Berwick Plates: Is there such a Thing?

If you don’t mind, I won’t deal with your points in the order in which you raised them, because the non-UK driver issue was the catalyst for all this in the first place!

If a certain Tyneside council had licensed a Polish driver, who had previously been licensed in Plymouth, who had a Polish CRB with certified English translation, a UK Enhanced CRB check, a medical and had passed that other council’s knowledge test, no-one was ever likely to have gone to Berwick. Who was racist? Some have suggested the councillors of the Licensing Committee of that council were racist, but I wasn’t involved and don’t know whether they were or not.

What I do know is that it only took me 2 minutes to contact the Polish Embassy in London to find out how to recognise a genuine Polish CRB; and to find out whether it was possible to get convictions removed from a Polish CRB. And for anyone who doesn’t yet know the answer to that question, the answer is ‘yes’, but only by application to the court, which rarely gives permission and only ever in relation to minor offences committed a long time ago. However, the certificate then records the fact that a conviction or convictions have been removed, so having them removed doesn’t serve any great purpose!

Coincidentally, I’ve never seen a Polish CRB with a single conviction recorded on it.

Despite widespread belief that the majority of Berwick licensed drivers are not local people, you’re wrong! The majority did hold badges with other councils (although many have since let them lapse) and others are local people new to the trade. Don’t fall into the trap of judging someone by their skin tone or appearance! By far the minority are those from outside the UK.

Do I accept that one or two drivers were licensed with Berwick that subsequently I would have preferred not to have licensed, ‘yes’. As Berwick had only ever licensed people working in Berwick, the application form did not ask whether an applicant had ever held a licence with another council or had one refused, suspended or revoked. Once we learnt that someone who had had a licence revoked elsewhere (because of conduct issues which had not resulted in police investigations or prosecutions), we revised the application form. However, we never received complaints against either of these individuals.

I have heard of drivers not knowing where they are going and accept that (if proved) that could be relied upon as a lawful justification for a knowledge / locality test. Surprisingly, we never received a complaint from a passenger. All we ever heard were accounts that sounded rather like bad jokes, “Did you hear the one about the ******* who . . . . ?” The number of asterisks are completely random and are not intended to suggest any race or nationality.

Effectively, you ask if the Council could not have done something to discourage applications; and the answer to that is also ‘yes’. However, it would have been unlawful to introduce something solely for that purpose, so the Council declined to do it. If there is evidence to justify the imposition of a knowledge test, it was never brought to my attention – all that was required was complaints from a number of members of the public about a number of drivers. As you’ll appreciate, if all complaints (and there were none) had been about one driver, then that was evidence that that driver was not a fit and proper person, rather than a need to test all drivers.

Unfortunately, I lacked a crystal ball and, therefore, did not foresee the future when I licensed one Polish driver!

Did the Tyneside council that refused to licence the Polish driver in the first place foresee the future? I don’t know, but I’d guess we can all guess that they didn’t!

The reality is that the vast majority (and I accept not all) of the Berwick vehicles and drivers would have been licensed as private hire with Newcastle or North Tyneside councils, if they had not been licensed by Berwick.

In the circumstances, so long as Berwick drivers do not flimp (and I acknowledge that some have done so), they are no more a threat to the hackney trade than the private hire trade is, because that’s the work they are doing.

On the subject of flimping, when Newcastle did its first enforcement operation they caught 9 flimpers – only one was licensed with Berwick, but six were Newcastle private hires!

I’m not really concerned with arguments between the two sections of the trade – the hackneys complain about private hire and out-of-town hackneys flimping; and the private hire trade, including the out-of-town hackneys, complain about the hackneys picking up their booked fares. Whilst I accept that flimping does occur (and it shouldn’t), I also accept that hackneys will pick up booked fares, but I’d also accept that the hackney may have no idea that the person who hires them had also booked a private hire, but decided not to wait for it. It’s not the hackney drivers fault, but you will keep blaming each other – why?

Finally, as a result of being born in Newcastle and originally living on Armstrong Road, I think I can rightly assert that I am a Geordie – don’t be fooled by appearances – the educated language, voice, past jobs, home address, etc!

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The views expressed in this site do not necessarily reflect the views of TooManyTaxis or the general U.K. Hackney Carriage Trade

Pandora, all your questions are sensible and reasonable; and I shall do my best to answer without relying upon too much law and legal jargon!

1) When Berwick adopted the 1976 Act in 1979, the existing unlicensed private hire trade appear to have opted to become hackney carriages and drivers, because they probably thought they might as well be able to work from a rank, if they had to become licensed anyway.

2) Berwick did require the medical to be done by an applicant’s own GP when it had its own medical certificate, but upon raising the standards to the DVLA Group II it was difficult to insist upon it being done by an applicant’s own GP, when the DVLA don’t require that for HGV / PSV licensing. The preference was always for medicals to be done by an applicant’s own GP.

