Session 2010-11
Publications on the internet
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the transport Committee
on Tuesday 15 March 2011
Members present:
Mrs Louise Ellman (Chair)
Steve Baker
Kwasi Kwarteng
Mr John Leech
Paul Maynard
Iain Stewart
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Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Brian Whitehead, Regional Organiser, RMT, Eddie Lambert, Former Chair London Taxi Branch, RMT, Paul Brent, Chairman, National Taxi Association, Tim Gray, Company Secretary, National Taxi Association, and Steve Wright MBE, Chairman, Licensed Private Hire Car Association, gave evidence.
Q118 Chair: Good morning, gentlemen. Welcome to the Transport Committee. I apologise for keeping you waiting for a few minutes. Could you start, please, by identifying yourselves with your name and the organisation you represent? This is for our records. Could I start at the end here?
Brian Whitehead: Brian Whitehead, RMT.
Eddie Lambert: Eddie Lambert, RMT.
Tim Gray: Tim Gray, National Taxi Association.
Paul Brent: Paul Brent, National Taxi Association.
Steve Wright: Steve Wright, Licensed Private Hire Car Association.
Q119 Chair: Thank you very much. Mr Whitehead, could I ask you first, what restrictions, if any, do you think should be put on private hire vehicles operating outside their home area?
Brian Whitehead: I think they should return back to their area immediately unless they have a prebooked fare because any other system can be abused and cannot be policed.
Q120 Chair: You think that should be an automatic thing; they should go back.
Brian Whitehead: Yes.
Q121 Chair: Does anyone else have any views on that-on private hire?
Steve Wright: It’s absolutely thinking from the dark ages, with respect. We live in an age where we have environmental and safety considerations. In London, where we have got rid of this type of restrictive practice with a modern Act of legislation, we have a very, very good system.
Q122 Mr Leech: Can I ask Mr Whitehead how you would expect this to be policed to make sure that a private hire vehicle would return to its home district before taking another fare?
Brian Whitehead: Simply by the enforcement system that we have now, but actually using it. It is not being used at the moment. You can go to London any time you like in the evenings, because it is predominantly an evening problem, and you will see private hire vehicles ranked up, which is illegal.
Q123 Mr Leech: How realistic is it, do you think, that local licensing authorities would be able to deal with the issue if they were mandated to do that?
Brian Whitehead: If it was based on a system where it could be cost-effective for them in that any fines or levies they imposed would make it neutral so that it was not an outlay for the council, then they would enforce it. The problem we have at the moment is that we have people coming in, crossing the borders, sitting around, taking up parking spaces, annoying residents by sitting outside residences. How do you police it? At the moment it says they should pick one up and go back, but who is to say which one they pick up, where they are going to take them and if they ever end up back in their own area.
Q124 Mr Leech: If this was introduced, the obvious areas where this would have a big impact would be town and city centres in the weekend evenings, I suspect. Would you take the same view on taxi firms that were based very close to borders? For instance, I represent a constituency that has Trafford on one side and Stockport on the other, and if a taxi firm was based right on the boundary between the Manchester authority and the Stockport authority, or Manchester and Trafford, do you think it would be reasonable for those taxi firms to have to apply the same rules as you are suggesting for the city centres?
Brian Whitehead: Where do you draw the line? It is all right saying you will live on the boundary, so you make the boundary bigger, but there is always going to be another boundary, isn’t there? You are always going to have another boundary. So how far do you keep going and going and going so that it becomes totally unenforceable or licensable because it is covering the whole country, if you don’t want a boundary? With private hire, as with anything, if you are on the border and someone over that side of the road wants you, all they’ve got to do is pick up the phone and call you, and you come. There is no restriction on that. What we are saying is that, once you go into someone else’s area, you should go back. Otherwise, you have paid the licence fee, the licence comes with all the safeguards about monitoring, being a good proprietor and everything else, but you are in another area where no one has control, no one knows what you are doing and there is no way of coming back.
Q125 Mr Leech: Just one last question, Chair. Has the RMT made an assessment of what impact your proposed change in the regulations would have in terms of the number of staff that local enforcement teams would require to be able to police a change?
Brian Whitehead: No, we haven’t; I’ll be totally honest about that. We haven’t done that, because part of our problem is that, every night of the week in London, we are having a problem as it is with enforcement.
Q126 Mr Leech: Would you accept, though, that it would have a big impact in terms of the number of staff that would be required to deal with the issue?
Brian Whitehead: It could have; I accept it could have. But what we are saying is that the staff we have now don’t seem to be enforcing.
Q127 Iain Stewart: Could I just probe you a little further on your suggestion that there is a requirement to return to the home licensing authority? Surely there is a difference between accepting a fare in one place that is a return fare to the home area, and having a fare that starts and finishes in another authority. Following on from Mr Leech’s example, would your suggestion allow that scenario to give a fare that started in Stockport, came to Manchester and then a return fare from Manchester to somewhere in Stockport? Would that be acceptable in your solution?
Brian Whitehead: Again, how would you do that? I don’t know if it is a solution, but the way I look at it is, how would you police that? If you drive into another area and you drop off, if you haven’t got a prebooked fare, what you are saying is you can hang around and wait for someone to come and pay.
Q128 Iain Stewart: But it could be a prebooked fare.
Brian Whitehead: It would have to be a prebooked fare. How long would you wait before it becomes cost-effective? If you are waiting too long, it isn’t cost-effective. Most private hires that I have used are when I’ve gone longdistance. I have said, "I want to go from here to here." They have quoted me a price, and I have said, "That’s a bit dear." They have said, "Well, we can’t get a fare back so you are paying for that." That is part of the deal that you get when you do it. When I do airport runs and things like that, part of what I pay is because they are coming back.
Q129 Iain Stewart: So your solution would be to require every cab to return empty to its own authority.
Brian Whitehead: If they have prebooked fares, they can come back with that fare. But how long are you going to go into an area and just sit around for? How do they get a prebooked fare coming back?
Q130 Chair: Is your issue about taxis waiting when they haven’t got a prebooked fare?
Brian Whitehead: Yes.
Q131 Chair: That is the problem, not when there is something prebooked.
Brian Whitehead: No. If they have a prebooked fare, I have no problem with that whatsoever. It is if you have a taxi that is not licensed in that area, it doesn’t have an operator’s licence for that area, and it is going into that area and just sitting around. It is going to take up parking spaces and everything else. We have no control over what that private hire vehicle does by sitting there. If it doesn’t have a prebooked fare, it should come back.
Chair: Mr Maynard, was your question on that point or was it different?
Paul Maynard: I was going to go on to something else.
Q132 Chair: I think the question from Mr Leech was how that could be policed and how somebody would know. How could it be enforced?
Brian Whitehead: By the local licensing authority.
Q133 Chair: Mr Wright, do you have any view on that one?
Steve Wright: I sat before this Committee in 1993 and advocated a sensible Act for London, which is exactly what we have got. Now 40% of the private hire and taxi industry operates in London, without these ridiculous local controls. It has produced a safe, modern, less polluting taxi and private hire system than anywhere else in the country. On the private hire side, the private hire regulations have done that, and it is absolutely ridiculous. I spoke with Minister Glenda Jackson prior to the Act to demonstrate why vehicles should not, for environmental reasons, be running back empty. It reduces provision and it increases pollution to make these restrictive practices. In London, the 35 boroughs are covered by the London Assembly and it all works perfectly well. There aren’t the problems. There is no ranking in London. It is a common thing for the trade unions to say ranking is taking place in London. No prosecutions against private hire ranking in London have ever taken place. It’s a myth. They deem cars parked up in a row to be a rank, which is not the case.
Q134 Chair: Mr Brent, do you have a view on this one and how this could be done?
Paul Brent: Personally, I feel that they should return to base and it is being abused. I feel that Greater London is always looked at as a model and should be contained in London for London. It took them 22 years to catch up with the rest of the country with the Miscellaneous Provisions Act, and 23 years if you look at the Plymouth Act.
Yes, I do agree with what Mr Wright says on some things in his submission. When people are looking at getting taxis from point A to point B, the safety issue definitely comes into it. But, if you go out into the sticks, when taxis go into other people’s areas and just wait and wait and wait, and get a job from one area to another area and don’t even return to their own area, which was the submission from Liverpool where predominantly the companies are working in another city, the person that is getting all the revenue for that is the one who is issuing the licences. In the Delta situation, all or a percentage of the vehicles were working in Liverpool. They were doing nothing wrong in law, but is that the correct way to operate a business when the vehicles or the drivers cannot be checked?
