Millmans Coaches Limited (trading as Grey Cars) & Anor

An appellate tribunal will not interfere with a Traffic Commissioner’s regulatory decision unless it is plainly wrong or the facts or law require a different result. In a severe maintenance case, the Commissioner must consider the available regulatory outcomes proportionately. A suspension or curtailment need not be selected where reliable evidence shows that it cannot operate meaningfully.

Serious and repeated vehicle-maintenance failures, coupled with inadequate competence and only short-lived improvements after earlier intervention, may justify findings that an operator and transport manager have lost good repute. Improvements to paperwork and systems do not answer the risk where safer vehicles are not being operated. Revocation may consequently be proportionate and inevitable.

The company held a standard international PSV operator’s licence and operated school and private-hire transport. Its transport manager was Paul Mark Hamlyn-White. Following a further unsatisfactory DVSA maintenance investigation, multiple immediate prohibitions, overdue inspections, deficient records and brake-testing failures, the Traffic Commissioner revoked the company’s licence and found that Mr Hamlyn-White had lost his good repute.

The Commissioner disqualified him from acting as a transport manager for one year and until he had passed the relevant certificate of professional competence. The appellants challenged the proportionality of revocation, the handling of curtailment, and the finding concerning the transport manager’s competence. The central issue was whether the Commissioner’s decisions were plainly wrong.

1. The appeals were dismissed. The Tribunal held that the Traffic Commissioner’s decisions were not plainly wrong and that neither the facts nor the applicable law required appellate intervention under Bradley Fold Travel & Peter Wright v Secretary of State for Transport (2010) EWCA Civ.695.

2. The underlying maintenance findings were unchallenged. They established serious and repeated failures affecting road safety, including immediate prohibitions, poor annual-test performance, overdue preventative maintenance inspections, defective records, inadequate brake testing and ineffective vehicle-off-road controls. The Commissioner was entitled to regard the case as severe under the proportionality guidance.

3. Having placed the case in that category, the Commissioner had to consider revocation and disqualification, an extended suspension, and a significant indefinite curtailment. He did so. The evidence that an operation below sixteen vehicles would be commercially unviable entitled him to conclude that meaningful suspension or curtailment was not an available alternative. It was proper to ask the operator about viability and to allow time for advice; procedural fairness did not require the Commissioner to propose a number for the operator.

4. The Commissioner was entitled to find that the improvements in systems and documentation had not translated into safer vehicles. Earlier intervention had produced only short-term improvement. The evidence supported the conclusion that the company could not be trusted to comply in the future, applying the Priority Freight question, and that the risk justified ending the operation, applying the Bryan Haulage (No.2) question.

5. The finding that the transport manager lacked the competence required both in the workshop arrangements and in his transport-management role was also open to the Commissioner. The loss of good repute of both operator and transport manager was proportionate. Revocation of the operator’s licence was therefore inevitable.

• Upper Tribunal (Administrative Appeals Chamber): dismissed the appeals and upheld the Traffic Commissioner’s decision.
• Traffic Commissioner for the West of England: on 2 March 2023 revoked the PSV operator’s licence under Public Passenger Vehicles Act 1981 and found that the transport manager had lost good repute.