GMB PERSPECTIVE
respective licensing enforcement and known as predomi- nant out of area hiring.
b) Operators: To stop the loophole of a licensed operator licensed in area ‘A’ intentionally placing a hackney car- riage/private hire vehicle licensed in area ‘A’ to predominantly work in area ’Z’ for the purpose of being hired known as predominant out of area hiring.
c) Cross-Border Hiring: It is not the intention to hinder the natural transit of cross-border hiring but to ensure that licensed vehicles do not predominantly work out of area for the purpose of being hired away from their respective licensing enforcement.
d) Local Licensing Enforcement: The Triple IUP will alleviate time in work hours and licensing funding on ‘Predominant Out of Area Hiring’ investigations. This works both ways for local licensing authorities who will see for its enforce- ment officers:
1: The reduced need to travel to far away areas to check on their respective licensed vehicles that under the cur- rent system allows those vehicles to predominantly work remotely out-of-sight and away from their own local enforcement.
2: To allow the full concentration on locally licensed hack- ney carriage/private hire vehicles/drivers and operator enforcement.
e): Public Safety: Currently where a vehicle predominantly works in a differing licensing authority area the local enforcement has no idea as to:
1: Whether the vehicle complies with its own specific and relevant licensing conditions.
2: That the driver of the vehicle is a genuine licensed driver.
3: That the vehicle is fully insured to predominantly work outside its respective licensing area (see Section 15: Hire & Reward Insurance Fraud in the full GMB Policy Document)
4: INTENDED USE POLICY OPERATOR LICENCE - EXPLAINED
The third licence to apply an 'Intended Use Policy' is on the operator licence, as in principle it is the operator who con- trols the use of a private hire vehicle (as well in some cases hackney carriage vehicles) and a local council can enforce any reasonable condition of licensing on an operator’s licence.
Under what is known as the ‘Triple Lock’ system, all three licences - the driver licence, the vehicle licence and the operator licence - must be held and issued by the same authority. This allows for cross-border hiring to take place. This ‘Triple Lock’ legitimised what has always taken place
SEPTEMBER 2020
under natural transit hiring, especially within neighbouring areas.
However the mass abuse of cross-border hiring by an oper- ator encouraging vehicles to be licensed in one area and yet predominantly work hundreds of miles away has completely eroded local licensing control and infinitely more worryingly, public safety. This is a very serious point that the Depart- ment for Transport and Grant Shapps, Secretary of State for Transport, has ignored in the recently published DfT Statu- tory Taxi & Private Hire Standards.
The DfT has now imposed six-monthly enhanced DBS checks but where the vehicle works many miles away in dif- ferent areas, even daily enhanced DSB checks are worthless, as who is to know if the driver is the actual licensed driver of that vehicle?
The gain of cross-border hiring expressed by Uber has always been articulated as being in the public interest and quite astonishingly declared along the lines of being eco- nomical for a driver to be able to take a customer down to one area in the country and be able to pick up for a job to go back.
If only this was true because if it were, then we would not be seeing the massive amount of drivers getting licensed in one area with the sole intention of intently and predomi- nantly working in a completely different area and never leaving!
Where is Uber now? Well, at the time of writing it appears that it is intending to remodel itself into being an aggre- gator instead of a licensed operator, therefore giving up all responsibility of being the principle of the booked journey.
Under an 'Intended Use Policy', a driver could still carry out that return from an area that the private hire vehicle has just dropped in. But it would stop that vehicle from predomi- nantly and purposely loitering or staying in that area for the purpose of being hired and defying local licensing control and being ‘out-of-sight and out-of-mind’ of the vehicle’s own local authority enforcement.
An 'Intended Use Policy' equally applied to the operator licence would ensure that the full responsibility of the vehi- cles under the control of that licence would not be predominantly placed and used out of area for the purpose of being hired but would still allow for the natural transit cross-border hiring that has always taken place.
To read the full document see:
www.gmbtaxis.org.uk/iup
Andy Peters Secretary GMB Brighton & Hove Taxi Section
andy.peters@
gmbtaxis.org.uk
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