Sussex wrote:
rayggb wrote:
How can it be a breach of licensing law if the main licensing man says it's acceptable in Sheffield?.
Same way in court you have two highly qualified solicitors and every time one of them loses/gets it wrong.
But it is a breach of licensing law.
Nowhere in any act, or in any judgement, does it say licensing laws only apply when you are working.
On the other hand, suspect it's a grey area, the type of which the legislators didn't envisage when they drew up the legislation. Nowhere does it explicitly state that use as a private car should be regarded as identical to use with a view to profit.
And haven't seen anything in this thread which directly addresses the question, and presumably there's no case law either.
The insurance companies treat SDP as conceptually different from commercial use. And several LAs obviously regard the two scenarios as different with regard to licensing law, as the use of CCTV and Ray's seats demonstrate.
And, for example, the law on the carriage of wheelchairs and assistance dogs says that it applies regarding when a taxi is 'hired', or a PHV 'booking' accepted by an operator.
So would SDP use amount to a taxi being 'hired'. Might the legislators here have worded this so as to exclude the use of licensed vehicles on SDP? And the PHV aspect begs an interesting question - if you use your PHV for SDP use, are you acting illegally unless it's booked through an operator?
So unless these things have been definitively decided in a court of law, I would say that at the moment they're nothing more than *opinions* on the law.
Therefore I propose a crowdfunder with a view to raising a judicial review to get some sort of more concrete answer.
Suspect it would raise at least tuppence-ha'penny