[2024] UKUT 421 (AAC)

As we mentioned above, the 1995 Act does not provide a right of appeal against a Traffic Commissioner’s refusal to grant a period of grace. Despite that, there are decisions, such as McKee, in which the Upper Tribunal has felt able to offer an opinion, albeit in quite general terms, on when a period of grace should, or should not, be granted.

While there is no right of appeal against a Commissioner’s refusal to grant a period of grace, cases arise in which the refusal to grant a period of grace is an integral part of the decision to revoke an operator’s licence. In such cases, we consider that the Traffic Commissioner’s obligation to provide sufficient reasons for a licence revocation decision cannot be discharged unless some explanation is given for the refusal to grant a period of grace. We are satisfied that the present case falls into this category. The absence of a transport manager was the only regulatory concern mentioned in the PTR letter and, on the operator’s case, the only impediment to it satisfying the requirement to have a transport manager was time.

In our judgment, the Traffic Commissioner was required, in this case, to give the operator some explanation as to why its request for a period of grace was refused. The circumstances do not speak for themselves or, to put it another way, this cannot be considered to be a case in which a request for a period of grace was bound to fail. We say that for the following reasons:

the operator argued that it did not receive the former transport manager’s March 2024 letter of resignation. On its own, that assertion might carry little weight but, here, OTC’s records show that it also did not receive the transport manager’s letter despite the manager asserting, in July 2024, that the March 2024 letter was sent to both the OTC and the operator;

the OTC’s letter of 22 August 2024 informed the operator that certain information was required in order for the request for a period of grace to be considered: information about the activities of the previous transport manager, the period of grace sought, how transport manager duties would be ‘covered’ during any period of grace and action being taken to ‘meet the transport manager requirement’. While the operator’s response did not deal with the activities of the former transport manager, it did identify the period sought, and explained that it had identified a replacement prospective transport manager whose expected appointment was imminent (on 10 September 2024). Apart from the failure to provide information about the previous transport manager, the operator’s response was not obviously inadequate;

while the operator failed to respond to the OTC’s request for information about the activities of the previous transport manager, that information would have been of no relevance to the question whether the proposed replacement transport manager was satisfactory. It may have been relevant to a wider regulatory issue about whether this was an operator who could be trusted properly and effectively to co-operate and liaise with its transport manager but no finding was made to that effect in the Commissioner’s revocation decision letter.