toots wrote:
Anyway back to BPG. This is of course only a guide and will be judged by it's extent of achieving it's aims due to it being open to interpretation of the whole document and not just one paragraph that mentions onerous licencing conditions. It's difficult to obtain a unified agreement as to what the guidance really means so the following is of course only my opinion of the guidance intention.
Well said - at least we can broadly agree on something.
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When referring to onerous licencing conditions it's not just referring to restriction. One has to consider the wider implecations of de-restriction and not just the ability of a person being able to obtain a vehicle licence. I think it is fair to say that if a district does restrict it's vehicle licences having had a SUD then it has met it's obligation under the guidance. There you go that's me done on my opinion of the BPG and how it relates to restriction.
I think you're placing too much emphasis on the SUD issue, which is a crude legislative test relevant only if the council wants to restrict numbers. The BPG is more about policy than crude law, and rather than a simplistic attempt to match taxi supply and demand it requires looking at wider issues such as the safety aspect and thus the basic question of whether to restrict. Strictly speaking the SUD test doesn't look at these wider aspects.
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With regard to how they issue further plates and to whom is a different matter and there is no guidance available for that. However it's my opinion that plates should not be sold in any way shape or form. Vehicles should not be allowed to be sold with existing plates on them. If the owner of the plate no longer wishes to be a plate holder they should legally be required to return the plate to the licence department and it should then be offered to the person at the top of the list if such list exists. I do not condone any practice that involves the selling of plates. It's also my opinion that one person only requires one plate because they can only drive one vehicle, therefore mulitiple applications by one person need not be considered.
To an extent I agree with where you're coming from, but that would require changes to the law, but these aren't on the table just now.
But simply barring plate sales won't work, because that's been tried in several Scottish areas, and the licence holders will just keep hold of them until they die - perhaps decades after they leave the trade - so instead of profiting from a sale they profit from the rental, so to that extent it's no improvement.
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An alternative to total de-restriction is managed growth. If they issue a set amount of plates per year until such time as it is quite obvious there would be no benefit whatsoever to the public, this is surely a better option than total de-restriction, but again that is only my opinion.
Which is supposedly what's happened in Edinburgh over past years. In which case the main growth is in the number of hired drivers, the number of PH and the size of plate premiums.
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Just for the record I never intended to question the efficacy of the advice given by the BPG. I questioned the morality of using rape as a means to obtain further taxi licences in a restricted area when there is no evidence to show that more taxis do indeed reduce rape.
There is no clear cut evidence to suggest that the risk is reduced either seeing as the reduction in rape cases is not evident in already de-restricted areas
So where precisely can this evidence of no reduction in sexual assaults in derestricted areas be found, Toots?
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