Out of Town Drivers!!!!! Why are council doing Nothing!!!!!!

I am here to applaud the driver on Saturday night who was ranking on Carver Street.

Basically what happend was there was a Doncaster cab ranked among our Hackneys at the far end.

Some customers negotiated a price with the driver and thery were about to drive off. The driver (our Sheffield boys) got out of his cab approached the driver and asked the customers to get out and as it wasnt a sheffield cab.

The customers got out and got in a Sheffield cab.
The doncaster driver was given a bollocking and left empty.

Why do i every weekend see Barnsley, Doncater, Chesterfield and Northeast Derbyshire cars stealing our jobs.

Surely the Council can do something about them!!!!!! Or do we have to move them ourselves!!!!

This is a question that has been raised and answered many many times, of course the licensing section will take action against any driver illegally plyining for hire in Sheffield, what ever the origin of the vehicle or licence,

It is the Council's policy to prosecute illegal plying for hire, What we need to do that is proof, and that is not as easy as it sounds, the last 5 interviews we have conducted all the drivers interviewed have only picked up friends,family, aquaintance that fix their vehicles, old friends from school, etc.

There are many steps to the procedure,

1, Gather eveidence, this is done in may different ways, but the most effective is covert passengers, or observations.

2, Check with private hire operators that the driver does not have a booked job, this is difficult if the operator is not from sheffield.

2a, Check the vehicle registered keeper (in cases of no licence on the vehicle) with the DVLA, write to the registered keeper, once the DVLA respond to the Council. We may be able to prove obstruction but this would be very difficult,

If the driver and vehicle are unlicensed then there is no legal obligation on the person to respond.

3, Contact the licensee to obtain information on who was driving the vehicle at the time of the incident. Await their response.

4. Once driver identified, arrange interview if no job bookings were found or the driver does not have a licence,

5, undertake the interview, and then arrange to to follow up with contacting the individuals the driver names as the passengers (if that is the case ) at the time of the incident,

6 Take statement from those individuals or other witnesses that may have been named in the interview.

7, collate all the evidence and decide on the next step,

If after all this we believe that we have a prospect of winning a Court Case where we can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the driver illegally plied for hire we will submit a file for prosecution, we also now have instructions from the Licensing Board, that if the driver is licensed in Sheffield we have to immediately suspend their licence at this point and refer them to the Licensing Board at the next available opportunity.

A normal prosecution in these instances usually runs to 40 to 50 pages of evidence and statements,

We have to lodge a prosecution with the Courts within six months of the date of offence or we cannot then lay the evidence before a court, but most cases, take over 5 months to get to court, for a full trail, especially if the accused plead not guilty.

We have in the last year won the majority of all the cases we have taken Court, and we currently have 5 prosecutions pending for illegal plying for hire.

I hope this answers you questions.

Most of the out of town drivers are from Dronfield and working largely in Sheffield anyway. We have given away to them a large proportion of the city to work as they like because the Sheffield drivers are not interested in working at Woodseats and beyond.  Why have Network been allopwed to have a free phone in Morrisons at Meadow-head? Why don't Sheffield taxi firms compete for work in those areas and do to them as they do unto us, work in Dronfield and Coal Aston. Leaflet the area and provide such a good service that these cowboys are starved out of the market.
There is only so much the Licensing can do but there is so much more that we should be doing to safeguard our trade and we are not doing that we don't have a right to complain about others not doing enough.