Q135 Paul Maynard: Is there any meaningful difference to the passenger in the 21st century between a private hire vehicle and a licensed hackney cab, and if so, what is that difference?
Steve Wright: I can answer that. A licensed taxi is far more expensive. It is cruising the streets, polluting the environment, whereas the private hire industry is a modern, less costly form of transport. In London, in the 10 years we have had the Act, our fleet is two years younger and far more environmentally friendly as a result of the lack of stupid restrictive practices in the industry. It works. It is good for the public. The touting and the illegal activity in London have reduced by about 80% as a result of it. There is still work to do and there is more work to do with enforcement, but from the public’s point of view, the private hire service is without problem.
I ran a private hire operation for many, many years in Harrow, and our vehicles would return to within three or four miles of our office. It is a myth to say that we would be parking cars all over the place. They come back to the local area and park up, and they do that for environmentally friendly reasons.
Brian Whitehead: I think there is a big difference. If you look at the types of vehicles used and the differences and the availability for disabled passengers, there is a massive difference. It is about comfort, and it is not about restrictions but what you get out of a licensed hackney carriage compared to what you get out of a private hire. Yes, private hire vehicles are a lot cheaper to run. For £12,000, you can buy a brand new four-door saloon and go out and use it for private hire, whereas it is a minimum of £28,000 for a hackney carriage which will take disabled passengers and everything else. Therefore, there is a difference in price there that puts the fare up. But, if you look at the difference in fares, there is not that much difference between private hire and hackney carriage. In fact, if you come out of a nightclub in London in the evenings any time after midnight, you will find that sometimes you can get a hackney carriage cheaper on the meter than you can with someone who is-and I will say it-touting and ranking up outside nightclubs. If you go to nightclubs, there is just row after row of private hire vehicles sitting there and not one of them has a prebooked call. They are sitting there waiting for a call, and that is why hackney carriages are having to cruise around, because there is nowhere for them to park because people are coming in and doing that.
Q136 Paul Maynard: From the point of view of the consumer, there is no obvious distinction between the two types of taxi. With the example you have cited, coming out of a nightclub, there are taxis outside, the consumer doesn’t distinguish necessarily between licensed hackney cabs and private hire vehicles, and indeed, as you have just said, the fares are often indistinguishable. Why, therefore, are we putting significant effort into this system of dual regulation for two different types of operation which are effectively performing the same service for the customer?
Brian Whitehead: They are a totally different service.
Paul Maynard: But driving me around-
Q137 Kwasi Kwarteng: With respect, you have said that there is not much difference in price. As far as the consumer coming out of the nightclub or whatever it is at night is concerned, they just want to get home. You have said that they are using the private hire vehicles, because if they weren’t using them, the vehicles wouldn’t be there. So I am very confused, as I am sure other members are on the Committee, as to what the actual difference is. What is your argument? Why are these private hire vehicles so bad?
Brian Whitehead: I am not saying they are so bad, but if you look at certain statistics, like crime, and what goes on, such as assaults, whether they are sexual or it is violence in a cab, and compare private hire and hackney carriages, there is a vast difference-a massive difference. If you also look at the safety specifications of the two vehicles, there is a big difference. Hackney carriages are built to different standards from an ordinary four-door saloon for private hire use.
People who come out of a nightclub just want to get home straightaway. The ranking in the majority of places is away from the front entrance of that nightclub, but if you come out of there you will see private hire, parked on double yellow lines, waiting to pick people up. What happens is that people come out and there will be people there saying, "Do you want a cab? Come over here." They’ll put them in that and off they go. That is the problem. People are under the impression-
Q138 Kwasi Kwarteng: You are saying that is wrong.
Brian Whitehead: Yes, I am, because it is illegal. It is illegal.
Q139 Chair: Let’s bring Mr Wright in. It is illegal, isn’t it, for private hire to approach people without having been booked?
Steve Wright: Of course it is. What this gentleman is doing is rather misleading you, because he is saying that this is the private hire industry. These are touts. He is comparing the price of a taxi to the price of a tout. It is a fact that private hire vehicles, on average, prebooked through an office, are 25% cheaper than a taxi. End of story. That is a fact. It is quite wrong to say that private vehicles are dearer and it is actually misleading you on that. You cannot compare the illegal cabs to the legitimate, pre-booked industry. He also talked about the assaults that take place in private hire vehicles. They don’t take place in private hire vehicles at all; they take place in illegal cabs. They don’t take place in private hire vehicles. The Public Carriage Office has no records of any assaults whatsoever in the 4 million journeys a day in a prebooked private hire vehicle. They take place with the touts.
Q140 Chair: You are saying the problem is with the touts who are acting illegally, not with the legitimate private hire.
Steve Wright: There is a problem with the touts, and he is comparing the taxis to the touts.
Q141 Kwasi Kwarteng: It is interesting that you are saying this. My experience in London is that there was a very restrictive system and it became less restrictive. Just from anecdotal experience, no one I have spoken to-people I know, my friends who work and live here, who use taxis all the time-has ever said, "We’ve got to go back to the old system." No one has ever said that, which seems to me that they’ve got something right. If it works in London, I don’t understand why that can’t be applied in other regions.
Brian Whitehead: Because London is being used as one licensing authority.
Q142 Chair: Mr Whitehead, can you tell us why London is different?
Brian Whitehead: It is not different. It is being used as one licensing authority. Again, you are going to get a situation where adjacent licensing authorities are going to be coming over and undermining that system. That is what we are on about. It is where you draw the line. Where does that licensing authority stop? At the moment you’ve got a licensing authority in London that covers all the boroughs. Outside of that, you then have other authorities, and you are getting the same problem on the boundaries now of cross-border vehicles coming in.
Kwasi Kwarteng: Just to come back to that, the issue is that people like yourself were making these exact arguments before when we had this chopped-up system within London. You were making exactly the same points that you are making now. What happened was that we had one big authority in London and it was a vast improvement. That is all I am putting to you, and you are making exactly the same arguments that you would have made 20 years ago about London taxis.
Q143 Chair: Mr Whitehead, are you saying that these problems remain, but it is in a different boundary?
Brian Whitehead: Yes.
Q144 Chair: It is still a border issue, but it is on a different border.
Brian Whitehead: Every time you create a border-it doesn’t matter how artificially you create it-if you are going to move a border out to try to stop the situation and you make that one area, you are still going to get that area where it balances out against another border. So it is always going to happen.
Chair: That’s okay. It is just so that we understand what the issues are.
Q145 Paul Maynard: I was interested to read in your evidence about the case of Grassbys in Basingstoke, where they operate in Basingstoke but are registered in London, so that they are exempt from the congestion charge. That raised a question in my mind. Why isn’t every taxi firm registered in London in order to gain exemption from the congestion charge? Surely, most southeast taxi firms would rather register themselves somewhere that granted them an exemption. You mentioned that the borders have to be set somewhere. Isn’t the logical conclusion of your argument a national licensing system?
Brian Whitehead: You are back to the same thing then: how do you police it? At the moment you have separate laws that cover London from the rest of the country, with every county doing their own thing and doing it in different ways. If you are going to do what you are suggesting and go national, you are still going to have London by itself because it is covered by Acts of Parliament rather than the Acts of local councils.
Q146 Paul Maynard: Without getting into a debate, one would presume new legislation would be national rather than local, but if the only argument against national licensing is who enforces it, how would you respond to my argument that we have national laws already that local government enforce at a local level? Why would national licensing not work in this country, because we live in an age where we all travel far more? We travel further than we did in the 1840s when hackney licensing was first introduced; we are no longer just travelling within a small town. Why is national licensing not the way to go forward?
Brian Whitehead: Again, it is people knowing where they are going; it is their local knowledge, whether it is through a hackney carriage licence and local knowledge, or even if it is local private hire. It is still about local. Most taxi journeys are not miles and miles long; they are only a few miles.
Q147 Chair: Mr Brent, what is your view on national licensing rather than local licensing?
