Kings View Chambers have successfully appealed a decision by Transport for London (TfL) in a private hire licence refusal case.
The details
Our client had his private hire driver’s licence suspended in 2017 following an arrest for alleged rape. In 2018, and following the investigation, the case against our client was confirmed as not proceeding to charge.
Despite this, TfL took 11 months to make a decision about the fitness of our client to hold a private hire driver’s licence. TfL finally decided to revoke our client’s private hire driving licence 3 days before the expiry of his 3-year licence.
The appeal
We successfully argued against TfL’s decision to revoke our client’s licence on a number of grounds but including on the basis of TfL’s own behaviour in this case and policies.
Other grounds relied on included:
- Lack of “full” information and evidence before the decision was made
- Critiqued of the decision letter from TfL as being sloppy, illogical in places and showed the decision had not been set against TfL’s own rules
- Evidence from our client
- Lack of consideration of any mitigation put forward (including the obvious point that the matter was dropped which is beyond mitigation)
TfL attempted to persuade our client to drop the appeal to protect its reputation given the disproportionately long time it took to decide to revoke our client’s private hire driver’s licence. The request was resisted on a very important point of consideration. If our client had withdrawn his appeal, TfL would have relied on the revocation (and absence of appeal against it) to refuse his fresh application making the case so much harder to win next time.
The outcome
The outcome of the appeal for our client is that the TfL legal representative said he will recommend the next application by our client goes through without the need for an appeal.
The driver was represented by Stephen McCaffrey.