Are Uber Giving TfL The Big Finger... By I'm Spartacus : Plus The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars

Why do you think TfL 'lent' their policy officer to DfT.... to roll out minimum standards nationwide without proper parliamentary scrutiny of any law change?

TfL license these vehicle and are the enforcement authority for them. 

Wherever they turn up, TfL are under a duty to act, look at the chaos at St Pancras (supposedly geofenced to prevent issues), what's got to happen before any action is taken, punch ups, stabbing, petrol bombings.....remember the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars ? (See below)

TfL are showing complete disregard for public safety in the pursuit of licensing fees and the 'Dear Jo' agenda, to the detriment of honest drivers and licensing authorities nationwide. 

'Working' towns outside your licensing district isn't legal, it's not the intention of cross border hiring at all.

What an absolute scandal, Khan & Shawcross (supposedly Labour politicians) hang your heads in shame. 

    

      With thanks to Taxi Leaks roving reporter, Sean Driving Abaht 

EDITORIAL COMMENT By Lee Ward 

Lets have a look at what the Local Government Association say in their Councillors Handbook on Licensing shall we?

Pages 23 & 24
As a councillor you can take some simple steps to ensure that your local authority is not having a detrimental impact on other authorities and their communities.

Ask your taxi and PHV licensing service whether they have a high enough standard of conditions (see councillor checklist) and consider where an applicant intends to work when issuing licences. 

You do have the legal right to refuse to issue a licence if the applicant does not intend to work mainly in your
area and should recognise that the reputational impact to your council of knowingly licensing taxis to operate elsewhere could severely limit your ability to develop partnership working with neighbouring authorities.

If you seek to include a section on this in your licensing policy, then it is important to remember that a ‘hackney carriage’ cannot ‘work’ or ‘operate’ as a PHV. The law simply allows them to be used for ‘private hire purposes’. 

This may sound like semantics, but has been tested in the courts and means that you cannot use your greater power to condition PHV driver licences to regulate the driver of a hackney carriage, even though they may at times be working in the same manner as a PHV driver (ie making pre-booked journeys, rather than plying for hire).

EDITORIAL COMMENT : By Paul Coghlan

The London uber driver escorted out of Liverpool returned. The reason, he had no choice he lives there. 

This if nothing else this is a glaring example of how this TFL cancer has spread nationwide. 

Any Tom Dick or Harry has thrown a license for 300 quid with  no questions asked. 

We are now seeing London licensed private hire vehicles in virtually every major city in England. 

The scale of corruption and cover ups not seen since Hillsboro or Jimmy Saville. 

It will come out... and when it does you will see this cartel they call TFL, has more snakes at its head than the Greek god medusa.

Taxi Leaks Extra

The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars

Was a turf war in the East End of Glasgow in Scotland in the 1980s between rival criminal organisations selling drugs and stolen goods from ice cream vans. Van operators were involved in frequent violence and intimidation tactics. A driver and his family were killed in an arson attack that resulted in a 20-year court battle. The conflicts generated widespread public outrage, and earned the Strathclyde Police the nickname the "serious chimes squad" (a pun on Serious Crime Squad) for its perceived failure to address them

Drugs and stolen goods.

The violent conflicts, in which vendors raided one another's vans and fired shotguns into one another's windscreens, appeared superficially disproportionate, even farcical. However, more than just the sale of ice-cream was involved: several ice-cream vendors also sold drugs and stolen goods along their routes, using the ice cream sales as fronts, and much of the violence was either intimidation or competition relating to these.

Arson attack

The culmination of the violence came on 16 April 1984 with the murder by arson of six members of the Doyle family, in the Ruchazie housing estate. Eighteen-year-old Andrew Doyle, nicknamed "Fat Boy", a driver for the Marchetti firm, had resisted being intimidated into distributing drugs on his run, and attempts to take over his run – resistance that had already led to him being shot by an unidentified assailant through the windscreen of his van.

A further so-called frightener was planned against him. At 02:00, the door on the landing outside the top-floor flat in Ruchazie where he lived with his family was doused with petrol and set alight. The members of the Doyle family, and three additional guests who were staying the night in the flat that night, were asleep at the time. The resulting blaze killed five people, with a sixth dying later in hospital: James Doyle, aged 53; his daughter Christina Halleron, aged 25; her 18-month-old son Mark; and three of Mr Doyle’s sons, James, Andrew (the target of the intimidation), and Tony, aged 23, 18, and 14 respectively.

Want to know the full story, watch the fascinating channel 4 documentary Trial and Error below.