Stephen Hodgson

Archive for July, 2009

Yesterday I voted in the Total Politics Blog Poll 2009. The blogs I voted for as my top 10 (in alphabetical order, not rank order) are:

Blaney’s Blarney
Conservative Home
Dizzy Thinks
Guido Fawkes
Iain Dale’s Diary
Paul Waugh
Political Betting
Samizdata
The Young Conservative
Tory Bear

There are only two days left to vote for your own top 10. See the Total Politics Blog Poll 2009 website for details on how to vote by e-mail.

The Loughborough Echo reported last week that three Charnwood taxi drivers successfully challenged Charnwood Borough Council’s decision to suspend their licences for refusing to take a BTEC course in how to load luggage and be polite that the council made compulsory for all taxi drivers in 2007.

Under current rules imposed by the council, all cabbies in Charnwood must pay £120 to attend 12 weeks of evening classes, which finish with a multiple choice test for a level 2 BTEC qualification.

But at a hearing at Loughborough Magistrates’ Court on July 16, a judge ruled that suspending the drivers for refusing to take the course was unreasonable and ordered the council to pay the trio £5,713.55 in costs.

This is a victory for common sense. When I was elected to Charnwood Borough Council in May 2007, two of the first pieces of casework I was involved in related to two experienced Charnwood taxi drivers who contacted me because they were concerned about the council’s (then) new policy mandating a BTEC course for all drivers. Sadly, I quickly discovered I could not offer much help because the council’s licensing committee had agreed to the new rules just weeks before the election was called and for me, as an individual councillor and someone who doesn’t sit on the licensing committee, there was nothing I could do except to apologise to the taxi drivers for the way the council was treating them.

The print edition of last week’s Loughborough Echo has done a fantastic job exposing the unnecessary waste and expense associated with the taxi driving BTEC course by printing examples of some of the topics and exam questions for the course.

Quoting from the online edition of the Echo again:

Solicitor David Leigh, who represented the drivers, ridiculed the multiple choice questions on the course, adding: “There was an entire evening on the carriage of parcels by taxi – something that could be taught in all of 30 seconds.

“One has to wonder what the council were thinking – I don’t think they bothered to even look what was being taught.

“One might speculate that the only people to gain anything out of it were the course organisers.”

Well said. To force taxi drivers with decades of experience to spend hundreds of pounds and tens of hours of their spare time to be told how to be polite to their customers is frankly insulting. It’s great that these three taxi drivers stood up for common sense and that Loughborough Magistrates’ Court came down on their side.