3) To limit the number of hackney carriage plates requires an unmet demand survey at least every three years. I don’t know when, but at some time, probably in the late 80s or early 90s, Berwick did remove the cap on numbers. The Borough of Berwick-upon-Tweed covered a large area, with a number of towns and / or large villages (e.g. Seahouses), so a survey would have been expensive, even though there were few hackney carriages. The costs of the survey every three years would have been passed onto the hackney carriage proprietors, which would have resulted in Berwick having some of the highest (rather than the lowest) fees in the region, despite the trade probably also being the poorest or one of the poorest in the region. I’m sure it was the right decision at the time, but who was to foresee what the position was going to be about 20 years later?

4) Until October 2006, Berwick drivers worked in the Borough of Berwick-upon-Tweed, where the majority also lived. One or two did live a few miles north of the England – Scotland border, but their nearest town was Berwick. So, they were local people, working in their local communities, who knew what they were doing and where they were going – there was little (if anything) to be gained by introducing tests, but it would have increased their fees! There wasn’t any apparent need for such tests. Once applications were made by those who used them out of town, a test could have been introduced, but only for the purpose of testing their knowledge of the area of the council. As Berwick only has two major roads, with only two towns (Berwick and Wooler) and a number of villages, it would be difficult to produce a fair locality test that someone would be able to pass with very little effort!

5) Not in the first place, because we were only concerned with one Polish applicant / driver. Even when there were a few more applications, we had no reason to imagine that matters would develop as they did. After all, it had never developed in that way in any other council area, taking Tynedale, Eden and Hambledon as local examples. Hindsight is, however, a wonderful gift!

Pandora, I hope that fairly answers your questions.

As for PHD, you over simplify matters! Firstly, since joining the council in June 2004, I had raised standards, so there was no desire to lower them or attract custom from elsewhere. As taxi licensing is self-financing, the council was never going to get anything out of the increased revenue, except for a need to do more work. As for the former Mayor, you’re right he did make such comments, but he was also corrected by the Chief Executive who stated, as I just have, that there could be no profiteering, because the revenue could only be applied to administering the hackney carriage function. Berwick’s increased revenue was only used for what it was supposed to be used for. Can every other council genuinely make that claim?

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The views expressed in this site do not necessarily reflect the views of TooManyTaxis or the general U.K. Hackney Carriage Trade

Interested Party, your maths is good, but your formula is flawed, because the fee was £125 and not £200.

In October 2006, licensing consisted of me and a licensing assistant, but ultimately the team was expanded to cope with the volume of work and became me, two licensing officers and a licensing assistant.

You’re also wrong about enforcement. When the only hackneys licensed by Berwick worked in Berwick, enforcement was easy, because they were there to be seen on the ranks in the town!

As numbers grew and vehicles were being used out of town / borough, we addressed that problem – as I have said, we employed more staff, bought and equipped a high visibility enforcement vehicle and undertook regular enforcement exercises across the region. We aimed to spend one day a week on enforcement, but realistically we only managed to do enforcement one day a week for three out of every four or five weeks. Unless we were working with the police or VOSA, we were accompanied by an authorised MOT tester (who was paid out of the hackney carriage revenue).

You’re right that we didn’t provide CCTV to the existing resident Berwick trade, but their roof / top signs were paid for by the Council out of the surplus from 2006 – 2007.

The surplus from 2007 – 2008 was carried forward to 2008 – 2009 as a ‘reserve’ towards the legal costs of the High Court case.

If the judge had not ordered Berwick to pay half of Newcastle’s legal costs, Berwick would have had a surplus of £30,000 to £40,000. We had spent much time over 2008 working on the creation of additional taxi ranks in Berwick town, Wooler, Belford, Seahouses and Bamburgh, but the costs order put pay to those plans.

You are right that it would have been appropriate to reduce fees, if the Council was running with a constant surplus, but to do that was only likely to encourage others to licence with the Council, which might have resulted in a further surplus; and the circle might have continued for ever more! As we did not want to attract applicants (and had never wanted to attract anyone), we endeavoured to spend the revenue on the service for which the fees were received.

Personally, I would have rather spent the projected 2008 – 2009 surplus of £30,000 to £40,000 on the creation of taxi ranks across the Borough of Berwick-upon-Tweed, but the judge had other ideas. Either way, the account was as good as balanced; and any small surplus that remained was carried over to Northumberland County Council’s hackney carriage account, for which there should be an account specifically for the Berwick hackney carriage zone.

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The views expressed in this site do not necessarily reflect the views of TooManyTaxis or the general U.K. Hackney Carriage Trade