Opinion
Donna Short, National Private Hire and Taxi Association 0161 280 2800
www.nphta.co.uk
donna@nphta.co.uk
WAKEFIELD APPEAL: WHAT A CAN OF WORMS THAT HAS OPENED!
As you have no doubt already read on this month’s front page, Wakefield Council has lost its appeal against a High Court decision from December 2018 in respect of the setting of its licensing fees.
Now, you all know what press reporting does: it can put a totally different (and sometimes incorrect) slant on any particular event, fuelling rumours, indecision and often panic. Following the original hearing in 2018, the local press (and some other national sources) said in their articles that Wakefield Council had lost its High Court case due to “overcharging”… with not a great deal of further expla- nation.
So as you might imagine, large numbers of NPHTA members and PHTM readers contacted us and said, “Hey – can’t we take our council to court as well? We think they’re overcharging us for our licensing fees… It’s not fair… We’re paying too much…” and so on.
In light of our ongoing campaign to present “Just the facts, Ma’am”, may we attempt to set out the background to this Wake- field business. For a start, Wakefield Council was not taken to court on the flimsy basis of “overcharging” on its own: it was the
nature of the charges and the way they went about justifying them that landed this council in court.
In simple terms, Wakefield Council decided that – as many coun- cils have believed following the Audit Commission report in Guildford in 2010 – because they couldn’t charge for enforce- ment against drivers under LGMPA section 53(2), they would claim the fees for such activity under section 70(1)(c) in connec- tion with vehicles and operators. This of course was their justification for putting up the vehicle licence fees by some 60 per cent in February 2018 – which triggered the original Judicial Review being lodged by the Wakefield District Hackney Carriage and Private Hire Association.
But the gist of the case was more complicated than that: Wake- field Council had argued in the High Court and again in the Court of Appeal that “it is a principle of law” that licensing schemes ought to be self-funding rather than being reliant on a local authority’s general funds raised from its council tax payers. The High Court (HH Judge Saffman) was not persuaded there was any such principle; and the Court of Appeal dismissed the council’s appeal against his decision.
Wakefield Council’s justification for charging for enforcement against driver “activities” such as dressing inappropriately, using a mobile phone, smoking in the taxi, carrying excess passengers, access refusal of assistance dogs, “and various other uncivil and illegal conduct” under the vehicle licence fee was that “the driver is in control of the vehicle”. This premise was dismissed by the Court of Appeal as “a very strained and artificial interpretation of the relevant words”.
The concept of a licensing authority being able to include the cost of enforcement against licensed drivers within the fee it charges for vehicle licences had been shot down in the original High Court hearing. Under appeal, Wakefield Council was defeated once again; in the Court of Appeal’s words, “there are distinct and
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