Aylesbury

A long anticipated judgement has been handed down by Mr Justice Ouseley and Lord Justice Treacy  whereby they have ruled that a single breach of a procedural requirement upon which a prosecution depends does not automatically mean that prosecution must fail.

The defendants, Call a Cab Ltd., were prosecuted by Aylesbury Vale District Council for operating a private hire vehicle without a licence. The defendants raised, in their defence,  their belief that  the Council had failed to carry out the correct procedures in 1989 when they sought to adopt the private hire controls in Part II of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976.

The Magistrates’ Court of first instance accepted the defendants’ argument, ruling that a failure to notify 12 out of the 112 parish councils in the district meant that the Act had never been validly adopted and the prosecution therefore failed. The Council raised an appeal as the effect of the ruling would have had consequences throughout England and Wales for many Councils.

On appeal to the High Court, Mr Justice Ouseley and Lord Justice Treacy ruled that the starting point must be the statutory context read as a whole and that is was significant in this case that the defendants had suffered no prejudice because the Act did not require notification to them, but to the parish councils.

Mr Justice Ouseley finally said that the magistrate should have considered the degree to which there had been "substantial compliance" with the procedural requirement, and cited the words of Lord Woolf in R v SSHD ex parte Jeyeanthan [2000] 1 WLR 354.

Mr Justice Ouseley however rejected the Council's first ground of appeal (which concerned the inferences the District Judge drew from the lack of mention of receipt of any notices in parish council minutes).  and made comments as to a number of different ways councils might be able to demonstrate service and, he most importantly, confirmed that any Court examining the matter should start from the presumption that the Council had done what it ought to have done.

The Divisional Court remitted the original prosecution back to the Magistrates' court for further consideration.

The original court case can be found here.

http://www.localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13547%3Athe-case-of-the-taxi-prosecutions-and-the-missing-records&catid=61%3Alicensing-articles&Itemid=29