Issue - meetings

Report of the Cabinet Member Development and Safety

RESOLVED THAT

1.    the consultation feedback received be noted;

2.    the revised policy attached at Appendix 3 of this report be adopted; and

3.    authority be delegated to the Director of Environment to take the steps necessary to implement the policy changes.

The Cabinet Member Development and Safety introduced the report and explained that the council’s current licensing policy for private hire and taxis was adopted in July 2014. Whilst there was no statutory requirement to undertake a review of the taxi policy, there was a commitment to do so at least once every three years to ensure it remained up to date and relevant. He reported that a 12 week consultation took place between September and December 2017, the responses to which were reproduced in Appendix 4. In addition a taxi policy review working group was set up by the Licensing Committee in April 2017 to facilitate the review of the policy; it had met 4 times and the minutes of their meetings were included in Appendix 2. The proposed revised policy was included at Appendix 3.

The Cabinet Member then summarised the proposals-

• Knowledge test-a number of changes to the current knowledge assessment were being proposed including replacing the written Highway Code section of the test with the higher practical driving assessment; introducing a learning day covering safeguarding, equality duty, law and conditions. All the proposed changes aimed to improve safety so that licenced drivers were fully aware of the duties and responsibilities in law so the council could be confident that Cheltenham taxi drivers were some of the best in the country.
• Three Strikes Policy-the purpose of this policy was to improve the council’s means of dealing with complaints, allegations and witnessed incidents of misconduct or infractions of a type which individually were not considered sufficiently serious to justify a review of a persons suitability to hold a taxi or private hire driver, vehicle or operator licence, but which may give rise to such concerns if repeated or if regarded cumulatively with other such incidents.
• Working Hours-whilst it was acknowledged that this would be hard to enforce on an hourly basis, the point was to lay down expectations of what constituted safe working practices
• Online criminal records checks (DBS)
• Vehicle emissions-the proposed revised policy for new vehicles was to retain 5 year rule for petrol cars (Euro Emissions Standard 5 compliance), Euro Emissions Standard 6 for diesel and any age for ultra-low emission vehicles-defined as 75g CO2/km and under. The proposed revised policy for existing vehicles was to phase out older vehicles so to get all petrol vehicles to at least Euro 5 standard by 2021 and get all diesels vehicles to Euro 6 standard by 2021
• Testing arrangements-privately contracting additional testing stations for licensed vehicles
• Grandfather rights-different rules currently existed for hackney carriage vehicle licence holders depending on the licence plate number. A number of hackney carriage vehicle licence numbers had grandfather rights attached to them meaning that as long as the licence remained valid, these vehicles did not have to comply with the council’s wheelchair-accessible vehicle (WAV) policy. The council had consulted on a number of options with regards to existing grandfather rights : a) to amend them so that they only applied to current licensed vehicles  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5