PASSING THE BUCK
This is why the case for a root-and-branch DfT review of how the fit and proper test is actually being applied - and how poorly licensing officers are trained to apply it - is now hard to avoid. Not another consultation on the law, which is settled but an honest look at whether the people applying it understand what it requires.
Not an isolated council
Elmbridge is one borough. But the pattern - a licensing authority disclaiming responsibility for the consumer-facing side of a trade it alone has the power to regulate - is not confined to it. It recurs, in different forms, wherever a council treats consumer protection as somebody else’s department:
Trading Standards’, the CMA’s, an operator’s own conscience. Multiply that abdication across the c. 300 licensing authorities in England and it stops looking like local administrative drift and starts looking like the structural condition of the trade itself: a fit and proper test that quietly excludes the one obligation that actually protects the passenger, and no single body prepared to own the consequence.
The only lever left is a courtroom
Ask what happens to a licensing department, or the individuals within it, when it declines to
perform a core statutory function, and the honest answer at present is: nothing. There is no regulator of regulators here. The CMA won’t step into licensing. Trading Standards won’t make findings without more evidence than a member of the public can usually gather alone. And the licensing authority itself is marking its own homework, with no external check on the marking.
That leaves one route, and it is the one this correspondence has now been pushed toward: judicial review, funded not by the public purse but by whichever member of the public is prepared to pay for it, to compel a public body to do what the statute already required it to do.
That is not accountability. It is a workaround for the absence of accountability - and it should not be the only mechanism standing between a licensing authority’s discretion and the consumer protection Parliament intended every PH passenger to have.
Until that changes, the position remains exactly as stark as it looks: there is a law, there is consumer law, and in Elmbridge’s case, there is a licensing authority that has decided, on the record, that the second one is not really its problem.
ELMBRIDGE BOROUGH COUNCIL RESPONSE
An Elmbridge Borough Council spokesperson responded: “Elmbridge BC takes its duty to safeguard residents very seriously and is satisfied that its current policy, together with its wider licensing and enforcement arrangements, provides a robust framework for ensuring public safety and maintaining high standards within the licensed trade.
42
“We thank Mr Johnson for his input and engagement on this matter. However, for the reasons already explained to him, we do not consider that an amendment to the policy is necessary at this time.
“We remain confident that our existing approach enables us to deliver a safe and effective service for residents while exercising our statutory functions in a proportionate and lawful manner.”
SEPTEMBER 2026 PHTM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78
