' Witch hunt' charge before Tribunal
Page 33
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• Counsel for the National Freight Corporation (Mr. R. M. Yorke) had -sought to continue his Davis witch hunt but had not sustained his objection,it was submitted before the Transport Tribunal in London on Tuesday by Mr. T. H. Campbell Wardlaw for Larrow Transport (Northern) Ltd. The appeal by Larrow was against refusal by the Northern Licensing Authority of an additional vehicle on an A licence. The only respondent to be represented was NFC. The Tribunal is to give its decision in writing,
Mr. Wardlaw said that in his submission the LA had been wrong to treat the application as one for an additional vehicle; Larrow had merely applied to substitute one vehicle for another at the same unladen weight. The LA's decision was harsh and unjust, submitted Mr. Wardlaw, and the file of doctments sent to the Tribunal by the Authority was "singularly incomplete and, if I may say so, misleading".
The facts were, he continued, that following repossession of a vehicle by a hire
purchase company, the LA struck the vehicle from Larrow's licence under Section 177(11 of the 1960 Road Traffic Act. The company returned to the LA its licence, as required, and at the same time applied for variation of the licence by the addition of one vehicle in place of the one repossessed. In Mr. Wardlaw's submission the LA was bound to grant this as no increase in unladen weight was involved.
However, the LA decided not to grant a short-term licence pending a substantive inquiry. On May 16, 1969, this application was heard and refused, being the subject of the present appeal.
It was not contested, said Mr. Wardlaw, that the LA was right to strike off the vehicle. Nor was it contested that he struck off the vehicle on March 5 while the office stamp on the Larrow application showed the LA had received it on the 6th. However, the licence and,, the application were sent off together. The LA's decision that as he had struck the vehicle off on March 5, the application
received on March 6 amounted to a substantive application to increase the fleet by the addition of one vehicle was "coloured" said Mr. Wardlaw.
Mr. Yorke submitted that the LA was right in what he did. The vehicle had been struck off the day before and therefore the Larrow licence was for nine vehicles (and not 10) on March 6 when the application for substitution was received. "You can't add by way of substitution a vehicle you haven't got," he remarked.
The Tribunal decided to allow Mr. Yorke to put before it a series of documents which were copies of documents it had before it in a previous Larrow appeal from a decision of the Metropolitan LA. Mr. Wardlaw objected that he had only been notified of them the evening before and had no chance to obtain instructions in order to answer them.
After going through points in the documents, Mr. Yorke said that in comparing these documents put in to support a Metropolitan application with the ones now put in for a Northern application. there were about 100 instances of discrepancies in figures. It was quite impossible to base any reliance on the figures. It was possible that one set was true; but both could not be so.
"The figures put in by this company are so suspicious that it is quite impossible for any LA to accept them," he said.