The court of appeal for road hauliers
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If you don't get what you want before the LA, your only option is to appeal to the Transport Tribunal. But what is the Transport Tribunal? Who sits on it? What are its powers?
The first point to remember is that the
Transport Tribunal is an appeal court which considers only points of law. You cannot simply ask the Transport Tribunal to reconsider your case—the position is similar to an appeal from an Industrial Tribunal on an unfair dismissal case.
A Transport Tribunal has three members. The chairman is always a lawyer who will be either a Crown Court Judge or a Queen's Counsel. He sits with two lay members who have an equal vote. Those lay members will have experience in the industry: they invariably understand not only transport law but also the transport industry. The most difficult case to approach is where you think that the LA has simply made the wrong decision on the facts. Any operator appealing to the tribunal has to prove that the LA was "perverse", or came to a decision which no reasonable LA could have come to on the facts. Perhaps that is why so many appeals fail before the Transport Tribunal: for an appeal to succeed the tribunal has to accept that the LA has made a fundamental mistake of law or has been perverse. Having said that, the Transport Tribunal is one of the most informed appeal courts in the judicial system.