A view from the trade by B. M. ROLAND 0161 280 2800
www.npha.org.uk
Opinion
npha@btconnect.com
EIGHT WEEKS AND OUT: WHERE ARE YOU?
The Law Commission consultation started on the 10th May and was sup- posed to go until the 10th August, but it has now been extended to the 10th September. By the time you have read this paper, two full months will have gone by, with the biggest consultation of all time in our industry sit- ting out there for your responses. So far the Law Commission has advised that 112 responses have been received. A very large number of those have been in respect of whether wedding cars should be licensed or not. I presume that the drivers of wed- ding cars have got more time to sit and write responses than you have, sitting in your car waiting for the next job – however long that might be. I do appreciate that if you are on a rank in a deregulated area, you might be using that time to catch up on sleep, as you are working 16 hours a day... And if you are in a private hire car, it may be that you are waiting for the radio to come blasting, or the computer to come clicking in your ear. We do have severe doubts as to how many copies of the consultation have actually been seen by drivers, but apart from rants on some of the websites, shouting “Rubbish! Ridiculous! Renegade-ish! Rip-rotten Ram- pages!” and right well annoying stuff, I wonder whether this suggests to some readers that the content of the document is such a load of rubbish that it’s never going to happen – and the need to reply is minimal. It is less than a month since this year’s Exhibition, where the Law Com- mission project team attended on both full days and spoke to several hundred licence holders and licensing officers. Yes, it was hundreds... I was on the next stand and did see them with my own eyes. There wasn’t a single moment in the day when each individual member of the project
team was not surrounded by a group of folks giving their views. So that’s several hundred, at least, who knew about the consultation, and travelled up to hundreds of miles in order to meet the LC team. Having met with them, and obtained some feedback, it might well have been logical to assume that these people were writing their responses. If they have, then maybe there’s been a major postal delay or broadband breakdown – those responses don’t seem to be arriving. More importantly, the feedback we are getting is that any responses they are getting have not been evidential. Let’s look at the major contentious issues which have been lifted, certainly by the industry, from the 241 pages - namely cross-border, deregulation, and contract exemption – and then those issues that may have been overlooked.
CROSS-BORDER
The cross-border issue is in fact the button that pressed the engine for this consultation to start. Your Berwick and your Stockton, which have now led to your Rossendale and your Gedling, and others. The setting up of – as we see it – unlicensed on-line booking services or “booking agents”. And of course the very concept that any vehicle licensed in area A could at any time be possibly allowed to travel through areas C, D and E because it would obviously have been machine-gunned by the licensing officers in area B before it could do so. Sorry – stop giggling. You may well be a hackney carriage driver who has deep and meaningful feelings about cross-border issues. You may be a private hire operator who feels that the boundaries set by current legisla- tion do nothing but restrict your business from growing. You may be a member of the public who relies on a mobile phone or his/her ability to stagger to a taxi rank, having consumed eight gallons of alcohol. You may have downloaded the main document and read chapter 10 and its 79 paragraphs. And then, going into the proposals, you see questions 36, 37, 38, 39, 41 and 42. On these questions the ability to say Yes or No is very easy; but in replying, if you do not supply any evidence on why you are answering as you are, I would suggest that you are completely wast- ing everyone’s time. If you are in an area where you are close to the boundary of another dis- trict, or if you are in a local authority that is on the outskirts of a major city or entertainment centre, you spend all day crossing borders. Why do you do that? Remember, these borders were in all probability set up long before you were born... and which were not taken into consideration by
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