NPHTA
UPDATE...NPHTA UPDATE
Localising licensing – and a very important change of language
This is perhaps one of the most significant areas of discussion.
I am personally delighted that we are increasingly moving away from the expression “cross-border working” and instead talking about:
Predominant out-of-area use
That terminology describes the problem far more accurately.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a licensed private hire vehicle undertaking a legitimate pre- booked journey across local authority boundaries.
In fact a journey can cross one boundary or ten boundaries.
It can travel inbound or outbound.
That has always been part of private hire operation and must remain perfectly legal. That is not the problem.
The mischief we are trying to address is the practice of obtaining a licence from one authority while working solely - or predominantly - in an entirely different licensing area.
Those are two completely different things, and it is vitally important that legislation recognises the distinction.
During discussions, we have also made clear that any new system must recognise legitimate specialist transport operations.
There may need to be carefully defined exemptions or provisions covering areas such as:
l NHS and patient transport contracts; l school and SEN contracts; l specialist airport operations; and l chauffeur and executive transport.
But whatever mechanism is eventually adopted, something has to address predominant out-of-area use once and for all.
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If standards are national, why does it matter where you are licensed?
This is an obvious question.
If national standards are introduced and every driver, vehicle and operator meets the same minimum requirements, why should it matter which council issues the licence?
There is some logic to that argument.
National enforcement powers would further strengthen consistency and remove some of the present enforcement difficulties between authorities.
But there is another fundamental principle at stake.
If you have no intention whatsoever of providing a service within the district that licenses you, then quite simply, you are licensed by the wrong authority.
The purpose of local licensing should surely include providing a service to the community whose authority issued that licence.
National standards should remove incentives to licence shop.
They should not remove the relationship between licensing and the community being served.
Intended use – why only taxis?
Intended-use policies were therefore discussed at length. They
They are not.
A properly constructed intended-use policy does not stop a hackney
carriage undertaking legitimate
journeys outside its district. What it addresses is the extent to
which that vehicle is being used
predominantly for pre-booked work somewhere else. And that raises an obvious question:
If intended-use policies can legitimately address predominant out-of-area pre-booked work undertaken by hackney carriages, why should the same principle not apply to the sector specifically licensed to undertake pre-booked work - private hire?
SEPTEMBER 2026 PHTM are sometimes misunderstood as
mechanisms designed to prevent taxis travelling outside their licensed area.
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