry, when you said...

"However if you add up ALL the possible income from every source (HC badges, PH badges, pit tests, medicals, CRBs etc) it falls well below the £3.5m income for just the HC licences."

....and in the context of the rest of the post you seemed to be alluding that the vast majority of income from licensing had been included in the £3.5 million figure, including pit tests and medicals, with the latter I assumed recharged out like the CRB checks.




In fact looking at it in isolation I would say that it should just cover income from HC vehicle licences, but of course that's before you said that the pit test income was actually the HC vehicle license income






Ah, I see - if someone mentioned to me a figure for pit tests I would assume that that was a separate figure for testing over and above the vehicle license fee.



Income, you mean?



Good audit trail they keep, obviously

Indeed that's why even making comparisons using the DfT's taxi/PH stats is misleading, because sometimes it seems that some LAs count dual badges twice, while others don't.

But councils know best