Written evidence submitted by Medway Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (TPV0049)

The Medway towns have been affected by out of town vehicles and drivers since 2014. This was mainly an influx of Tonbridge and Malling Hackney Carriage vehicles and drivers working on one of our Medway licensed operators. This presented several issues as these vehicles were Hackney Carriages, with several reports and incidents of them plying for hire within Medway. Joint compliance and enforcement has been carried out between Medway and Tonbridge and Malling officers. But these joint operations were at extra costs to both authorities and unfairly put a strain on each licensing department. We now have Hackney Carriage working in Medway from as far away as Huntingtonshire!

In 2017 on top of the Tonbridge and Malling issue. Medway was bombarded with 100's of Transport for London vehicles and drivers working on the uber platform under Uber's London operators licence. London is some 30 miles away from Medway and not a neighbouring local authority.  The consequence of this influx has put further strain on the Medway trade and licensing department. It presented a situation, especially with Uber's aggressive marketing strategy and intent to menopolise the market in Medway meant that the majority of private hire bookings and journeys fulfilled in the Medway Towns were under no scrutiny of Medway licensing and no enforcement could take place by Medway licensing to ensure that the public in Medway were safe.

There have been several attempts to bring enforcement down to Medway from Transport for London and to date only one compliance check has been performed in Medway by TfL back in 2019. In April this year following pressure applied from the licensing chair and the MLTDA and with political intervention by the leader of Medway Council, a meeting was held with a TfL compliance officer with verbal agreement to carry out enforcement on the 100's of TfL licensed minicabs working out of sight and and out of mind of TfL compliance. To date this has not happened!

This raises the serious question of safety of the travelling public in Medway using the services of the uber app.

The legality of the operations of Uber in the controlled district of Medway has always been questionable. In 2019 the trade funded a legal opinion on this matter. The legal opinion stated that Uber's operations in Medway were unlawful under section 46, 1 d of the LGMPA 1976 with the suggested course of action for Medway Council to take legal action against Uber. This was also backed up with independent legal opinion commissioned by Medway Council and a full council motion passed to “take the appropriate legal action against Uber”

To date this legal action has not happened. This is perhaps mainly due to what could be an expensive and long battle through the courts with any associated cost to come out of Medway's budget.

To add some clarity to the above. In Medway in 2019 there were 785 licensed Hackney carriage and Private hire vehicles and drivers and to date this number has fallen to just above 400. This is an evidential dramatic drop in licence holders in Medway considering local population growth.

We now have the situation in Medway, where a new driver that lives and wants to work in Medway as a private hire driver will licence themselves with Transport for London and not Medway Council. This is a direct consequence of Uber being allowed to operate in Medway where they are not licensed to do so. Again this raises serious questions of public safety in Medway due to the majority of journeys taken by the public in the controlled district of Medway are not under the control and scrutiny and enforcement of Medway Licensing.

As you can tell the trade welcomes the change in stance from the government to look at closing the exploited loopholes of out of area working following the Baroness Cassey report. The trade has been pushing for resolution of this for many a year in the interests of public safety. Lets not forget that public safety and localism is at the heart of the current legislation.

A resolution to out of area working or cross border hiring can be made quite simply following some small amendments to legislation and/or local policy as follows.

One suggestion from the trade that would be quite simple to action would be, as condition of Licensing or national standard:

Operators that are licensed under the Plymouth City Council Act 1975, the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 and the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998 must only dispatch a booking to a vehicle licensed by the same authority when that vehicle is within the controlled district that issued the license.

What this does do is put the legal obligation on operators to ensure that they only dispatch bookings to their associated vehicles while they are within the area and forcing the vehicle to return to that controlled district should the booking take them to another district which in turn makes enforcement of local vehicles much more effective for the authorities. For app based operators this can quite easily be achieved by geofencing their app to the area they are licensed to operate.

This simply is a reinforcement of Section 75, 1, (a) LGMPA 1976 that unfortunately is rarely enforced.

What has worked for many years is localism and localism is the essence of the legislation, where each authority decides the best and most suitable requirements for their area’s vehicle and driver requirements respectively. 

Secondly an intended use policy could be placed on private hire vehicles (currently this can only be applied to a Hackney Carriage) that each vehicle proprietor must intend to use their vehicle in the area the licence was issued for that vehicle.

Both of the above do not stop a driver's ‘right to roam’ but does bring back local enforcement and scrutiny and puts a stop to out of area licensing and licence shopping.

By simply applying either one of the above changes to stop cross border hiring negates the need for statutory national standards. Each local authority implements and enforces their own set of standards and conditions upon licensees in the interests of public safety.

Lets not forget that Nationalisation of the trade only suits the large corporate run operators, it makes their life easier as this suits their business model. But does this suit and protect the travelling public? Does nationalisation of the industry suit the self employed drivers who have conformed to the local standards, sometimes at great expense?  Licensing is there for public safety not there to support any corporate operator.

August 2025