Hard Concrete Limited and Jatinder Singh Dhillon: [2025] UKUT 071 (AAC)
Upper Tribunal Administrative Appeals Chamber decision by Judge Ovey on 24 February 2025
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Judicial Summary
The First Appellant held two restricted licences. The Second Appellant was the sole director of the First Appellant. There was a lengthy series of formal warnings relating to maintenance of vehicles and unsatisfactory audit and investigation reports. The Company was called to a public inquiry in respect of both licences and its application for a third licence. Within a week it applied for an adjournment to obtain legal representation in circumstances of financial difficulty but failed to specify what steps, if any, it had already taken and how long an adjournment it was seeking. The adjournment was refused the next day without any inquiries about those matters.
It was plain from correspondence and other documentation that English was not the Second Appellant’s first language. We concluded that the refusal of the adjournment without further steps was substantially unfair given in particular the Second Appellant’s linguistic difficulties, the likelihood he would struggle to present the Company’s case effectively and the existence of matters as to which a representative might have been able to make effective submissions.
We remitted the matter for a further hearing, but expressed the view that the Traffic Commissioner’s decision had not been plainly wrong on the material before him and drew attention to some potential difficulties faced by the Appellants.