...LATEST VIEWS FROM THE NPHTA
The 76 Act clearly states at section 75 that a vehicle may drive through all other licensed areas but not make itself available within another authority’s area (I paraphrase) and it’s beyond me why this argument has never been addressed in court - truly, I am completely baffled by that.
The 76 Act was after all written with localism in mind and the excuse that technology has outgrown the Act is no reason to not uphold the Act today. We could say the same when we get caught speeding, because the speed limit set on the motorway is for public safety but since that speed was set, vehicles can go faster and stop quicker due to technology - but don’t try this as a defence if you are due in court for speeding.
This case will be a good 12 to 18 months before it’s decided, and even then the correct argument, for the sake of the trade across the country, has to be made by the relevant solicitor under the instruction of the person paying them.
My only concern is whether the York authority has the heart to go through with this and take the correct argument with it? Our trade has been ruined by weak and uninformed opinions of the officers who are paid to regulate it.
FACT.
Those very officers are happy to use time stamped data to gain evidence of a driver plying for hire, or going the longest route, or in extreme circumstances where they are accused of parking in a remote area and demanding special payment from the customer.
Yet that very same set of data is not looked at, understood or accepted by those officers when it comes to the operator illegally directly operating drivers and vehicles licensed by another authority.
This all boils down to the two ways in which an operator uses vehicles from another authority to cover work in its own locally licensed area.
• The first is the misuse and wrongly concluded decision in Skyline v Milton Keynes regarding a booking being subcontracted to another operator. I say misuse because the argument of where a vehicle is made available was never discussed; and I say wrong because the details of the data logs were not fully investigated or understood.
• The second is the misuse of the Deregulation Act 2015 because let’s be clear, this Act was only for the benefit of the operator and not the driver; it was also worded very carefully when it was introduced into the LGMPA 1976 - where that introduction kept the original wording of the 76 Act and the subcontracting to another operator licensed within the same area.
DECEMBER 2020
This point brings me straight into why the above two exam- ples are illegal and ignored by local authorities.
Before the Deregulation Act an operator in one area could not subcontract a booking to an operator in another. We all know it was legal for the operator to accept the booking regardless of where the customer wanted picking up from; however, what stopped the acceptance of these bookings was not how far a radio wave could carry, but the location of the vehicle whose driver accepted the job offer from the operator. Fact. Period. Nuff said.
The old excuses that it wasn’t viable are still relevant today, because it isn’t viable for that driver to travel 20 miles to cover a three-mile journey at the rate of £1.40 a mile, unless that driver is no longer 20 miles away and is sat round the corner.
However, it wasn’t advancement in technology that allowed this to happen; if it was then why do we still get DVLA points for exceeding the speed limit in vehicles that can drive faster and stop quicker than they could in 1965?
it was the fact that vehicles located in their licensing area could not justify driving all the way out of their area and then drop locally to the pick-up. Technology didn’t change this, the lack of enforcement of the 76 Act changed this.
NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS.
Authorities got swallowed into the rare and often wrongly fought battles to challenge this new pattern, none of them were prepared to take the battle to the courts because the government chose not to get involved.
Well ,I challenge each and every authority to explain to the trade why they have not pushed this argument through the courts and not protected those very drivers who are licensed by them and sharing the work with the drivers who have circumvented the system for their own personal gain.
Because any driver who does this, I assure you is not a fit and proper person in my eyes. Why would they be, and did the authority in which they work class them as fit and proper?
NO, THEY DIDN’T. I REST MY CASE, M’LUD.
NPHTA comment: this issue will only be resolved if it is taken to the level of the Administrative Court; only then will it be binding on all courts below. However, I don’t see either York Cars or York Council taking it beyond Mags to Crown to Admin Court. But that’s what is needed: a definitive case to define illegal cross-border activity once and for all.
23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124