Paul Brent: If I could just rewind a little bit to Mr Leech, you live in Stockport, I take it. I come from Trafford. If we were to have a Greater Manchester plate, where would the boundaries be then? Does that mean to say that Liverpool, which would have a Merseyside plate, would be able to sit on our side of the fence, if you like, and vice versa? Greater London, with their Acts and everything, is for the whole of Greater London. If the people from outside were all to register in London, then most of the cabs would be in London. Let’s just get back to the people. If we have a Greater Manchester plate, what would happen if everybody went into the centre of Manchester? People in Hazel Grove and places like that wouldn’t be getting a taxi home because there would be no taxis there. Take Macclesfield, or even some parts of Cheshire, such as the Wirral; there is just nobody there.
Q148 Chair: Are you saying there that one problem of bigger areas is that the very local needs might not be addressed?
Paul Brent: Everybody would start cherry-picking. If you had national legislation, most of the cabs would be in the big cities.
Q149 Mr Leech: Is there any evidence of cherry-picking in London in certain areas where you are going to pick up the fares, so that everyone goes to those locations and leaves some of the-there is no remote area in London-less busy parts of London without access?
Steve Wright: I can answer this question because I was an operator in London for 30 years, both before and after the Act. There was absolutely no change after the 1998 Act in the demographics of where the vehicles were. It is an argument that was put before this Committee and others at the Department for Transport prior to the 1998 Act that is absolute fiction. It has not made an iota of difference to the provision of taxis. There are still over 2,000 operators in London. There has been consolidation, because some of the poorer operators have gone because of the Act, but the number of vehicles and drivers has grown, and the choice and the service have improved. What that has meant is a far more environmentally friendly service in London that is completely regulated. We heard all this before, "This would happen, that would happen, the other would happen." It is fiction. It never happened.
Q150 Chair: Does anybody have a different view on what has actually happened?
Eddie Lambert: Speaking as a London cab driver, there are areas outside the central area that do get very badly serviced by the cab trade-very badly. You often hear this myth, really, "I won’t go south of the river." There are occasions when drivers don’t want to go south of the river. It is not because they’ve got a problem with taking the passenger out there; it’s the 15, 20 or 25 minutes coming back when they are not going to get any work. That is why they don’t want to go south of the river. It is not the job out; it is the down time coming back where they won’t get a fare. That is part of the reason.
I want to challenge Mr Wright on saying there are no sexual assaults in private hire. Very recently, there was a Camden Town private hire driver done for sexual assault on a young lad under social services care. A couple of drivers from Stratford have been done for rape in E15 over a period of years. To say there has been none is a fabrication.
Q151 Iain Stewart: I wonder if I could approach the national standard argument from another angle, and that is, are you concerned about any local licensing authorities who set standards below an acceptable level? Particularly, do you have a view if there are any authorities attempting to gain additional revenue by undercutting neighbouring authorities? Does that exist or is that not a factor?
Tim Gray: Sir, I have some knowledge of the scenario in Berwick because I am from the northeast. They were certainly generating a huge amount of income by massively increasing the amount of licences that they issued, and we had them operating all over Newcastle, in the Rhondda, even in London. They were considered to be somewhat soft touches over CRB checks, vehicle checks and things like that. So you do get that.
What I am not sure about, Sir, is whether you are saying, with a national standard, you would have what would essentially be a national onetier system: there would be no distinction between hackney carriage and private hire. Is that what is in our minds or in the minds of the Committee?
Chair: We are asking you. We are exploring a number of things, and that is one of the issues I think we might be interested in. But maybe Mr Stewart still wants to pursue this particular one.
Q152 Iain Stewart: You mentioned the example of Berwick, which we have heard from other witnesses. Is that an isolated example or is it more prevalent out there?
Eddie Lambert: I live in Peterborough. King Cabs have moved out of town to Yaxley, just over the border, so they can operate under Huntingdon conditions. Peterborough has a purpose-built policy, like London: all black cabs, all high cost. The policy in Huntingdon is four-door saloons, with no age limit. But they do the majority of their work in Peterborough now, as they did before, because that is originally where they built up their base. They have moved over the border so they can benefit from the cheaper licensing and vehicle costs.
Tim Gray: The standards really do vary massively. I have had a case where I was dealing with a taxi appeal in Newcastle where a chap was found not to be fit and proper. He walked in wearing his badge from Derwentside, another authority, where he had obviously been found to be fit and proper. That is an example of the variations there can be.
Q153 Chair: How many examples are there where there have been problems because of a variation in standards?
Tim Gray: The problem I have is that I can’t speak at all for London, because obviously we don’t operate there in any big way. I hear what Mr Wright says about that. I have seen intense problems in my area with the variations in the standards. I say again that Berwick was the classic example, because what you had there was a private hire operator who simply wanted to cut his own costs and achieve other benefits, going to what became simply a flag of convenience. It was impossible to enforce anything that they did in Newcastle because they were licensed in Berwick, and Berwick, of course, didn’t want anything to do with them. Indeed, Berwick, when they were licensing them, were telling them that they couldn’t actually operate in Berwick.
Q154 Chair: Could you give us any idea of the extent of this problem and any more examples of what happened?
Tim Gray: I can’t in the sense, Madam, that I am talking as a lawyer rather than somebody who has the knowledge on the ground, but I am sure that there have been other authorities to which people would go because they have an easier regime. I know, for instance, in my area that we have a particular issue over the local airport. There are various different plates that are represented there, and let’s say some are more rigorous than others. You are not going to get the same standard. You may be saying that a national licensing system would give the same standard, but I go back to the whole issue of enforcement, which is what has worried me all the way along the line.
I hear what Mr Wright says about London, but that just isn’t going to work in the provinces. We have seen the difficulty over enforcement with that Berwick scenario. Cross-border hiring has been a big thing in our area because of the activities of a local firm, the leader of which is one of the leading cases denying cross-border hiring. We have seen all of that, and that is illegal. I come back to what we say in our submission, which is that the present system works perfectly well. There are two tiers, yes there are, but a national standard will never work because you will get different levels of enforcement still around the country. You can’t deal with it all centrally, I am sure.
Q155 Mr Leech: In your view, if we were to have national standards, do you think it would drive standards up or drive standards down to the lowest common denominator?
Tim Gray: I think it depends, Sir, on where you set the standards or who sets the standards. Obviously, you can set a universal standard, but my worry is how somebody who sets a standard, say, in London is going to enforce that standard in Newcastle or in Manchester or wherever. I see this as being something that simply has to be a local issue, because there are different localities which have different features and obviously different demands. I do go along with the socalled honeypot argument, that people are going to flock to the places that are really very busy, because we are finding that already in the northeast with authorities that have become unitary authorities.
Q156 Mr Leech: Does anyone have a particular view that it would either drive up standards or lower standards?
Chair: And could you address the issue of enforcement outside London? I want to talk about outside London now.
Steve Wright: We have member operators outside London, and I happen to live outside London. I will give you a classic example outside London. If I book two vehicles, one was a hackney carriage that was filthy and the driver didn’t know where he was going. From the same company, a private hire vehicle came, it was cleaner, newer, and the driver knew where he was going. You get those sorts of anomalies right the way across these things because of plates that have been bought and territories that have been owned by somebody for a period of time. Standards have just risen and risen and risen in London. If you go outside and look at the age of the average private hire vehicle in London, it is two or three years lower than the taxis. The reason it has been successful is because there haven’t been the ridiculous constraints.
Outside London, you have ridiculously lax regulations and also ridiculously onerous regulations. The combination of those things, border by border, borough by borough, over 350 local authorities, has created the need for things like Berwick to happen. It should all be swept away and market forces should take place.
Q157 Chair: You are saying it is lax and it is onerous at the same time. These seem to be in conflict.
Steve Wright : Yes. That is the way it is.
Kwasi Kwarteng: Some of them are lax and some of them are onerous.
Q158 Mr Leech: Would you not say that part of the issue is having better coordination between local authorities that border other local authorities, so that, coming back to the comment that I made at the beginning, Manchester, Stockport and Trafford have roughly similar regulations, and there is no advantage to someone going to Trafford as opposed to Manchester because it is cheaper and less onerous?
Steve Wright: London has 35 local authorities embraced in one Act that covers it. I would see that these things need to be regional, and, where regional working cooperation has taken place, all the problems that we are discussing here have melted away. There are local authorities such as Humberside and Yorkshire that have merged together their procurement for taxi and private hire. They have saved cost and they have improved provision. It is the fact that there are 350 different sets of regulations and rules that causes the variation of standards and the variation of regulations across the whole country.
