Opinion
LONDON TODAY – THE REST OF THE COUNTRY TOMORROW
A couple of days before press deadline for this edition I had the privilege – and yes, it was a privilege – to attend the latest meeting of the Licensed Private Hire Car Association at the Marriott Hotel at Heathrow Airport.
You might call this an EGM: an Extraordinary General Meeting, or more specifically an Emergency Generating-of-Funds Meeting. The purpose of this particular gathering was rather important, and very time-sensitive: the LPHCA has lodged a Judicial Review against the policy of Transport for London to introduce a series of swingeing pri- vate hire operator licence fees.
They’re tackling other trade issues as well, on an almost daily basis, some of which were mentioned at this conference. However, the strong emphasis was on the crucial goal of raising sufficient addition- al “fighting funds” to carry this JR into the Administrative Court on the 25th of this month – and to get more memberships to support their work on behalf of the industry.
They’d already put together some £117,700 – including over £60,000 raised at the previous meeting last November. But they’ve had to spend £149,000 to date, even getting the JR this far along: the appli- cation to the Court, solicitors’ and barrister/QCs’ fees, trial bundles, the usual requisites for mounting a legal challenge of this magnitude.
So the importance of this action was stressed very heavily through- out the day – as so it must be, in order to cover the costs of the court action. LPHCA Chair Steve Wright presided over the day’s proceed- ings, and in addition invited several guest speakers to highlight some of the other licensing anomalies facing the London private hire trade at the present time.
This was not just a case of handing round the ‘begging bowl’ for a boost to their association’s coffers; this is serious stuff, for which a lot of time and hard graft is being expended. But it is not just for the benefit of their association members; the future of the entire private hire trade in the capital is riding on this effort.
Coincidentally, (finally! – it took some putting together) we’ve been able to produce in this month’s edition the national survey of private hire operator licence fees being charged around the entire UK; you’ll find these pages inside. We reproduce the London operator licence fees within that set of tables, just to take your breath away. You will be overwhelmed by the vast differences in these operator licence fees nationally, especially when you throw London’s fees into the equation.
The London fees were brought in on the 16th October 2017, and are currently having to be paid out by any London private hire operator whose current licence needs renewing, or a new applicant who wants to set up a business. It is a serious statistic that since that time, over 60 London private hire operators have either shut down or moved out of the TfL/TPH licensing area, as they cannot finan- cially sustain their business under the burden of such a high level of licensing fees.
One of the main objections that was voiced at the conference on 21 March was about the jumps between strata of licence fees: If your London-based company has, say, 20 vehicles on its fleet and the next time its licence is up for renewal it has 21, the licence fee jumps from £6,000 (already a heady increase of 112.31 per cent from the previous fee) to £19,000. And a fleet of 100 vehicles has to pay £30,000 under the new scheme; add one vehicle to the numbers and the fee jumps to £150,000.
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