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IN THE LINCOLN CROWN COURT
AT LINCOLN
Before Judge Richard Pollard
D.C.Parsons
Appellant
v.
South Kesteven District Council
Respondents
Judgement
1. This Appeal arises from a decision of the Grantham Magistrates on 22 January 1996. The Appellant has an interest in a hackney carriage licence. His case is that conditions in his licence are unlawful, for reasons set out hereafter. Although the Magistrates held that he was a "person aggrieved" they refused him any relief.
2. The first issue that arose on this appeal was whether or not the Appellant is a "person aggrieved" within s.77 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. We gave our full reasons yesterday for holding that he is such a person. Essentially it is impossible to obtain a hackney carriage licence from the Respondents unless the applicant has a taximeter installed in his vehicle. We concluded that that amounted to a "condition attached to the grant of a licence", within s. 47 of the 1976 Act. As will become apparent later we also conclude that the requirement to have a taximeter means that the Respondents
inevitably thereby enforce their Table of Fares.
3. A Council is entitled to impose such "conditions" as it "considers reasonably necessary", s. 47(1) of the 1976 Act. In this case the Council had considered it "reasonably necessary" to require the installation of taximeters as a prerequisite (which we deemed a condition) for the obtaining of a hackney carriage licence, that being in their judgement necessary to balance the interests of the public on the one hand and the providers of the service on the other.
4. The Appellant's complaint is twofold:
(i) that the Respondents' decision was such that no reasonable authority could deem such a condition "reasonably necessary";
(ii) that the Respondents have, in any event, no power to impose such condition over the whole of their area.
5. To understand those arguments it is necessary to look at the history and geography of the respondent's district and then to look at the history of the legislation governing the grant of hackney carriage licences.
6. South Kesteven District Council is comprised of the old urban districts of Grantham, Bourne and Stamford, together with the surrounding "rural areas". It covers a total area of 360 square miles. It is one of the creatures of the 1972 round of local Government re-organisation created down by the Local Government Act 1972.
7. The history of hackney carriage licensing dates back to the Town Police Clauses Act 1847. Under s.37 of that Act commissioners were authorised to license such carriages "within the prescribed distance, or, if no such distance is prescribed, within 5 miles of the GPO of the town." Section 68 empowered the commissioners to fix the fares charged by licensees. The commissioners have been replaced by local authorities. By Section 171 of the Public Health Act 1875 the phrase "within the prescribed distance shall, for the purposes of this Act, mean within any urban Council".
8. Under the Local Government Act 1972, Schedule 14, para. 24(b) the general extension of the powers of the old councils to the new was made inoperative in relation to Hackney Carriage licensing, that schedule stipulating that such licensing was limited to the old urban areas.
9. Under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 a local authority was given the means of formally administering its licensing controls, by s. 47, cited already (para 3 above). The Respondents applied these provisions to its old urban areas. That is admitted by both sides (see admission 15 and Document 12).
10. A table of fares was thereafter introduced regulating the Hackney Carriage fares in Grantham, Bourne and Stamford and everyone proceeded on that basis.
11. The Transport Act 1985 extended Hackney Carriage licensing powers to the whole of a Council's the area i.e. in this case to the whole of the area administered by the South Kesteven District Council. There is no other possible interpretation of the plain wording of that Section. If there is any doubt about the meaning of that Section it is immediately resolved by reading the Circular from the Department of Transport at Paras 1 to 4, 7(c) and 9 (Document 22). That Act also set up a potential system of shared fares.
12. The Respondents, empowered so to do by the 1985 Act, applied the licensing provisions of the 1976 Act to their whole district, i.e. the rural as well as the urban areas. This was done by resolution of the Council, as is again agreed under Admission 17, and see Documents 13 and 14. Thereafter they instituted a Table of Fares which was to apply to any journey within the District. That was last updated in 1993.
13. The difficulty for licensees in such a vast area is that they might have to travel 10 miles (the "dead" miles) before they can "start the meter running" and it is this that is the Appellant's grievance. We are told that the trade continued to charge above this structure (without deliberately flouting it) to allow for the fact that they cannot charge for the "dead" mileage. In effect they carried on charging for the "dead" mileage on rural runs. It was only when an ultimately unsuccessful prosecution was launched that the present disputes between the - trade and the Council erupted. The Council finally climbed down in June 1996 and deregulated the trade, laying down only a "default tariff" but otherwise leaving it up to the parties to agree on a fare. The "default tariff" allows for a booking fee to make up for the "dead" miles.
14. We have concluded that the Council was empowered by statute to regulate hackney carriage licences within its whole district and decided so to do and that, therefore, the phrase "prescribed distance" of the 1847 Act is replaced for present purposes by "the whole of the area of the South Kesteven District Council".
15. We are satisfied that the Respondents have power to regulate the hackney carriage trade within the whole of its area and may, therefore, if it can do so in a reasonable way, regulate fares within its whole area. The fact that it may be difficult to construct a table of fares that is fair to all is a problem that they and the trade are going to have to face. We can have no say in how that is achieved. It may be that the Table of Fares will have to differentiate between urban and rural fares, it may be that the present system of allowing a "Booking Fee" in defined circumstances is appropriate. That is a matter for the Council, so long as it acts reasonably.
16. We are also satisfied that to impose an old urban fare structure over a vast rural area was unlawful in that no reasonable authority who applied its mind to the situation (and we doubt that this one did) could expect the trade to cope with that, given the inability to charge for the "dead" mileage. That would mean that someone travelling 2 miles within Grantham would be charged the same as someone travelling 2 miles within the country, even if the taxi had had to travel 5 miles to pick them up. For that is the fundamental nature of hackney carriages. They can only charge from the point of pick-up (whether they obtain the fare by plying for hire, sitting at a stand or by answering the phone. In that last event the hiring is a private one but the fare is still limited to the Table).
17. We believe that it is sophistry to say that we can look at the requirement of a taximeter but that we cannot look at the Table of Fares. We reject the contention that the Table can only be looked at by way of judicial review. We cannot make any sense of the appellate jurisdiction given to the magistrates and to this court without looking at the Table and its inevitable effect, particularly as the Table has effect, for the purposes of the 1847 Act as if it were included in hackney carriage byelaws (s. 65(5) of the 1976 Act). Taximeters are meaningless without a Table of Fares. The real effect of the Respondent's condition that there be a taximeter was that the council were imposing a condition as to the fares that could be charged. Indeed they must have thought that when they commenced their prosecution of a driver for not imposing their fare structure.
18. We therefore conclude that it cannot have been "reasonably necessary" to impose such an unfair fare structure. The Appellant is justifiably "aggrieved" and we find in his favour. Subject to argument we are minded to order the Respondents to pay his costs, here and below.
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