Chair: These are very contentious issues, aren’t they? We are in an age of localism as well, which is another issue on this.
Q159 Paul Maynard: If we were to have a national licensing system, you expressed a concern that taxis would go to where the business was, and you implied that that would therefore be a problem. Am I misunderstanding the nature of taxi provision in that it is a service provided to consumers and that where consumers have the greatest demand that is where the service should be provided? Is that correct?
Eddie Lambert: That is inevitably going to happen.
Q160 Paul Maynard: So why would it be a problem if there were more taxis where there was more demand and fewer taxis where there was less demand?
Tim Gray: Because there may well, Sir, not be any taxis where there is less demand.
Q161 Paul Maynard: Would they not be able to then book a private hire vehicle?
Tim Gray: I think the same economic constraints as there would be from the point of view of a taxi driver would affect a private hire driver in much the same way. If there is no business that is viable, and you are talking largely about rural areas, I don’t think anybody is going to be very interested in it.
Q162 Iain Stewart: I would like to put to the panel a potential solution that I suggested to previous witnesses, and that is to utilise new technology. My understanding is that the vast majority of hackney cabs and private hire vehicles use sat-nav technology. For companies that are licensed in one authority but do a fair proportion of their journeys in another authority, should there not be a requirement that for each company the data is downloaded and aggregated, and if they do a certain percentage of their business outside their home authority they would be required to pay some additional levy? Do you think that would be practical?
Brian Whitehead: You are talking about a vehicle tracking system.
Iain Stewart: Yes.
Q163 Chair: Mr Whitehead, do you have a view on that?
Brian Whitehead: I am not too sure how you would do that and how you would transfer data and everything else on that. The whole thing, for me, is that a local authority at the moment licenses its hackney carriages and gives private hire for what it believes it needs for the area, including those with special needs in that geographical area. If you start making that area larger, for earnings reasons and those reasons alone, people will generally gyrate to the town centres and to the places where they can earn because they are now licensed to go into those places where they weren’t before, and because there weren’t that many in that area they could make a living. Now that area is bigger, they can make a living by moving over there and leaving this area blank, and that is what is going to happen. It happened with bus deregulation and there was-
Q164 Chair: Mr Gray, do you have a view on that?
Tim Gray: The technology of course is there and it would be fair to say that, in the Shanks case, I think it was Lord Justice Latham who made this point before he, of course, found that there was illegal cross-border hiring anyway. But the fact is that it is not the technology. It is the question of the enforcement. Somebody has to regulate these people. At the moment the rule is that there have to be in private hire three licences-an operator’s licence, a vehicle licence and a driver’s licence-and they all have to be issued by the same authority. As long as that continues and there is no doubt as to who is going to be capable of enforcing it, those vehicles can go where they want.
Steve Wright: I would like to come back on a couple of points. First of all, with regard to localism, we would see regional large authorities such as London. We would see local authorities working together to make one set of standards collectively, as has happened in London, where 35 local authorities are under the one auspice, and we would see that as the same model but being more regional. The problem is that, when it is crook by hamlet, you know, village by village type regulations, you get all this protectionism and cross-border stuff. It just isn’t happening in London.
The second point I would make about the RMT thing is that the particular assault that he referred to is subject to a police inquiry so that is in process at the moment. A company like Addison Lee has done 27 million journeys in London with never a single complaint or a prosecution against a driver for anything. So I think we need to put that into context.
Chair: Thank you. I think that we are going to move on to the next set of witnesses.
Eddie Lambert: Can I just query the Addison Lee reference? One of their drivers was very recently done for manslaughter, where he deliberately ran over a homeless person in Old Burlington Street, London. To say that none of their drivers has ever been done is, once again, fabrication.
Chair: Thank you. We will leave it there. Thank you very much for a lively session. Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Kris Beuret OBE, Chair, National Association of Taxi Users, John Austin, Vice Chair, National Association of Taxi Users, John Moorhouse, Company Secretary, TravelWatch NorthWest, and Paul Fawcett, Advisory and Research Consultant, TravelWatch NorthWest, gave evidence.
Q165 Chair: Good morning. Could I ask you, please, to identify yourselves with your name and organisation? This is for our records. I will start at the end here.
John Moorhouse: My name is John Moorhouse. I am Company Secretary of TravelWatch NorthWest.
Paul Fawcett: I am Paul Fawcett. I am the Research Assistant at TravelWatch NorthWest.
Kris Beuret: I am Kris Beuret. I am the Chair of the National Association of Taxi Users, a consumer group recently established.
John Austin: I am John Austin, the Vice Chair of the National Association of Taxi Users.
Q166 Chair: I would like to start off by asking the National Association of Taxi Users if you could tell us how many users you represent and how you get your information.
Kris Beuret: We recently launched ourselves at a conference only in December last year and we did that at the instigation, really, of a lot of organisations. I myself was a member of the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee, which is now no longer working. A lot of disability organisations wanted to do something for consumers. Also, a lot of women’s groups, and generally the work we have done over the many years, have flagged up the need for a consumer group to represent taxi users. We did go to Passenger Focus. They had recently taken on buses as well as trains. They felt that that was enough for the moment, but they do support this initiative. We would hope that one day that would merge with Passenger Focus, but meanwhile we are here because we feel there is an urgent need to represent the needs of taxi users.
Q167 Chair: How many users would you say you represent? How do people know that you exist and how to approach you?
Kris Beuret: We have only recently launched the web page last month. We are getting more and more people using the web page and we are in the process of getting various people to amalgamate with us, including the National Association of Licensing Officers, who we hope will support us.
Q168 Chair: You have been here during the discussions this morning and we have heard a lot of issues about cross-border hire. What are your views on that? Do you think there is a problem with private hire based in one area going into another and waiting for business before coming back?
Kris Beuret: What we know from our members is that there is massive confusion about taxis. Local authorities spend a lot of time printing pamphlets, trying to explain to people about all these boundary issues, about the difference between private hire and hackneys and so on. Long term, we would advocate a national licensing system which we think would overcome a lot of these problems, not necessarily enforced nationally, but certainly set standards nationally.
Q169 Chair: How would it be enforced then?
Kris Beuret: It is already enforced, but the confusion is that-
Q170 Chair: How would a national system be enforced?
Kris Beuret: It would be enforced locally.
John Austin: It would be enforced locally by, we suggest, either local districts or counties and unitaries. But we believe it should be planned on a regional or a county basis rather than being looked at purely at the district level.
Q171 Chair: TravelWatch NorthWest, what are your views on the cross-border hire issues you have heard us discussing?
John Moorhouse: I think we would very much agree with our colleagues here. We think the aim should be to go towards national licensing to overcome these cross-boundary problems. It may be that an initial stage may be wider licensing areas than you have at the moment. I know you will still have boundary situations, but at least you will be minimising those. You would have fewer of them than you have at the moment. I think a national system would enable local enforcement, and you would then have a position where, because the taxi would have a national licence, the enforcement would simply be of any taxi in that particular area at that time.
Q172 Chair: How would consumers benefit from a national system that didn’t look at local issues?
Kris Beuret: It would be certainty about what standards to accept. At the moment, if people try and hail a taxi, say, in Manchester, if they are behaving legally, they have to say, if they are a private hire for another area, "Sorry, we can’t pick you up." People don’t understand why that is. They are totally baffled by it.
John Moorhouse: There is an issue about the perception of taxis. Most people who use taxis don’t really understand the difference between private hire and hackney. They are, as Kris has said, very underrepresented. There is certainly an issue about the need for more consumer representation. There is the need for the taxi passengers to be aware of how they can take an issue forward if they need to do so, because at the moment I don’t think that is the case.
Q173 Paul Maynard: Would you agree that the debate over the past two decades regarding taxi licensing and taxi legislation has been driven entirely by the taxi industry itself rather than by those who actually use taxis? Would that be a fair characterisation?
Kris Beuret: That is why we have set ourselves up.
John Austin: We believe that the needs of taxi users have not been fully taken into account. We also believe that the taxi and private hire industry has not been taken account of as much as it should be in local transport plans and therefore it has not been considered as much as it should be as part of a public transport system.
Q174 Paul Maynard: Do you believe that public policy making has been driven by that same focus on taxi providers rather than taxi users?
