ANNEX (continued)
Letter from the Clerk to the Delegated
Powers and Deregulation Committee, House of Lords to the Head
of Buses and Taxis Division, Department of the Environment, Transport
and the Regions
At its meeting last week the committee agreed that
it expects to wish to take oral evidence from your Department
on this proposal. As the House of Commons Committee is now going
to do so next Tuesday a decision will be taken whether or not
to hear oral evidence from you (on Wednesday 4 February) after
the Commons Committee's meeting next week.
In order to help inform that decision I should be
grateful if you could respond to the following two points by next
Tuesday:
(i) Your letter refers to Sir George Young's
Private Hire Vehicles (London) Bill which is currently before
the House of Commons. Could you explain how, if at all, para
1 of Schedule 1 of that Bill would tie in with the deregulation
proposal?
(ii) You mentioned in your letter that the Department
was not aware of any statistics relating to the number of attacks
on passengers in taxis, licensed minicabs or unlicensed minicabs.
You further commented that your understanding was that police
forces do not keep statistics on that basis. I find the Department's
apparent lack of information on this point surprising. One of
the Committee's witnesses drew my attention to the Evening
Standard article "Yard mini-cab warning after 67th sex
attack", pointing out the coincidence that it had appeared
on the evening of the day on which the Committee first considered
the deregulation proposal. I had also noticed the article in
The Times the following day. In the light of these statistics
I wondered whether you could check whether other police forces
keep similar statistics, and if so, whether in the Department's
view the number of attacks committed by minicab drivers raises
any question of necessary protection.
22 January 1998
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