Opinion in-border,


A view from the trade by B. M. ROLAND


THE NATIONAL PRIVATE HIRE ASSOCIATION 8 SILVER ST BURY BL9 0EX TEL: 0161 280 2800 FAX: 0161 280 7787 e-mail: npha@btconnect.com


THE STOCKTON SETBACK... OR STERILISER? Well readers, I’ve been observing section 46 cases for so long now, I


thought I’d better have a quick look and see where I was up to on my com- puter. And I found 21 cases, all in relation to section 46. Whether it was cross-border,


out-of-area, under contract, inappropriate


licence(s)... all of this stuff is on the list. And quite obviously that list does not include probably hundreds of other cases that have been heard at Magistrates’ Courts and have been unreported, but lie in the files of local authorities up and down the country.


WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED? I remember reading Hansard on the introduction of the 1976 Act, and the Lord Judges saying, “Why is this going through Parliament? This is rubbish! Why don’t you go back and re-think it??!”


Perhaps they said it a bit more politely than that, but that was certainly the message. You see, the fault is that the 1976 Act is in fact the 1975 Ply- mouth City Council Act, with a couple less paragraphs and a couple of extra commas... but effectively that legislation is almost word for word the same as the ’76 Act.


When you realise that the 1975 Act was written for Plymouth City Council, specifically to control what went on in their area and aimed at excluding any- body who was not in their area, you can see why it doesn’t work when you take it out of the Plymouth city boundary and dump it on 340 other councils.


And so it is also not surprising that many of those councils read cross-bor- der and other bookings as being illegal and tested them in the courts. It is very, very very significant that the vast majority of those 21 cases had to


then go to the Administrative Court on Case Stated, or on appeal, or on Judicial Review, because the law is written in a way that, having removed it from the context of one single council – namely Plymouth – it cannot be logically interpreted as being sound or understandable anywhere else.


SO WHAT HAS THE STOCKTON CASE DONE? You’ve got a hack- ney carriage – you can go play private hire anywhere in the country, with perhaps the exception of London because that is different legislation. And of course Plymouth.


We know that there are many places in the country where hackney car- riages from other areas are indeed being used for private hire. It is not just Berwick, or Stockton; it’s breaking out all over the country. And I have absolutely no doubt that, following the Stockton decision, the amount of cross-border bungling is set to rise rapidly.


We even have the position at this moment where some councils are issu- ing private hire licences to out-of-district operators so that they can continue to work in their home area while having access to cars licensed in other areas. This started many years ago in Brighton, but has recently rapidly increased.


SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? As you have seen on the front page, Justice Langstaff suggested that this was a case for Parliament. In going through the list of section 46 cases, I went back 11 years to the case of Murtagh and Carter –v- Bromsgrove District Council, in front of yet another Lord Justice, namely Lord Justice Kennedy. At the end of this judgment


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PAGE 10 PHTM NOVEMBER 2010


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