Kris Beuret: Certainly, the work we have done in local authorities shows that you often go to committees and in the public gallery there is the trade. Obviously, councillors do their best to represent consumers and so does NALEO, the professional organisation, but, nevertheless, it is the consumer voice that is frequently absent. Through my company I have done a lot of surveys which particularly have represented the views of disabled people. They very much explain experiences of discrimination; their voice is frequently not heard. That is why the National Association of Taxi Users is particularly anxious to involve disabled people, who are themselves a market for taxis.
Q175 Paul Maynard: I actually wanted to specifically address the issue of disabled passengers because-
Paul Fawcett: Can I just come in there and make the observation that there is a lot of confusion about the difference between private hire and hackney carriages? Hackney carriages are very often limited in numbers and this has been a brake on the introduction of taxi buses-a very big brake, really-because, until Mr Moorhouse and I appeared before this Committee 10 years ago, the private hire fraternity were not able to run taxi buses. We made that point very strongly, and we are glad to see that in the Local Transport Act 2008 it was taken up. So it is now possible for both to operate as taxi buses.
Kris Beuret: We feel that, if a national standard were to develop, it would be very good to have a national standard of training for taxi drivers, because, as you heard earlier, one of the problems is that these taxi drivers have to do local tests and, like a bus driver, they can’t go from one area of the country to another and just-
Q176 Chair: What about the local knowledge? Are you discounting that?
John Austin: We believe that local knowledge is important, but its importance will diminish over time with new technology. We live in a fast-increasing changing age and local knowledge will become much less important in the next five or six years, I would have thought.
Q177 Mr Leech: I asked the previous panel whether they thought that a national scheme would drive up licence standards or reduce them to the lowest common denominator. As users, do you think it would improve standards or make them worse?
Kris Beuret: National standards would have to be set, and we would certainly hope that it would improve, particularly, the lowest common denominator, of which there are many pretty awful examples.
Q178 Mr Leech: My understanding from speaking to a couple of licensing authorities who have higher standards is that they would argue that they set higher standards than what would be considered to be the norm. Is there not a danger that the standards would actually be too low if we have national standards?
John Moorhouse: I think you would have to have a national view of that, wouldn’t you?
Q179 Chair: If you are advocating a different system, you have to have reason-
Kris Beuret : What I thought-
Chair: Just a moment. We are speaking to Mr Moorhouse. You would have to have reason to believe that it would be better, not just go in on a hope, wouldn’t you? If you are advocating a change, you need to have grounds to think it will improve things.
John Moorhouse: Absolutely. I am not sure about the mechanics of how it would come about, but certainly, if you are going to introduce national licensing, then to go along with that you would have to have proper national standards and that would have to be laid down to apply everywhere. I am sure that then, however it was done, you would look at what are the best standards and best practice that are happening now in each local area and take that as your benchmark. I must admit I wouldn’t want to get into the mechanics of it.
Q180 Mr Leech: Moving on from that then, you were advocating national standards but you were advocating local enforcement. Is there a danger that, if you leave it to local enforcement, the actual enforcement of the standards would be dictated by a number of factors relating to how locally they were enforced?
John Austin: I think you would need to have national standards of the enforcement levels, to be honest, so that they would be done locally but they would be to a national standard. One area in which standards might well be increased by a national system is in the standards of drivers. I think it would assist in rooting out ones that get through perhaps poorer quality assessment systems in some existing licensing authorities.
Q181 Mr Leech: Is there a danger that some local authorities will end up spending exorbitant amounts of money on enforcing those national standards? For instance, coming back to my example of Manchester, Trafford and Stockport, I would imagine, if there was national licensing, we would end up having Manchester having to do an awful lot of the enforcement for the whole of Greater Manchester as lots of private hire vehicles were coming into the centre of Manchester all the time.
John Moorhouse: Presumably they should be enforcing those standards now.
Q182 Mr Leech: So Stockport would be responsible for Stockport private hire cabs in Manchester.
John Moorhouse: I would see that, in a future scenario, the enforcement will be done for all taxis operating within that area by the appropriate local authority. If you had a national licensing system, then it wouldn’t be for individual local authorities. It would be for the local authority where the vehicles are operating. Again, it would be a question of how you would do that. At the moment you can’t do that. If you have a taxi operating in Manchester which is licensed outside Manchester, you can’t enforce standards. I think I am right in saying that.
Q183 Chair: How would a national standard deal with a situation where someone got in a taxi somewhere and said, "I want to go to that white building that is somewhere around the city centre"? A local driver might well know what they are talking about. If you had something with national standards, where nobody needed to have any particular local knowledge, they could not deal with that, could they? Sat-nav wouldn’t tell them that.
John Moorhouse: That is a good point, but in practice you would find that most people would predominantly operate in their local area, and I think it would be the exception. If an operation was outside that area, then you would expect them to give the right kind of service and people operating those cars would have to have that knowledge.
Q184 Iain Stewart: I would like to pick up a point that was made by the RMT representatives in the previous panel, and that is the difference between licensed cabs and private hire vehicles in terms of provision for disabled users. From your perspective, in the private hire market, is there a sufficient supply of vehicles that can cater for the needs of disabled passengers or is there a shortfall?
Paul Fawcett: This is a problem that we have come across when discussing the provision of taxi buses, because they will hold a special restrictive PSV operator’s licence issued by the Traffic Commissioner, not by a local authority or a district authority, and therefore national standards would apply. Very, very few taxis would be able to operate as a taxi bus after 2012, because all PSVs would have to be DDA compliant. It is a real problem when you have more than one licensing authority and more than one enforcement authority. They contradict each other to an alarming extent, really.
Kris Beuret: Can I just say something about the access? The majority of disabled people do not need a wheelchair accessible taxi. There are different needs for different vehicle designs for disabled people. I really do believe that the market is growing to take care and provide that range of provision.
We did some work recently in Amber Valley, which has a vast rural hinterland, and we found that, gradually evolving, the market is providing larger vehicles, which sometimes are good for taxi work with people with lots of luggage, sometimes for nightclubs for groups of young people, and at other times for wheelchair access and other things. If consumers could understand the taxi system better and had more power, and if the taxi system worked more smartly-loads of them aren’t on radio circuits even-and they stopped sitting in ranks hoping for a fare outside Birmingham station, and being happy to sit there for hours, we think that it would be a very good industry to play its part in the public transport mix.
Q185 Chair: What about the consumer that comes off a train and looks for a taxi? Are you seriously saying that all the systems should be based on technology and the basic thing of somebody coming off a train looking for a taxi should be a very difficult situation?
Kris Beuret: There will always be taxis at stations, because they are needed. What we are saying is the market would be more informed about where else to go.
Q186 Kwasi Kwarteng: Forgive me, a lot of this debate seems mediaeval to me. I remember reading in the history books about when they had 350 different currencies in Germany and all that sort of thing, and a lot of this talk reminds me of that. I appreciate that you represent consumers and you feel that there should be national standards. Are there a significant number of people in your body who are arguing the opposite of having national standards, who are saying, "No, we want to keep the current system as it is, with lots of different local authorities exercising jurisdiction"? Are there a significant number of people that you represent who are making that argument?
Kris Beuret: No. I have to say we are still building up our base, but no. Everybody sees this as a sensible way forward.
Q187 Kwasi Kwarteng: Is this an argument that you have heard among consumers?
Chair: When you say "everybody", who do you mean? You are building up your base. You have not been in existence very long. Are these your opinions?
Kwasi Kwarteng: I am asking about consumers, with respect, Chair.
Chair: Yes, but I think these are your opinions, not the consumers’ views.
Kris Beuret: We have published a manifesto on the web page and we are getting all sorts of comments back. The people who identify themselves as consumers are not disagreeing with this.
Q188 Paul Maynard: Can I return to the issue of disabled passengers once again? Would you consider me to be mistaken in my belief that licensed hackney cabs are better providers for the disabled than private hire vehicles? An argument that often gets cited to me is that, because of the extra space and size of a licensed hackney cab, a typical black cab, and because of the supposed extra training of the licensed cab driver, they are somehow better placed to provide for that sector of the market. Is that, in your view representing consumers, a correct argument to cite?
