Orihuela’s Socialist Party has accused the City Council of mishandling the award of new taxi licences, claiming poorly drafted rules and allegedly disproportionate exclusions have left the process stalled for more than a year.
Socialist councillor Luis Quesada said delays were not simply the result of a complicated administrative procedure but arose from errors and ambiguities in the regulations approved by the municipal government.
According to documents reviewed by the PSOE, the council took almost a year to approve the rules and several more months to establish the assessment committee responsible for reviewing applications.
Once the evaluation began, both the committee and the council’s General Secretariat reportedly warned that several scoring criteria could not be applied objectively because they had not been defined clearly enough.
The committee subsequently declined to recommend which applicants should receive licences and requested a formal amendment to the rules. It warned that proceeding without changes could lead to arbitrary decisions or conflicting interpretations.
The problems reportedly include difficulty verifying applicants’ professional experience, a lack of clear standards for assessing language skills and uncertainty over how periods of unemployment should be scored.
PSOE representatives argue that these shortcomings have undermined the legal certainty of the entire process.
The dispute has been further complicated by appeals from applicants provisionally excluded under conditions they consider excessively restrictive.
Quesada highlighted cases in which candidates were reportedly rejected because the council considered that they had not sufficiently demonstrated their knowledge of Spanish.
Those applicants had submitted official training certificates issued by public adult education centres operated by the Valencian regional government. They had also previously been admitted to the theoretical examination and successfully passed it.
The Socialists described their subsequent exclusion over language requirements as difficult to understand and potentially contrary to the principles of proportionality and good faith.
Despite council officials identifying and confirming the technical problems several months ago, Quesada said no definitive action had yet been taken to restart the procedure.
Instead of immediately correcting the rules, the Department of Transport has requested further reports from legal and local development officials. These will determine whether the regulations should be amended, the process returned to an earlier stage or a system used by a neighbouring municipality such as Torrevieja adopted.
Quesada said this succession of reviews demonstrated poor planning and an inability to manage a process that should have been completed months ago.
The PSOE warned that the delay was harming applicants who remain unable to begin working while they await a decision. It is also affecting residents and visitors, who continue to face a shortage of taxis across the municipality, particularly during periods of high demand.
The party has called on the municipal government to correct the deficiencies immediately, ensure that every application is assessed fairly and provide the legal safeguards needed to prevent further challenges.
Quesada urged the council to end the uncertainty and complete the award of the additional licences as quickly as possible, improving conditions for applicants while expanding Orihuela’s inadequate taxi service.
