Scottish Private Hire Association hits out at Glasgow City Council over parking permit fiasco

The Scottish Private Hire Association (SPHA) has hit out at Glasgow City Council's application process for parking permits for private hire cars, branding the system as "impossible and unnecessarily obtuse".

The SPHA claims that the council's policies from one department don't match those of another which is causing a stalemate for hundreds of the city's licensed private hire drivers.

Licensing policy requires the name on a vehicle's logbook to match the name on the private hire car licence. However, according to the association, hundreds of drivers are in a position of having to rent their vehicles from third party vehicle owners meaning the name on the vehicle's licence issued by the council, and thus the logbook too, is a different name than that of the vehicle's day to day driver.

However, this becomes problematic as the council's policy for obtaining a parking permit requires the name on the logbook to match the name of the resident applying for the permit. A permit can also be obtained if the logbook is a company car with the name of a limited company on the car's logbook, which is often not the case for private hire cars.

Eddie Grice, the General Secretary of the SPHA, said: "We've been battling this for almost a year now. Our members are putting in applications for parking permits and they are continuously rejected. We've contacted council staff in the Roads and Parking Department and explained to them how the licensing regime operates and asked them to put a workaround in place so that private hire drivers that rent their cars can obtain a permit. We've had Councillor involvement where they've attempted to persuade the council staff to play ball also. Everything we've tried to negotiate so far has failed. The system is impossible and unnecessarily obtuse.

“I've now been forced to write to the Civic Directors in the hopes they will pull the department's round the same table and find some way for this to work. These cars are lawfully licenced by one council department and then the drivers are being told by another department that they don't comply with other policies. It's utterly frustrating and it's causing drivers to have to park their legitimately licenced vehicles away from home. We are hopeful that a quick and easy resolution can be found before our drivers feel compelled to seek legal advice."