Kris Beuret: What I think, and there is quite a lot of evidence for this, is that it varies. You can’t generalise and say hackneys are better than private hire. Disabled people really do build up trade for an operator, either private hire or hackney, who take care of them and who understand how to treat them. There are others who are very bad at understanding. That is back to training as well. But I don’t think you can generalise.
Q189 Paul Maynard: Would you, therefore, agree or disagree that any moves towards national licensing, deregulation or a gradual disintegration of the boundaries between licensed hackney cabs and private hire vehicles-any of that-would actually put at risk disabled passengers’ access to adequate taxi services?
Kris Beuret: We think it would improve.
Paul Maynard: You think it would improve.
Q190 Chair: Mr Fawcett, do you have any views on that?
Paul Fawcett: I am coming to it from the consumer’s point of view, who is looking for a taxi bus where a registered local service has been withdrawn. There is a market that will emerge for more consumerfriendly vehicles to carry more than just four passengers. The taxi bus regulations relate to vehicles with eight or less passenger seats. The Local Transport Act 2008 did make provision for these vehicles to be operated by community transport associations as well. So I think a market will emerge for the slightly bigger MPV, if you like, in the private hire vehicle world.
Q191 Paul Maynard: How many taxi buses operate at the moment in the northwest, roughly?
Paul Fawcett: One, I think.
Q192 Paul Maynard: Which is?
Paul Fawcett: I have identified less than 10 in the whole country. It is very difficult to persuade the taxi trade to take the idea of carrying passengers with separate fares seriously.
Q193 Paul Maynard: Which is the one in the north-west?
Paul Fawcett: It was Allerdale. Whether it is still running or not I am not sure.
Q194 Paul Maynard: So it has not been a great success, you would suggest?
Paul Fawcett: The problem there was that they had a private hire vehicle licence, and the taxi licensing authority had to amend that licence to make it a special restrictive hackney licence where they could operate as a taxi bus but they could not go on ranks and they could not ply for hire. Now the Act has swept that away, but they haven’t taken advantage of it.
Q195 Paul Maynard: Is there anything more that the Government could do to encourage the greater use of taxi buses or their further introduction?
Paul Fawcett: They should have more prominence in local transport plans. Also, local transport authorities should encourage private hire and hackney operators, although the distinction is merging now as we have seen, to tender for taxi bus operations where the main operations have been withdrawn or deregistered.
Q196 Chair: Would you like to see taxis and private hire figure more prominently in local transport?
Paul Fawcett : Yes. They are public transport.
John Austin: The situation at the moment is highly variable. We found a number of LTPs which regard taxis and private hire as part of the public transport system and to be planned and taken account of accordingly; others do not. We do think that, with large cuts in public expenditure and the amount available for subsidising bus services, there is going to be a real need for taxi buses in rural areas and perhaps some suburbs, where they might work better than buses on main corridors. The Commission for Integrated Transport had a major report, I think three or four years ago, about recommending widespread facilitation of taxi buses in England.
Kris Beuret: One of the problems at the moment is that so much taxi thinking is done at the district level and most transport planning at the next tier up. So you often find complete disregard of taxis as the essential cement often of the public transport system.
Chair: Thank you very much for coming and answering our questions. Thank you.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Norman Baker MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport, and Rachel Watson, Department for Transport, gave evidence.
Q197 Chair: Good morning and welcome to the Transport Select Committee. I think, Minister, this is your first appearance in front of us.
Norman Baker: It is indeed.
Q198 Chair: We are pleased that you are here today and we are pleased that you are here to discuss taxis. Perhaps I can start off by asking you how high up your agenda are issues to do with taxis?
Norman Baker: Very high up this morning.
Chair: I am glad to hear that.
Norman Baker: It is an important part of my portfolio, and I recognise that there are significant issues to do with, not least of all, the issues which I think you want to explore this morning. Perhaps to preempt one of your questions, when I came into post and had a look at the legislation, it did seem to me to be slightly archaic. Obviously, the legislation in relation to taxis and private hire vehicles has been around now for many years, going back to Victorian times and the 1847 Town Police Clauses Act. Our Victorian forebears managed to leave us with a very good legacy, but, a bit like the Victorian sewers, now 150 to 160 years on, it perhaps needs a little bit of attention.
Q199 Chair: You have told us that you are looking at reviewing taxi legislation. Could you tell us something about the areas you are considering and when any such legislation is likely to be brought forward?
Norman Baker: I have asked the Law Commission in fact whether they would consider this as one of their project areas to look at, which is, hopefully, an interesting and successful way of dealing with this matter, because it is quite complicated. You have four different pieces of legislation. You have one relating to taxis outside London and one in London. You then have private hire vehicles outside London and in London. So the legislation is quite complicated. It has been built on, higgledypiggledy, over the years. Obviously, it is a largely devolved matter in terms of licensing functions, and therefore the ability to predict whether or not a particular problem which arises can be solved by the legislation in place is uncertain. That is why there is a need to look at this.
Obviously, we want the Law Commission to accept the suggestion I put to them that this is a good area for a case study and they should come back with an idea of what we might sensibly do. I am also genuinely interested in what the Committee has to say on this matter, and I am actually very pleased that you are looking at this area, because I think it is an area where, in the Department, I certainly have an open mind on what the answers are. It is very useful that you have taken evidence from a wide range of people and will come up with a report which I will look at very carefully. If the Law Commission doesn’t in due course want to take that forward, then obviously we will have a look at what you said and see how that fits into a possible legislative framework.
Q200 Chair: What is the timing likely to be? Is this open-ended when you have referred this to them?
Norman Baker: We don’t have a definite date by which we have asked them to respond, but I would expect them to respond reasonably speedily as to whether they want to undertake such a piece of work or not. If they do, I would imagine it would take 12 to 18 months to complete.
Q201 Chair: Could you give us an idea of the areas that you are looking at? Some of the areas that have been brought to us are issues to do with national and local schemes, cross-border hire issues and enforcement issues. Are those the areas that you are looking at?
Norman Baker: Yes, loosely. I don’t come with any preconceptions except to say that I do accept that the arrangements are quite varied across the country and the legislation is quite archaic. There will be one or two recent judgments, of which you may be aware, which have in a sense altered the balance of what the Department previously thought was the case. There is the Stockton judgment in particular, obviously, but there is also the district auditor’s involvement at Guildford. So there are one or two issues where we have to look afresh at where we are.
Q202 Chair: When the Law Commission do come forward with some ideas, would those be discussed with the trade and members of the public? Would there be an opportunity for that?
Norman Baker: Yes. As I say, we are looking to go forward on a proper consultative basis, so if the Law Commission gets to that stage, I would want them to make their thoughts known to those who have an active interest in the trade itself, perhaps also to the consumer interest, to whom you have been speaking this morning, and also to yourselves, obviously.
Q203 Kwasi Kwarteng: To what extent do you think what has happened in London could be used as a model for the rest of the country? Do you have a view on that?
Norman Baker: There is an issue in London about the ability to subcontract. In other words, and I don’t know if you are familiar with this, if someone who is a regular person with whom a London private hire company will deal arrives at Manchester, there is an issue about this ability to subcontract and have a Manchester organisation deal with that. There is also an issue about using other firms outside if, for example, your vehicle breaks down. The London legislation allows that sort of arrangement to take place; it does work in reverse. So there is a gap in the legislation, in my view, in that particular regard.
It is also the case that the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998, I think it is, is just generally more modern than the 1976 Act, which applies to the rest of England. The enforcement issue-the Guildford issue, Chair, that I referred to a moment ago-was a district auditor discovering that the enforcement provisions in the 1976 Act relate to vehicles but therefore not to drivers and operators, whereas the London legislation is not deficient in the same way. There are elements of the London legislation-
Q204 Kwasi Kwarteng: But, broadly, do you think the 1998 Act with respect to London has worked well?
Norman Baker: Yes, broadly speaking, although I must say in my portfolio I don’t cover London. That is Theresa Villiers. But, broadly, I think so.
Kwasi Kwarteng: You would have a view on that.
Norman Baker: Yes.
Q205 Mr Leech: We have heard from a number of witnesses and written evidence in relation to certain private hire firms being licensed in places like Berwick but operating in completely different parts of the country. Do you feel that is a situation that can allow for decent enforcement of private hire regulations?
