Brummie Cabbie wrote:
That's as may be, but the honeypot syndrome will still prevail.
No doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but Brighton and Hove used to be two separate areas as far as licensing was concerned.
Now since B&H is effectively one city you can see the nonsense of not allowing cross-border PH operations, and how inefficient that would be.
So the two areas were amalgamated, and of course it was argued that central Brighton would be the honeypot and Hove would be ignored, but that didn't happen.
So it makes sense to treat B&H as a single entity.
I suspect it was a largely similar problem that resulted in the Shanks case, but I'm not too familiar with the Tyneside geographay. However, looking at the map there's clearly a big conurbation with but with several different LAs covering the area, thus not the most efficient scenario for cab licensing purposes.
Thus the difficulty is getting the balance right between licensing authority areas that can maximise efficiency on the one hand, and a national free for all on the other.
Of course, from the LC's perspective they're stuck with the current LA structure, so because there's no chance of a middle way instead they have to go the full hog and thus a national free-for-all, effectively.
Not saying that's how they approached it, but if licensing borders were constructed with cab markets in mind rather than sometimes residing in ancient history then perhaps the current problems wouldn't have arisen.