ALL THINGS LICENSING
contracting principles in section 55A, introduced by the Deregulation Act 2015, demonstrated Parliament’s intention to
restrict
freedom of contract under the 1976 Act. None of these arguments swayed the
What does the judgement say?
IoL Patron, Philip Kolvin KC, representing DELTA a Merseyside-based operator, has written that the court accepted argument on behalf of the Respondents, DELTA and Veezu, an increasingly growing national operator who put forward the argument that the only provision which could conceivably impose an obligation on the operator to contract as principal at the point of booking was section 56(1).
However, section 56(1) is to the precise opposite effect, since it provides that, whatever the contracting model adopted, the hirer’s contract will be deemed to be with the operator who accepted the booking.
As Lord Briggs poignantly observed:
“The one scenario where the deeming provision in section 56(1) has no role to fulfil is where the first operator actually does accept the booking by making a contract of hire with the applicant, as principal rather than as agent. Then the first operator is liable to fulfil the hire contract at common law, and the assumed statutory purpose of making the first operator liable for the fulfilment of the hire needs no statutory backing at all. And it would make no difference to the first operator’s common law liability to fulfil the hire that it had sub-contracted the hire to be performed by a second operator. Yet that is precisely the hire contract model which UBL submit is actually mandated by the 1976 Act as the only permissible way for the operator to accept the booking.”
Put shortly, UBL’s construction would render section 56(1) completely pointless.
Uber raised a series of other arguments, including that the 1976 Act was to be read in the same way as the later London legislation, that guidance as to construction was afforded by a 1970 departmental paper regarding London, and that the sub-
PHTM SEPTEMBER 2025
Supreme Court, whose conclusions were succinctly put:
(i) There is nothing expressly provided in the 1976 Act which can be interpreted as imposing, or even supporting, the prohibition for which UBL contends.
(ii) “Accepting a booking” does not, in context, mean only by contracting as principal to perform the hire.
(iii) There is nothing in the Act or in its purposes from which such a prohibition could be implied, and the Act plainly seeks to achieve public safety by other means through licensing.
(iv) The only provision in the Act which does impose contractual consequences, section 56(1), is wholly damaging to UBL’s construction, and would be pointless if UBL were correct.
What does this judgement mean?
For licensing authorities, operators and importantly passengers, the judgement means that nothing needs to change. Operators are free to contract with passengers as they wish under the many different models which have existed since before private hire services came under regulation.
Had the judgment gone the other way, it would have posed a significant threat to the provincial private hire industry, not least because of potential VAT implications of requiring the operator to contract, with the potential of uplifts in fares for passengers.
The judgment as delivered preserves the legal and practical ability of operators to run their service as they have
always done, including by providing an
alternative to the app-based private hire model now operated by Uber, an important consideration given that not all passengers have the ability to access private hire services digitally.
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