Professional Driver Magazine June 2022

Think global – act global!

This week, we’ve been thinking about

the Government consultation into the taxi and private hire industry, which closes at midnight on Monday, June 20.

It’s your chance to have a say on how the future of our industry will be regulated, so if you haven’t contributed, make sure you do.

We’ve also attended a couple of major trade events in the past few weeks, where, although the consultation is on the agenda, it seemed far from the minds of many delegates.

In his column, Mike Galvin makes a good point – the industry knows what it doesn’t want, but rarely speaks in one voice for what it does want. Much of the discussion at the LPHCA event in Manchester was about operator problems with local licensing authorities.

But the key word here is “local”. These are very much local disputes, often caused by the whims of a licensing officer who has a firm and intransigent view about, say, CCTV cameras, or signage, or vehicle age limits. We report stories like this all the time, and they’re part of the daily grind for operators.

But trying to bring about change by fixing local problems is firmly in the Titanic deck chairs league. The industry is terribly regulated, because quite simply it is so fragmented, with 400-plus little licensing empires making rules that are not joined up.

There is a broad consensus in the industry that national standards are required. Proper standards, not minimum levels. It should be simple to distinguish a taxi from a PHV on a national level. The taxi has a roof light. The PHV does not. That rule should apply everywhere.

Other transportation sectors have perfectly good national regulation. PSV, HGV and so on. There aren’t different standards for truck or bus drivers in different towns. Trucks don’t have to have their doors painted a special colour in Little Snoring. And it doesn’t cost more to get a bus licence in different towns – the price is fixed nationally.

It would be simple to do this in the taxi and PHV sector too. Why does it cost so much less to get a licence in Wolverhampton? And why can that licence be delivered so much more rapidly?

Under a national system, there would be no “local plates”. A licenced PH driver would be able to work anywhere, as he or she would have passed the national standard – just like a truck driver. Wolverhampton could issue all the licences it wanted to – efficiency would give it an advantage. Councils that take months to issue licences would have to shape up or ship out. Either invest in the licensing department or let Wolverhampton and others do it. If the standards are good enough – and best practice is out there – then surely there can be no complaints.

The old maxim of “think global, act local” may have run its course if the local actions are muddled and wrong. Local councils have struggled through the pandemic, and are just not up to the task of implementing national policy.

Tim Scrafton’s column highlights the failings of letting local authorities handle the task of ramping up on-street charge points. A £20 million fund for this job was launched in 2017 – and yet it remains not fully spent. Now they’ve got a further £450m to spend – but many seem clueless.

Tim highlights one authority where the officer in charge doesn’t like on-street chargers and wants to spend all his budget on big rapid-charging hubs. Fine, but these are expensive, and not offering on-street overnight charging near peoples’ homes is a major disincentive for people looking to go electric.

Imagine the scenario in 2030 when EV sales have flatlined because the infrastructure isn’t up to the task, and motorists are hanging on to their old smoky 10-year-old diesels.

Big-ticket changes such as national taxi licensing or EV infrastructure need guidance from the top – from central government.

But then, do we really want this government doing anything? I would have said something about pissups and breweries, but organizing piss-ups is about the only thing they can do. And they don’t even need a brewery.