The Deregulation Act is not the problem

The private hire industry has experienced massive changes in the past decade. Ride-hailing apps have come from nowhere to become a dominant player in London and a major part of the landscape elsewhere.

Consolidation has seen the rise of major national groups with fleets running well into five figures. Electrification forces new challenges on to operators, who are now faced with expensive electric cars and a woefully inadequate approach to infrastructure in cities. On the major trunk routes you can get charged reasonably efficiently – but at a price.

There’s a general belief that these problems are fixable. Competition is natural in a market such as taxi and private hire, and it’s up to the operators to be smart and keep an advantage.

Even the EV transition is some way off becoming derailed. There are new technologies in the pipeline, particularly with regard to batteries. And affordable cars will come – they just might not be from familiar brands.

But there are underlying problems that are far from being fixed, and most of these relate to how the industry is regulated. We see it every month in the news stories we report from around the UK.

Parochial stories such as the one on page 8, where a councillor in Bedford thinks a different coloured taxi light on a private hire vehicle is a good idea. The government disagrees, and has published some sensible guidelines to suggest that light = hackney and no light = PHV. But that’s not good enough for little Bedford.

This is the root of the problem. Local councils making up their own pettifogging rules that benefit nobody and inconvenience the operators and drivers trying to run a service. I bet the Bedford driver loves having to explain to a pissed-up punter why the green light on his roof means he’s not a “taxi” and therefore he can’t take you home. Cue torrent of drunken abuse and possibly violence.

Further up the food chain, we have one of Britain’s more sensible politicians, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, calling for the scrapping of the one piece of sensible legislation relating to this industry that has made it to the statute books in the past decade – the Deregulation Act.

Manchester drivers get their licenses in Wolverhampton not because they want to cut corners on safety. It’s because they actually want a license quickly, and at a reasonable price.

Wolverhampton provides that. It has geared up to do that, and if Andy Burnham wants to stop Mancunian drivers heading down the M6, he should do what they do in Wolverhampton. Gear up the licensing departments in various Greater Manchester councils to match Wolves on speed of processing and cost.

The fear is that Andy Burnham will have the ear of the incoming Labour Government and the Deregulation Act could be at risk.

This would be a massively retrograde step. Cross-border hiring has far more pluses than minuses. It cuts dead mileage and allows a degree of flexibility to operators and drivers to maximise the jobs that are available.

Far better than fiddling about with an existing piece of legislation would be to look long and hard at the issue of national standards.

This has been kicked about for years, with no proper outcome. But surely the answer is simple? What makes private hire and taxi licensing so special that it can’t be treated the same way as bus, coach or truck licensing?

A PSV or HGV license is subject to far more specialist training than PHV or Hackney, yet it can be administered nationally. A driver with a PSV licence in Manchester can move to London and drive a bus there. There’s no big deal about it, and councils don’t get to make the rules or set the fees.

This should be the first stage of national PHV and taxi licensing. National standards and national prices. So it wouldn’t matter where the drivers obtained their licences. The market would decide – the most efficient, friendliest councils would get the business, and it would be up to the others to make their service better.

That way you could address all the nonsense about window tints, roof lights, magnetic signs and other nif-naf that obsesses the licensing jobsworths and makes your life difficult.

The consultation on VAT shows there is an level of intelligence there within the civil service on private hire – make sure you get your response in to this, as we have a good chance of avoiding 20% VAT.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were in a position to make our own case to a new Government, and actually get somewhere?