Norman Baker: The issue of enforcement is in fact an important one and it is clearly difficult to believe that Berwick, although Berwick no longer exists in the same way as a district council, can sensibly regulate drivers in Paignton. There is an issue about whether that is a practical way forward or not and whether that leads to a lack of enforcement, as I believe it might do. One of the answers to that may be to have an arrangement whereby there is a much tighter link between the private hire operator, to which the driver has a relationship, and the location of that private hire operator than exists at the moment. As I understand it, a properly licensed Berwick taxi driver can, in terms of prebookings, align themselves with a private hire operator in Paignton, Manchester, Birmingham or anywhere else. It may be the case that, if you required a linkage to be established between the private hire operator’s district and the licensing district of the taxi driver, then that might solve some of those problems.
Q206 Mr Leech: How could that be done? One of the possible solutions would be to say that, if you become a licensed operator and the licence came from Berwick, you had to work within a certain geographical area of Berwick. But that would not address the issue that we have had from Liverpool whereby we have Delta taxis that are licensed in Sefton but are operating predominantly in Liverpool. Do you see that as an issue that could be resolved, or do you see a big distinction between the Berwick and Paignton model and the Sefton and Liverpool model?
Norman Baker: I think they are quite different, because the BerwickPaignton problem relates to taxi drivers who are licensed as taxi drivers but then using the ability which they have in the legislation to undertake prebookings, whereas the SeftonLiverpool problem, as I understand it, is a matter of private hire vehicles across borders. So there is a different problem.
The Berwick issue is an enforcement issue, as I think you rightly drew attention to, which I think would be significantly improved by the linkage which I described that might be introduced. With regard to the SeftonLiverpool problem, it depends what the problem is that you are seeking to solve. I don’t think there is an enforcement issue there. As I understand it, there is actually some good working between the different licensing authorities in Liverpool and Sefton. So it is not an enforcement issue. The issue there relates to other matters in terms of the impact on taxi drivers in Liverpool, which I think Unite feel strongly about, or whether it relates to what might be regarded as-I am not saying this is my view but it has been suggested it might be-unfair competition because, for example, the insurance companies tend to provide insurance at a cheaper rate for drivers and companies based in Sefton than they do in Liverpool. They are the sorts of issues and they are quite different issues from the BerwickPaignton ones.
Q207 Mr Leech: A number of our witnesses have suggested that a national licensing scheme should be introduced. Do you think there is a danger that this could drive down standards, or would it raise standards across the board?
Norman Baker: I suppose the answer to that depends on what the national standards are. But I am not sure that standards are the problem. I have asked officials to look into this, because one of the concerns which initially was expressed to me was that there was a difference in standards which apply to the licensing regime in different areas such that it encouraged people to register themselves or license themselves in areas where they wouldn’t otherwise do so. I have not seen much evidence of that, to be honest with you.
Yes, there are different standards in terms of, say, the percentage of windows that are tinted and that sort of thing, and yes, Berwick was cheaper in order to secure a licence than it was elsewhere, but I don’t think the difference in standards is such as to cause the problem which exists. I spoke to Unite yesterday. They were concerned not so much about the difference in standards but about the insurance issue to which I have just referred. Those sorts of issues, I think, are more pertinent in terms of costs.
Am I in favour of national standards? I want to see what you have to say about that as a Committee, but licensing is a local function and I think it would go against the grain of the Government’s general drift to take powers away from local councils and standardise them. There may be a case in one or two specific matters for having a national standard. That might be the case where we haven’t already, but I certainly think a move towards national standards in a wholesale way would be regressive and would not necessarily drive up standards at all.
Q208 Mr Leech: What about with enforcement, because, from the consumers’ point of view, they want to know that standards are being enforced? Is there any evidence that the enforcement of standards is patchy and very different from local authority to local authority?
Norman Baker: There is clearly an issue, coming back to the different problems, between Berwick and Paignton. There may be an issue there because it is unrealistic to expect Berwick to patrol what is happening in Paignton. I don’t think there is an issue, as far as I am aware, between Sefton and Liverpool in terms of enforcement. But, ultimately, local authorities are sovereign bodies. They are elected, they have their own accountability and they are responsible for enforcement on that, as well as knowing how many kebab shops there are and what time they shut. There is a whole range of things they are responsible for in licensing terms. Because one local authority may be less efficient at enforcement than another is not a reason to change the arrangements whereby these matters are handled locally.
Q209 Paul Maynard: One of the areas we have been discussing today has been the impact of any proposed changes on the disabled passenger. Do you have any thoughts on how you can not just protect but enhance the accessibility of taxis for disabled people?
Norman Baker: Yes. We have been working on that in the Department. As you know, at the moment there are options for local licensing authorities to control the number of taxis which are allowed to operate in a particular area. We have been looking at an idea that we might require those licensing authorities to have a certain percentage of vehicles which are accessible for disabled passengers, as a way of perhaps encouraging authorities to go down that track. Of course, this Government have put in place-and the last Government did as well-mechanisms to ensure that all vehicles are fully accessible by particular dates, whether that is on buses, taxis or rail vehicles, and that continues.
Beyond that, and this is an enforcement matter, to pick up Mr Leech’s point before, there is an issue as to whether or not we might look at-and I just say "look at" because we haven’t made a commitment on this-the issue of making fixed penalty arrangements more common in terms of enforcing some of these matters, which might be more immediate, more effective, and it might save money. You could take an issue such as, for example, a refusal of a driver to carry a guide dog, and subject that to a fixed penalty arrangement. That might be a far more effective way of dealing with that issue than the present arrangement, which would involve a huge kerfuffle through the courts.
Q210 Paul Maynard: We have also received evidence today regarding the concept of a taxi bus, which I gather was introduced under the previous Transport Act, licensed by local traffic commissioners. Currently, as far as we can make out, there is only one in operation, in Allerdale, and we are not even certain that that remains in operation. Does the Government have any plans to encourage greater use of taxi buses, particularly given what is happening in rural areas to bus services?
Norman Baker: You may have seen that I tabled a ministerial statement just a few days ago which in fact allocated £10 million to rural local authorities in order to encourage community transport. That sort of concept would come under the community transport field because it is my view that it is unrealistic to expect local authorities to subsidise services using doubledecker buses down country lanes, let alone expect a commercial company to provide those services. We need to find a way of avoiding isolation in rural areas. I think the way of avoiding isolation is to be far more inventive about the sorts of vehicles which we have down there. So I think that sort of model, including the old postbus which has operated in some parts of the country, does find a way of preventing isolation in rural areas at an affordable cost.
There is also the Local Sustainable Transport Fund, which again I launched as part of the White Paper on Local Transport, which has £560 million available to local authorities over a four-year period, which is a significant amount of money, more than the last Government did in the same four-year period. Local authorities are able, under that arrangement-the White Paper-to identify local priorities. If they believe that their local priority is to make sure that there is a connection available for particularly isolated rural areas, then, obviously, that sort of scheme will be eligible for the fund.
Q211 Iain Stewart: Returning to the cross-border hire issue, do you see a potential for using new technology to help guide regulation in this area, with most bookings being done through a computer system and all the sat-nav technology, if a firm was based in one licensing area but the aggregate of its journeys was showing that they were primarily trading in another authority? Do you think the Government would consider using that sort of information as a basis for changing the licensing system?
Norman Baker: I am conscious that the advance of technology produces many opportunities for greater information-gathering and, indeed, potentially even more public control than hitherto has existed. Certainly, the existence of sat-nav technology should mean that, where there are not specific tests for taxi drivers carried out by a licensing authority as part of the licensing conditions for the driver, and some licensing authorities do and others do not require that topographical test, then obviously the presence of sat-nav technology potentially means that people are better informed and better able to serve their customers than would otherwise be the case.
I do caution that people should not always assume that sat-navs are correct. Apart from the obvious problems of roadworks and sending vehicles down inappropriate roads, there was a case in my constituency where one of my constituents was encouraged to take the next left, duly did so at a level crossing and ended up on a railway line. People should use sat- navs and technology generally with caution. It is not a substitute for common sense.
Q212 Chair: Do you value local knowledge: the kind of knowledge that can’t come from a sat-nav, a local driver knowing about local facilities and being able to deal with generalised queries from customers?
