The ban on issuing new authorizations for the rental service with driver (NCC) until the national computerized register of companies holding taxi licenses and NCC authorizations is fully operational has allowed, for over five years, “the administrative authority to raise a barrier to the entry of new operators”, seriously compromising “the possibility of increasing the already lacking offer of non-scheduled public transport services”. This is what can be read in sentence no. 137, filed today, with which the Constitutional Court, accepting the questions it had raised before it, declared article 10-bis, paragraph 6, of legislative decree no. 135 of 2018 illegitimate.
As a preliminary matter, the ruling clarified that the recent adoption of decree no. 203 of 2024 of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, which establishes the “full operability” of the aforementioned computerized register starting from one hundred and eighty days from its publication, “has no impact on the present judgment, since the objections were raised on the legislative provision” by virtue of its “structure”, regardless of the “factual” events and “contingent circumstances” pertaining to its concrete application.
And this is because it is precisely the configuration of the censored provision that has allowed the administrative authority to block the entry of new operators into the NCC market by simply postponing, “with the succession of decrees (or with their issuance and subsequent suspension), the full operation of the computerised register”, as the concrete historical event has demonstrated.
The concern of the Competition and Market Authority (AGCM) aimed at highlighting that “the expansion of the offer of non-scheduled public services responds to the need to deal with a high and largely unsatisfied demand, especially in metropolitan areas, usually characterized by higher traffic density and the inability of scheduled public transport and taxi services to fully cover the mobility needs of the population”, has therefore remained completely unheard – the ruling noted. The censored rule has therefore caused, in a disproportionate manner, “serious harm to the interests of citizens and the entire community”.
In fact, non-scheduled road transport services contribute to making freedom of movement effective, “which is the condition for the exercise of other rights, for which the strong lack of supply” – which places Italy among the least equipped European countries in this regard – generated by public conforming power has unduly compromised “not only the well-being of the consumer, but something broader, which concerns the effectiveness in the enjoyment of certain constitutional rights, as well as the interest in the economic development of the country”.
MuoverSì: after the Constitutional Court, Meloni calls a round table
“We ask Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to quickly convene a roundtable for a new framework law on non-scheduled public transport”. This is what Andrea Romano, president of MuoverSì Federazione Ncc e Mobilità, which brings together the main associations in the Rental with Driver sector, said, adding.
“Today the ruling of the Constitutional Court deals a final blow to the already shaky credibility of law 12-2019, which now only Minister Salvini persists in taking seriously with seriously punitive implementing decrees towards tens of thousands of NCC operators and companies – adds Romano -. The Court has put in black and white what millions of Italian citizens, foreign tourists and companies experience every day on their own skin, denied the constitutional right to free mobility: the existence of ‘a high and largely unsatisfied demand’ for non-scheduled public transport, ‘the inability of the taxi service to fully cover the mobility needs of the population’, the ‘serious prejudice to the interests of citizens and the entire community’ caused by completely ineffective and outdated laws”.
”In the face of the non-scheduled public transport catastrophe, the only path that politics should take is not that of the colored patches that Salvini is following in homage to the taxi lobby, but that of a new framework law that finally gives Italy new and modern rules capable of guaranteeing the full right to mobility for citizens, tourists and businesses. Our federation, as well as the entire NCC world, is absolutely available to give its contribution in this sense to the government and to all politics” he concludes.
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