John Davies wrote:
With regard to legislation you know as well as anybody else that ambigous legislation is and has always been determined by a court of law. The DDA is not exempt from that process no matter what. It should also be noted that this act is a civil act and any legal deliberations will take place in the civil courts rather than the criminal courts.
My understanding of the current position is as follows:
The general provisions of the DDA are irrelevant to the trade insofar as it relates to vehicle specification. This exemption is fairly unambigous.
But the DDA does allow the Govt to pass regulations which will oblige taxi drivers to run accessible vehicles. But at present no regulations have been passed, so there is currently no legal obligation on LAs to compel the trade to run accessible vehicles.
However, LAs can specify accessible vehicles using their powers under the more general licensing law.
Clearly, whether they do this or not is a political decision, not a legal obligation, but many of the arguments comprehensively outlined in your earlier posts are the kind that would be considered by LAs thinking of going down this route. Clearly there is also lengthy DfT guidance on the subject.
Of course, it would be open to anyone to challenge an LA specifying WAVs under existing licensing and local government law, and I daresay the DfT guidance and the like would be considered by the judge, but I suspect that in strict legal terms the DDA would be irrelevant.
I assume that someone in the past has challenged an LA that has decided to go all WAV, but have presumably been unsuccessful.
This is probably still the most relevant law as regards any LA currently thinking about going all WAV.