Norman Baker: Yes, absolutely. I think that is very important. One of the reasons why, in my view, people are happier than they were with the railway system in some regards is because the level of interaction of customer knowledge and approach from staff on the railways has improved in recent years. I have been pushing at the Bus Forum, which I chair every six months, for bus operators to take a similar view in term of what the driver does. Many drivers are very good, of course, but some drivers still see themselves simply as drivers and don’t regard it as important to have a customer-facing approach, which I think they need to have, particularly with the one-person operation that we have on buses nearly everywhere these days. I think the same thing applies to taxi drivers. The person who is in the cab or private hire should feel that the person driving the cab or the vehicle is there to help them and is not simply an automaton taking them from A to B.
Obviously, local people also have knowledge about shortcuts which may not be obvious from a sat-nav. They may have knowledge about particular roadworks at a particular time. They may say, "You don’t want to go there. That restaurant shut last week," or whatever else they may have in their heads. I certainly think there is no substitute for personal knowledge. I recall when I was at school many years ago I was told that the calculator, which was just about starting in those days, was there as a help and not a substitute for mental arithmetic, and, if the calculator said 2 plus 2 was 8.3, you shouldn’t necessarily believe it.
Q213 Kwasi Kwarteng: That is a very charming reminiscence. With respect to local knowledge, do you feel that the local knowledge of a borough or an area is something which should be enforced at a local level? I have an anecdote of my own. I am lucky enough to be a Member of Parliament for a single borough and I am amazed at how many places in the borough are unknown to the taxi drivers. Do you think that is an issue that can be addressed by national standards or is it something that you feel should be a purely local matter?
Norman Baker: It could be addressed by national standards. Anything can be addressed by national standards. But I am very loth to start imposing on local authorities a particular way of acting. Other Governments in the past, with the best of motives, have identified a problem and thought that the way they should deal with it is to create something from the centre and impose that on local areas. That can work, but it can also provide inflexibility and perverse consequences which aren’t always, therefore, welcome. So I am not in favour of trying to impose these things. I would hope that local authorities would recognise the value of having cab drivers or private hire vehicle drivers who actually knew their way around and they ought to factor that in themselves, in the interests of supporting their own communities.
Where we come in-which we have done-is to publish the best practice guidance, which is a way of saying to local authorities, "From the centre, this is what we think is good practice, and it would be sensible if you had a look at that and questioned whether or not, if you are not applying it, why not? Is there a good reason not to?" There may be a good reason not to in certain circumstances and that is why national standards are not always appropriate, but this is something that the local authorities, I hope, will look at and they will base their decisions on that.
Q214 Mr Leech: Is there any evidence that local authorities aren’t anywhere near that best practice?
Norman Baker: I have not seen evidence of local authorities culpably failing in their licensing responsibilities.
Q215 Chair: Do you monitor the best practice guidance?
Norman Baker: We monitor it in the sense that we get complaints from members of the public on occasion. We obviously also talk to the trade. My officials regularly talk to the trade and talk to local licensing authorities. We don’t monitor it in a formal way, but we, I hope, are able to pick up problems by the myriad contacts that we have.
Q216 Chair: Have you picked up the Berwick situation and the problems there and cross-border hire problems?
Norman Baker: Yes. We were aware, before your inquiry started, both of the BerwickPaignton problem and the SeftonLiverpool one.
Q217 Chair: Do you think there is a justification for distinguishing between hackneys and private hire?
Norman Baker: Yes, I do, because I think they perform different functions, in the sense that, for example, you can flag down a taxi, and obviously you can’t flag down a private hire vehicle, or you should not be able to. Secondly, a taxi diver is obliged to take you somewhere within, I think it is 12 miles in London, and within the district in which he is licensed. A private hire vehicle isn’t obliged to do that. A taxi has a meter; private hire vehicles don’t always have meters. There is an arrangement there and a contract between you and a private hire operator, which doesn’t apply in regard to taxis in the same way. Private hire vehicles such as stretch limousines and novelty vehicles of other sorts sometimes have very particular functions which don’t apply to taxis. So they perform different functions, and, having thought about this previously, I am content that it is sensible to have twotier arrangements for the two types of vehicles.
Q218 Chair: It has been suggested to us that, if private hire vehicles go to do work outside the area in which they are licensed, they should have to return to the original area, unless there is a prebooking, rather than staying in the other area waiting to find out if there is any business. Is that something that would appeal to you?
Norman Baker: I will give you my view in a moment. I am not ducking it, but I am genuinely interested if the Committee reaches a view on that matter. My own personal view, for what it is worth, is that we have to decide whether there is a problem with the present arrangements, particularly the SeftonLiverpool present arrangements. Is it working against the interests of the passenger? That is the first question. I am not sure it is. It may be argued that they don’t know what conditions apply exactly or the arrangements for the vehicles are slightly different, and they may be slightly inconvenienced by that. I am not personally convinced by that, although I am openminded as to whether evidence comes forward to demonstrate that.
The issue then comes down to whether it is unfair practices in terms of the taxi trade and whether taxi drivers themselves in one area or, indeed the enforcement authority, are discriminated against unfairly because of the arrangements. I am not convinced of that either, but, again, I am openminded about it. If you send people back and people are required to return right away, that becomes quite difficult to enforce. I did actually look at the position in Scotland in preparation for coming along to you this morning. In Scotland there is a requirement to return. The advice from my officials who have investigated is that the Scottish authorities sometimes do find it quite difficult to enforce that condition. There is an enforcement problem which is created by the requirement to return back to base. It is also the case that, if you return back to base, there may be a carbon implication, which I am not keen to generate. There is also an issue as to how long someone can wait in an area. Is it legitimate to stop for a sandwich and then get a booking that way? I just think it raises a number of issues which, in practical terms, makes it quite difficult to deal with.
There is also the issue of dead mileage. If you end up having to travel long distances, that puts up the cost to the driver because he or she is paying for fuel that otherwise wouldn’t be used. I don’t think it is quite as simple as just saying they should return. There are all sorts of consequences which arise from it.
Q219 Mr Leech: You have half answered my question in terms of how difficult it might be to enforce a change, if it was decided that change was necessary, but is there any evidence from Scotland that enforcement has become more costly because of this rule?
Norman Baker: I don’t know whether it is more costly or not. The advice I received from Scotland was simply that the terms they had set were not quite as clear in the legislation as perhaps has been presented to you. They are not quite as pristine and uncontroversial in terms of application as it might have been thought and there are enforcement problems in determining when somebody has offended against that particular condition. I don’t know whether it is more costly. I imagine that depends on how much, in terms of resources, they put towards dealing with it and to what extent they turn a blind eye.
Q220 Chair: Do you think that the legislation on London taxis and private hire should be applied nationally?
Norman Baker: I think that was the first question to which I responded. The private hire vehicle legislation in London is clearly more up to date and therefore is in a better state- frankly, a better and fit condition-than the private hire legislation from 1976 which applies in the rest of England. There is a case, if you are starting from a blank piece of paper, that you would seek to update the 1976 Act, yes.
Q221 Chair: How would you like to see taxis and private hire incorporated more fully into local transport plans? Is that something which you think is important?
Norman Baker: I do think they have a role to play, and certainly the Department-and this comes within my portfolio area-has been looking at the concept of end-to-end journeys. I am very keen that we establish an ability for someone to have confidence that they can use something other than their own private car to get from their front door to the door they want to arrive at somewhere else.
What was quite clear from the work we have done in the Department is that people are confident that, if they turn up at a railway station with a ticket and so on, they will get from A to B on the railway. They are much less confident about the last mile or two beyond the railway station to get to their final destination. That leads to some people driving entire distances from, say, here to Norwich and beyond, because they can’t deal with the last two miles from Norwich. That is clearly not sensible if we are going to try to encourage a modal shift to rail, which we want to do in terms of reducing carbon, and it is not sensible if we have failed, therefore, to deal with the last two miles of the journey. Taxis have a role to play in that, as do buses and cycle hire facilities. All those things have an answer to help us.
One of the things which we are doing, in conjunction with ATOC, is looking to put in every railway station information which gives people confidence when they move towards the exit of the station what happens next. There will be a physical map there in every station which will have details of the area around the station. It will also have information about taxi ranks, bus stops, cycle hire facilities and so on. We are also looking at whether in principle-and this is early stages yet-smart card technology, which I am very keen to see rolled out, might also be accepted at some point by operators of taxis. So we need to see whether or not we can link in, in a way that the public find attractive, different modes of transport to encourage the whole journey experience to be better.
Chair: Thank you very much for answering our questions.
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