Consulta opens up to coach companies: yes to new licences and booking apps

From the Constitutional Court comes a double blow against the stasis that continues to surround the rules of the chauffeur-driven hire service, and which complicates the mobility of Italians already struggling with the cyclical shortage of taxis.

With Order 35/2024, the judges move against the stop to new Ncc licences decided by decree at the end of 2018 (Conte-1 government) until the national computer register, never launched by the Ministry of Infrastructure, is 'fully operational'. In Judgment 36/2024, the Court declares unfounded the constitutional objections addressed to Law 37/2023 of the Calabria Region, and above all explains that the Ncc can develop so-called "innovative services", for example booking systems through apps, just like taxis because a ban reserved to rentals "would lack any rational justification and would configure a protectionist measure".

With the two pronouncements filed on 7 March, the Court goes straight to the heart of the matter for the government. But in Italy, the dossier is a delicate one for all executives, caught between the desire (more or less explicit depending on the case) to pander to the protectionist urges of taxi drivers and the impossibility of doing so explicitly without violating the cardinal principles of competition.

Hence the recourse to indirect means to close the market, such as the one conceived by the simplification decree (so to speak) no. 135/2018 with which the yellow-green government devised the public national computerised register of taxi and Ncc licence holders, and blocked new licences for rentals until the actual launch of that register: which, however, never arrived.

Such a situation, the ordinance explains, seems to "respond to a protectionist urge" rather than to "a public interest"; and the problem is aggravated in a sector such as non-scheduled public transport, "characterised by an inadequate openness to the entry of new subjects" as underlined by the Court itself in its ruling 8/2024 on the Antitrust. To understand the repercussions of this attitude just take a trip to London: where, according to the latest data, there are 9.7 Ncc licences per thousand inhabitants, i.e. over 60 times the 0.15 per thousand residents in Milan.