Are you a Cash Cow ?
uring the past month or so there has been a marked increase in reports of trade discontent in respect of increasing and differing licence fees across the country. How can it be that in a place like Selby it will cost a taxi proprietor £99 to licence
D
rises to a staggering £319 to licence the same
pots of money, he can afford the fee, I am a poor northerner, and can’t.
We appear to have almost 400 licensing authorities with almost 400 odd different fees and charges, ironically, almost 400 odd different ways of arriving at the fee itself. Don’t get me wrong here, a number of local authorities are actually subsidising the taxi licensing regime. The cost of what you may consider enforcement is a rather expensive hobby to undertake. Perhaps a decent start to this is maybe looking at local authority websites, whilst a few are decent and easy to
licensing fees is like looking for the proverbial needle. Believe me, after looking through most of the country’s local authority websites during the past month I do know. Where do these
people go for websites? AAA website Ltd – the
One of the better ones is in St. Edmundsbury, I have absolutely no idea where the place is, but the way they set out fees is easy for someone even as thick as me, other local authorities should take note. Before I continue, let’s look at the charging power allowed in the 1976 act in respect of driver fees; please take note of the bold type;
Section 53 of the 1976 Act at (2) states;
Drivers’ licences for hackney carriages and private hire vehicles
view to recovering the costs of issue and administration
The costs attributed to section 53 are ‘quite’.....
Licensing. A council can recover the costs of issue and administration. Most of us now
an ID badge, these often come complete with a photograph, therefore we are issued with a new ‘badge’ every time the licence is up for renewal. In days gone by we had a metal badge, which lasted for years. So I can see the need for paying for the cost of making a new one every renewal. The administration. Okay, errm administering,
administer. Presumably this means what it says in the dictionary, which is pretty useless, because
amongst its many meanings, it states it means the
. So a quick re-check with a decent dictionary tells me it means to ‘manage’ or ‘supervise’. How many hours a year does a
licensee? Well I ain’t got a clue, but allegedly it’s all worked out and your driver licensee fee should comprise of the costs of issue, which is likely to be, 10p for the paper licence, £3 for the plastic badge, £1.50 in postage and associated costs, with £96.40 administering.
In days gone by the £96.40 administration could be easily explained away, for example, the local authority might have had to make a phone call or two just to make sure the person they’re licensing isn’t an axe wielding homicidal maniac. But is that still true now? I don’t think it is. Virtually all of you reading this will at some point have to produce,
have to go to a solicitor for a statutory declaration, you will have to declare all offences, if you don’t and the CRB states offences you haven’t added to the application, you will be refused a licence at best, taken to court for perjury at worst. Indeed, you may be required to provide a medical. you may be required to pay for a DVLA check, where effectively your name is added to a database and if you are caught committing a driving offence this information will be sent to your local authority. If you see what I’m getting at here, a lot of items are at , they are not within the physical cost of the licence fee. They all merely make up a sum part of the information the local authority needs to
In my view, it is costing an awful lot of money for a licensing department to check the medical, CRB, and all other items on the application form are actually in order. Which facing facts, shouldn’t take much more than a quick glance. Yes, I accept the majority do actually pay for the minority, and by this I mean if a driver commits a misdemeanour, the cost of preparing reports and licensing hearings is maybe a cost that should be borne by all licence holders. Is that cost over one year really 96.4% of the licence fee? Indeed, in certain areas it is predominantly private hire drivers that are found to be committing misdemeanours, should a hackney carriage driver have to pay the cost of administering the costs associated with reports for illegal PH activities? The above being said, the section of
omits the word ‘supervision’, which is ironically within section 70 (c) in connection with licensed vehicles, but more about this later.
I skipped over the subject of the CRB check, but referring to this some local authorities are silly enough to insist on annual CRB checks. To be honest, if they are actually doing their jobs properly, working with enforcement agencies, it
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would seem to me, this is a cost that isn’t actually needed. This is a rather confusing move anyway, primarily because the CRB service are so inept that it takes so long to get a check on time, your next licence is due by the time it arrives. More importantly, taxi drivers are supposed to be part
where the authorities work together, basically
licensees may have inadvertently been found guilty of ritual sex with a goat. Whilst the NOS should set a few alarm bells ringing about major offenders, many local authorities now have companies in place that report on lesser offences, such as speeding (hence the DVLA check).
Some local authorities charge the driver a fee over and above the cost of the CRB check, a sort of handling fee, which seems to be part of the all encompassing word ‘administration’. Great ain’t it, a fee for handling the CRB check which they insist on anyway! I’m not joking here, the cost of a CRB is £36, yet some local authorities charge upwards of £50. Whilst this isn’t seemingly questioned, surely the cost of handling the CRB should be or is (in the case of some LAs) incorporated, as explained above, into the actual licence fee itself? Talking of CRB checks, some local authorities insist on drivers having the more expensive enhanced check, which incidentally I agree with, unfortunately the CRB service doesn’t. They apparently see the job
to warrant the enhanced version, drivers may be paying for enhanced and receiving the bog standard check. Whilst this may be minor to you, in terms of cost the difference is £10. Whilst I will mention other fees local authorities are charging some of you a little later in this article, you should consider that in respect of the driver license administration fee, even our friend Mr James TH Button concedes that enforcement against unlicensed drivers cannot legitimately be included within the fee.
Fees for vehicle and operators’ licences.
the reasonable cost of the carrying out by or on behalf of the district council of inspections of hackney carriages
(b) the reasonable cost of providing hackney
carriage stands
any reasonable administrative or other
costs
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