Agenda and minutes

To approve the minutes from the last meeting of the Full Committee.

The minutes of the meeting held on 11 May 2022 were agreed by the members present and then signed by the Chairman.

To receive any apologies for absence

Apologies for absence were received on behalf of Councillors Bhinder and Johnson.

To receive any declarations of interest.

There were no declarations of interest.

There was no public participation.

The Chairman invited the officers to introduce the report.

S Mcdonald introduced the licensing fees and charges report for 2023-2024. As previously advised by email, Phil Wortley (Licensing Team Leader), was unfortunately not available for this meeting.  That being the case, S Mcdonald and K Knight would try and answer any questions that members may have.

The report before members set out the draft licence fees and charges for the next financial year.

In addition to the content of the report, there were a small number of errors on the proposed list in Annex B as follows:

Pages 26 and 27 of the report, specifically the fees for Lottery registrations and Licensed premises, Club Gaming, Club Machine and Prize Gaming permits and their associated annual fees and administration fees cannot be raised, as these fees are set in Gambling Act regulations.

Pavement licensing fees have unfortunately been omitted from this list – the £100 fee is capped within the 2020 Business and Planning Act Regulations, and therefore the 10% uplift cannot be applied to these.

However, a review of this activity is currently being undertaken and a new licensing regime is expected to be announced in its final form around September 2023, potentially introducing longer term licences, with a revised fee structure.

A report will be presented to the Committee at that time, to appraise them of the new arrangements and to agree revised fees if appropriate.

It should also be noted that we cannot charge or recoup costs for charity collections or hypnosis registrations.

Consideration for fees for scrap metal licences are an Executive function, delegated to officers, and would therefore fall to the Assistant Director of Legal and Democratic Services along with final agreement following consultation for proposed taxi vehicle and operator charges, dependent on initial agreement this evening.

They therefore requested, that, following consideration of this report, the Committee agree the draft fees and delegate authority to officers to complete the process where required, as per the recommendations on page 6 of the report.

She welcomed questions from the committee.

The Chairman thanked the officers for all their hard work producing the new fees and charges for the coming year. She also thanked them for all the additional information they provided and for all the queries they had answered prior to this meeting.

Councillor Rogers also thanked the officers for the additional information they had provided him with prior to the meeting. He noted there had been a significant and consistent fall in taxi licences and asked if the officers had an indication of the impact Uber and other App based companies were having.

K Knight felt that although Uber had made an impact it wasn’t significant. She explained that Uber wasn’t licenced to cover Berkhamsted or Tring, so Uber drivers could only drop-off there but weren’t able to pick up customers. This generated more work for local drivers. She advised that some private hire operators were also introducing App based services similar to Uber to keep  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.