[2025] UKUT 067 (AAC)

We refused the Appellant’s director’s request for an adjournment and heard this appeal in the Appellant’s absence. We were satisfied that the Appellant had been given proper notice of the hearing in accordance with the 2008 Rules. We decided that it was in the interests of justice to hear the appeal in the Appellant’s absence for the following reasons:

no good reason was given by the Appellant’s director for his failure to attend the hearing. Simply being ‘unavailable’ is not a good reason;

the Appellant’s director has hardly engaged with these proceedings at all. The director did not respond to the Upper Tribunal’s request to return a confirmation of attendance form. He was then asked to respond to a chasing email ‘by return’ but, instead, informed the Upper Tribunal at 9 p.m. on the day before the hearing that he was ‘unavailable’. The director’s limited engagement with these proceedings to date made us doubt whether he would attend a subsequent hearing in the event that we granted the request for an adjournment;

our provisional assessment of the merits of this appeal suggested that an adjournment would probably serve only to delay its inevitable dismissal.

Section 27(1) of the 1995 Act requires the Traffic Commissioner to revoke a standard operator’s licence if the operator does not satisfy the requirement to have a transport manager. There is a procedure whereby an operator may be permitted by the Traffic Commissioner temporarily to operate without a transport manager (known conventionally as a period of grace) but this operator made no request for a period of grace.

It is not clear whether the Appellant received the OTC’s proposal to revoke letter of 23 April 2024. The Appellant’s director concedes that he did not deal with emails sent to him by the (one time) transport manager when the director was in India, but those emails would probably not have forwarded the OTC’s proposal to revoke letter since the proposed ground of revocation was that the Appellant did not have a transport manager. But that does not matter. It was the Appellant’s duty under regulation 25 of the 1995 Regulations to notify the Traffic Commissioner of an effective address for correspondence upon the previously notified address having ceased to be an effective address for corresponding with the licence holder. If the Appellant did not receive the OTC proposal to revoke letter it was because it failed to comply with its duty under regulation 25. That failure had nothing to do with the OTC nor the Commissioner and cannot affect the validity of the OTC’s proposal to revoke letter / section 27(2) notice nor the Traffic Commissioner’s subsequent decision to revoke the operator’s licence.

The Appellant did not have a transport manager. The Traffic Commissioner was required by section 27(1) of the 1995 Act to revoke the Appellant’s standard operator’s licence once the Act’s procedural requirements had been followed. Those requirements were followed and there was no element of procedural unfairness in the Commissioner’s approach. The Commissioner’s findings of fact are not challenged. The Commissioner’s revocation of the Appellant’s operator’s licence involved neither an error of law nor any mistake of fact and we must therefore dismission this appeal.