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COULD A GLASGOW COUNCILLOR BE ON THE PATH TO CHANGING THE ENTIRE LICENSING PARADIGM? Not just in the sense that a
Article by Eddie Grice NPHTA Board Member for Scotland and General Secretary of the Scottish Private Hire Association
www.spha.scot
office@spha.scot
As we all know, taxi fares are set by local licensing authorities. In England and Wales, this is a discretionary power granted under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1974,
although in practice there isn’t a council in England or Wales that hasn’t made use of that power.
In Scotland, it is a statutory duty of local authorities to set taxi fares with the relevant stipulations coming from the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 and as amended by the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010. In the current financial climate, taxi fare reviews have been a hot topic. Here in Glasgow, mid-January saw a 19.36% increase to the fare scales.
Following Glasgow’s taxi fare increase, Councillor Alex Wilson, Convenor of the city’s Licensing and Regulatory Committee, was reported to have said he believes the taxi trade should have the power to set its own fares.
On top of this, at the tail end of last year, Cllr Wilson hosted a civic licensing summit, which was attended by the licensing convenors from all 32 Scottish councils. After the summit, Cllr Wilson announced that current licensing legislation is “not fit for purpose”.
Furthermore, the committee that Councillor Wilson presides over has been highly engaged with the trade and has implemented a number of proposals put forward by trade representatives.
It is becoming abundantly clear that Cllr Wilson is on a mission. The question we should be asking here; has Wilson actually kickstarted a chain of events that will lead to the entire licensing paradigm being changed?
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legislative rewrite could end up on the cards. Yes, that, but also; have we now embarked on a path that will eventually lead to a licensing regime where the trade makes decisions for themselves rather than having policy being dictated to them? Will all of this lead to a devolution of power from the regulator to those that are regulated?
Cllr Alex Wilson
We could be looking at, here, the early gestation of a system where we see the trade itself being the primary think tank on policies and tariffs while the local authorities act as an ‘August Upper House’ to check the decisions being made by the trade before giving an Emperor-esque thumbs up or down.
In effect, a non-codified version of such a system is already sort of forming within Glasgow’s licensing circles, so we may have already seen the beginnings of a paradigm shift. If such a vision is to be fully realised then the next steps of this would be to, somehow, formalise that arrangement. The council’s licensing department already engages with the trade via a stakeholder’s working group, but perhaps that loose arrangement could be tightened up. We already have Local Licensing Forums for other areas of civic licensing, mandated by law in sections 10 and 11 of the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005 (with further provisions within Schedule 2 of that Act). So, one possibility could be to create similar forums for the private hire and taxi side of civic licensing.
This doesn’t necessarily require a legislative rewrite to begin happening. Sure, such an administrative arrangement without legislative backing wouldn’t have any statutory functions nor any sense of secure permanence, however there is nothing stopping a local authority from setting something like this up as a proof-of-concept on a trial basis. The skeletal framework already exists in the form of trade bodies and working groups; all that would be needed to take it to the next level would be some steering principles in the form of something resembling standing orders.
FEBRUARY 2023 PHTM
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