Reprieve for Manchester pedlar

Article published: Monday, July 26th 2010

Members of the pedlar community expressed relief and delight last Friday after a man was acquitted of illegal street trading at Manchester Crown Court. Critics feel the Council has been unfairly targeting the mobile vendors in recent months.

Brandon Garlick, of Manchester, was found not guilty of the offence of illegal street trading under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982.

Despite his possession of a valid pedlar’s badge issued by the police, Mr Garlick was stopped by Council licensing officers who informed him that he had remained in a single spot for too long. They claimed this amounted to erecting a fixed pitch, which is not permitted for pedlars under street trading laws.

On appeal to the Crown Court from a conviction at Magistrates Court, Mr Garlick contended that he was permitted to remain in that position for a reasonable amount of time as he was waiting for a customer. The customer had told him that she intended to buy some of his goods but needed to find her husband to obtain the neccessary money. This ‘procurement order’ therefore protected him from the need to remain constantly mobile.

Additionally, not all the time he was alleged to be stationary was captured by CCTV evidence and the court reasoned that during that time he could have been on the move.  This negated the prosecution assertion that he was static and had a fixed pitch.

The defence was based on the critical distinction between street trading and acting as a pedlar. The latter is a separate legal category and the Pedlars’ Act 1871 aims to facilitate their trade, referring to travelling vendors of goods. Those falling under the Act are expressly exempt from the law regulating street trading as they exercise a different function.

In April of this year new legislation that only affects Manchester restricting pedlars was introduced. The Manchester City Council Act 2010 imposes what campaigners say are unwieldy and restrictive conditions on pedlaring, with legislative terms that are unclear and confusing in practice.

Incidents have been reported of Council licensing officers providing differing interpretations of the provisions relating to how long a pedlar can remain in a certain place and what the geographical scope of a single location is.

Pedlars say that the Council are intentionally attempting to restrict their business and get them off the streets.

As reported by MULE the Council spent £100,000 on Parliamentary agents to push for the legislation. Despite this, their wish that pedlars be subject to the near impossible task of being in “perpetual motion” while trading, was dropped from the final draft of the act – along with another punitive provision which would have allowed on the spot fines of £300.

Nic McGerr of the Pedlars’ Association, which offers resources and advice to pedlars, told MULE that this was “an embarrassment all-round for the Council.”

He added that the Council “wanted scalps to justify the huge amount of money they paid in order to get the legislation through.”

How fervently the Council’s Licensing Unit will pursue pedlars under the new legislation, in force as of April this year, remains to be seen. The new law has not yet been tested in court and without proper legal clarification of the meanings of its terms, pedlars fear for the continued security of their livelihood on the city’s streets.

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Comments

1. thanks for printing this mr Mule, but I’d like to make a correction. Although I support the work of “pedlars.info” it is a free open access site & there is no such organisation as “The Pedlars’Association”. I may associate with pedlars as much as I associate with any member of the public, but it is not correct to give that a title that puts any pedlar outside of being a single self-motivating, self-sustaining person – as much an individual as any other member of the public. A pedlar is not part of a maintained special interest group like a rent association or housing co-op which can be altered by private legislation outside of the general public interest and outside of the category of being covered by a national public statute such as the Pedlars Act.
   This is the crux of the argument that pedlars are having to have with the promoters of these private bills & Acts. Pedlars say promoters are interfering with the public liberty of people to meet up and make arrangements with each other in public and not be forced to have the open market driven on to people’s doorsteps & into the peace & quiet of private homes. This is what the Manchester Act has been set up to achieve, & soon like the Westminster bill in London, Manchester folk will discover that they are to be prosecuted for selling at home their own private car parked on the street with its public license.
   These private Acts can be endlessly altered to suit the fantasies of council officials obsessed with labelling things as “shoddy” or which seem to threaten the monopoly of “approved” inner city moneyed conglomerates.

   Comment by nic mcGerr on August 6, 2010 at 12:41 pm

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