Professional Driver Magazine December 2022 Help for heroes

Help for heroes

After the trials of 2020 and 2021, the year that’s drawing to a close had to be better for our industry, right?

Well, yes – and we certainly celebrated the best of the best in style at last month’s Professional Driver QSi Awards. Once again, congratulations to all our champions.

But the end of the pandemic has brought about new problems. Drivers remain in short supply, and so do cars –especially much-needed electric models.

This means the supply curve is now well behind demand –not so good if you’re a passenger needing an urgent pick-up, but not entirely bad for the operator and driver, as it means a long-overdue uplift in fares is now happening. And with fewer drivers on the road, there’s plenty of work for those prepared to put in the hours.

But this can’t continue. So long as national and local governments pursue their war against the private car (step forward, Sadiq Khan) the taxi and private hire sector is in many circumstances the only viable alternative.

A late-shift worker in a bar, or an NHS nurse on nights, cannot rely on shonky public transport, especially in the suburbs, where the buses seem to finish at about 9pm. And for all the cycling evangelism of the 20-somethings at TfL, an 50-year-old office worker is not going to cycle home 10 miles to the suburbs after a long day at work.

The taxi and private hire industry needs help from regulators. Especially in London, it needs a more flexible approach. The sad truth is this: Transport for London is not fit for purpose. Under-funded, under-staffed and inflexible, it acts as a boat anchor on this industry.

Yes, safety is important. Yes, applicants need to pass DBS checks before being allowed behind the wheel of a cab. But there is no reason why the process has to take so long – 10 months at present – to carry out. Wolverhampton Council can process a licence in a couple of weeks – why can’t TfL?

Then there are the punitive rules on vehicles. Back in 2015, TfL decreed – after being bullied by the black cab lobby – that every new private hire car should be “zero-emissions capable”. This idiotic rule means that clean petrol-electric hybrids such as the Toyota Prius were banned, though it was OK to license a

PHEV. You didn’t need to plug it in – it just had to be “capable” of operating for a few miles on battery alone.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out what happened. Nobody plugged in the PHEVs (as there was nowhere to plug them in), and instead the drivers lugged a dead battery, weighing as much as two passengers, around all day. Well done, TfL. You made people buy a less efficient car.

Now we’re heading to a point where you can only register an EV. There are 100,000 PHVs in London. Most of the drivers do not have off-street charging facilities. See where we’re heading here? Where’s the incentive to go electric when it presents so many problems? Find a charger. Wait for it to become free. Wait up to an hour for it to charge the car. Precious earning time gone. You might as well keep your old diesel and pay the C-charge. Again, a negative effect.

It’s particularly bad for chauffeurs. Only now, with the launch of the BMW i7 and Genesis G80 Electrified, are genuine all-electric chauffeur cars coming on stream. If you want a seven-seater, you have the choice of Mercedes or Mercedes. Yet TfL refuses to grant a short extension to allow new, non-EV seven-seaters to be registered to replace increasingly worn-out diesels. Common sense is extinct at TfL.

As the government looks to draw up new rules for the sector, it’s important that issues such as EV infrastructure are addressed and common sense rules about upgrading vehicles are applied. In Glasgow, drivers with older cars will have to replace them by next June – a reasonable request for a 12-month extension was refused. The result is likely to be that those who cannot afford a new car will simply quit. And this at a time when the city is desperately short of cabbies.

We need help, and we’re not getting it. And frankly, given the efforts of the past two years that this industry has made to keep Britain moving through the Covid years, we deserve better.

Meanwhile, have a prosperous festive season and let’s hope for a better new year.