Taxi Driver Online

The land of the Skull.

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IDFIMH

nothing wrang wi a dundee lassie, mean cooks, even meaner fighters...so if yer ever oot-numbered fae a bunch o jakies wen yer on the swallie wi hur.. fear not !! she'll bang a few pusses tae help ye !!!

sorry JD..eh didna mean 2 offend thee..
but they wur slaggin the slags o dundee..
n that wisna good enuf 4 me..

Oh well he will not have any problems or obstacles when he goes on maneuvers, land of the fur coat and no draws

The reason I posted the changes to these sections of the 1982 act was because quite frankly I wasn't aware they existed and I thought many other people might be in the same boat? No doubt many people in the Scottish Taxi trade will be aware of the changes but for those who aren't then the best thing I could do was make them public.

I think the most interesting aspect of these amendments is the fact that apart from section 5 of the 1982 act which gives a council a general administrative power to set reasonable conditions in relation to the specific nature of the licensing function, the secretary of state has demonstrated that other than what is mentioned in the 1982 act the power to set "taxi conditions" by regulation resides solely with him and nobody else. In fact he has not only demonstrated that he has such power to make regulations but he also demonstrated that he has the power to "prohibit councils" from making conditions. I am hoping the court of appeal will take that on board when the Renfrewshire appeal is heard.

Regards

JD

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Does this mean that councils cannot impose for example, an all WAV policy like Aberdeen and Dundee

Again the accepted wisdom seems to be that these are reserve powers and if regulations haven't been passed then councils can do as they please subject to the normal administrative law considerations.

In particular, the 'prohibited conditions' regulations date from 1986 and were presumably passed because some LAs had conditions limiting operators to a certain amount of cars or stating that they couldn't have employment or business outside the trade, as per the Dundee case that JD posted recently. Cleary the SoS at the time thought that such conditions were over-restricitive.

The powers to make such conditions are contained in s 20(1) of the Act and I think these date from the Act's inception.



I think the operative word is "may", which indicates that the power is a reserve/discretionary one and thus unless the SoS acts in a particular regard then the powers reside with the councils.

If the sheriff is correct then councils can't impose any kind of WAV policy at all, never mind ALL WAVs.

I'm not sure if JD is saying that only the SoS has powers to prescribe any kind of condition, but as far as I read the judgment (or end bit ) the sheriff is just saying that councils are only prohibited from making conditions relating to wheelchairs and accessibilty etc, thus they could still impose other conditions such as the turning circle.

However, I still disagree with the sheriff, and the powers regarding WAVs is merely a discretionary power as per what I said in the post above.

The sheriff claims that the reason he concludes that the WAV powers reside only with the SoS is that if Parliament had intended otherwise then there would have been no need to amend the Act to include subsection 20(2A) which specifically provides the powers in relation to accessability.

I suppose that is plausible to the extent that accessabilty regulations could probably have been introduced using that unamended Act, but the way I see it is that amendment was unnecessary but was merely included for the avoidance of doubt or suchlike, and was not intended to prevent councils introducing their own policies.

As far as I know the DDA was introduced to provide uniformity throughout the country and provide accessability where councils hadn't already acted - it wasn't intended to prevent councils introducing policies before the SoS had acted, and I can't see how the changes to the Scottish Act conflict with this.

Again the operative phrase is that the SoS 'MAY make regulations', indicating that he has no obligation to do so, and even if the legislation stated that he WILL make regulations then I can't see how this necessarily conflicts with councils introducing their own policies in the meantime.

I would be interested to see one scintilla of evidence that Parliament intended that councils shouldn't be able to introduce their own accessability policies prior to the SoS excercising the powers given to him by the legislation. In fact, all the evidence points to the contrary?