Richard Baum

As well as spending £100,000 and countless hours staging a referendum that moved us precisely nowhere and yet which still managed to please me, the Council has also this week given me my debut on the Licensing and Safety Panel. This is the group of Councillors who decides whether to grant licenses to taxi drivers (in the main) and whether or not to take them off the naughty ones.

Obviously there are loads of applications for licenses every year, and so the panel only gets to see the ones that aren’t clear-cut decisions. Most people applying for licenses are perfectly decent people wanting to earn a living performing this important public service. But an important public service it is, and so everyone wanting to do it has to be a fit and proper person, and when they’ve got a criminal record as long as the Tyne Bridge, it’s up to me and the rest of the panel to decide.

This is an important job. Not only are we talking about the livelihoods of the people involved, but also their families and of course the safety of their passengers. It’s not to be taken lightly.

We had about half a dozen license revocation issues at the start. This is where license holders have done something naughty (usually getting caught plying for hire rather than picking up pre-booked customers like they’re supposed to, although occasionally something very naughty indeed like beating someone up) and now come before us to see if it’s naughty enough for us to take their license off them.

After that was a dozen or so applications, where we were tasked with deciding whether people with criminal histories were now reformed enough to be given a license. For some it was easy, either because their discretions were so few or ancient as to barely be worth a mention, or because they had more form than Reggie Kray. But for others it really was touch and go. It doesn’t feel pleasant watching a man trying to make a living be denied that opportunity by us.

What irks the most is spent prosecutions. Under the enhanced CRB check that taxi drivers must submit to, all the convictions ever recorded, spent or not, are disclosed. So we have cases of people with long records stretching over a number of years, but who have been conviction free for a decade or more. What do we do with people like this? And, should they even have to tell us? What is the point of a spent conviction if it is never truly wiped away? One fella had a trivial conviction the best part of 20 years ago. Why should he have to declare that no matter what job he’s going for? He committed the crime but he paid the punishment and has obviously reformed since.

It was an interesting evening, and the legal advice we got through light on some interesting issues, like the achingly slow criminal justice system. Unfortunately these meetings aren’t open to the public because of the confidential things discussed. It’s a shame because unlike 95% of the other Council meetings, watching one of these would probably enthuse people about what we Councillors get up to. Sadly the public are stuck with scrutiny, where it’s now wonder the average audience is nil.

Rick