Here is the summary of Judge Sean F Dunphy in the Ontario Court of State Justice in 2015 which can be located here https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2015/2015onsc3572/2015onsc3572.pdf
It was very clear that a P2P service such as Uber do not actually accept the booking, but the driver does.
Lee Ward Chairman of Alpha states
“This has been proven quite easily by myself and a friend who is an Uber driver. We drove to the outskirts of Sheffield to ensure that no other Uber driver was close by and I requested a trip from the Uber App, which I could not make because no Uber cars were available and therefore Uber could not and did not accept my booking.
I then asked my friend to log into his Uber drivers App and make himself available for work, which he did. Sure enough I could now link myself to a driver on the Uber circuit, so I therefore requested a journey, but, I asked my friend to not accept the booking. Because he did not accept the booking the Uber App then told me to try again later, which is quite obvious that the booking was never accepted in the first place by Uber even though a driver and vehicle was in the area.
Again, this simply proves that what Judge Dunphy identified that it is the driver who accepts the booking and not Uber or any of its servers, companies registered under its umbrella or an employee of Uber that accepts the booking as an operator of private hire vehicles is by law required to do. The driver quite clearly accepts the booking and Uber then link the P2P request of the customer with the driver. Even if the driver accepts the booking and then chooses to decline the booking, the customer is then still without a booking being accepted because they have to try and get another driver to accept the booking by repeating the process.
This then means that every driver who accepts a booking by a user of the Uber App is actually plying for hire!
Another scenario that would support this action is that if a friend of mine has an operators license and puts his phone on divert to my mobile so that I can take calls and then cover the work I would also, as a driver, be accepting the work and not him himself who is a licensed operator”.
Mayor Sadiq Khan pledged that he would crack down on Private Hire companies and drivers who broke the law, so now lets see some action, Uber have basically handed it to you on a plate and openly admitted that they are breaking the law and the terms of their operators license, so come on Mr Khan, now is your opportunity to prove you are a man of substance.
