New advice on vehicle licencing

The Department of Transport has published new guidance on vehicle licensing for childminders. Many local authority areas have required childminders to license their cars as a public service vehicle and may have been required to have additional CRB checks particularly for school pick ups.

Now the department states that, ‘Car journeys undertaken in the context of most typical childminding arrangements would not fall within the PHV (private hire vehicle) licensing regime.’ This will hopefully clarify the situation for local authorities.

The guidance states that:

A childminder will have undergone a whole raft of suitability checks and the service he or she provides goes well beyond driving. It seems to the Department to be unnecessarily burdensome for childminders to be drawn into the PHV licensing regime.

Childminders are already vetted; they are carrying out work where the driving element is incidental rather than central, they require specialist skills and they have responsibilities to the passengers which go beyond driving.

The Department considers it most unlikely that a court would conclude that Parliament intended that the majority of the many thousands of childminders across England and Wales should have to obtain PHV licences in order to be able to transport children in their care.

Taking account of the principles set out in Part One of this guidance note, the Department considers that typical childminders should not be licensed because:

• the carrying of passengers is an ancillary part of the service;
• the driver is likely to have been vetted for wider work;