NEW BRIGHTON AND HOVE FARES IMPLEMENTED
By the time this is read our new fares will have been imple- mented and as per my ramblings in the March edition of PHTM, this has been a six-month process. This procedure has got to change, so one task for 2022 for the trade here is to roll up our sleeves and set about to greatly reduce this time period for any future fare reviews.
So, we have now gone from £2.40 per mile to £2.60, which for T1 is the £3 flag, giving £5.20 for the first mile and £7.80 for two miles. I’m not sure at the moment where this will put us in the National Fares League Table, where I believe we were in ninth position. But I do know that many other areas are also implementing fare reviews, so it will be interesting to see what position we will end up in.
And just to point out; we only just managed to get support from the councillors on the Licensing Committee on a 5/6 vote for this, which is of great concern to us. This is especially relevant because a regular Licensing Committee councillor can be absent and another councillor can step in as deputy who knows nothing about our trade.
Fortunately we have a Trade Forum meeting coming up which is the first face-to-face one, so we will certainly be bringing this up as an item on the agenda.
However, having utilised the cost of fuel for the Fare Review being around £1.55 per litre at the time, this has now be superseded with prices ranging around £1.75 to over £1.90. No one knows if these prices will continue to spiral, so we are constantly looking at this situation, as I am sure the rest of you will be doing.
SOUTHAMPTON FARE FREVIEW
My goodness, what is happening with the Southampton Fare Review would be quite laughable if it wasn’t a case of drivers livelihoods being at stake.
My good friend, Ian Hall of the Southampton Hackney Private Hire Association, who has also written for PHTM, has been informing me of the saga of trying to get updated fares in place. This is very important because there has not been a fare increase there since 2014. He told me that a proposal for an increase was put to the Southampton Licensing Department which was rejected at the last moment and a different proposal, written by a Licensing Officer, was submitted to the Licensing ommittee and passed. The rub of this was that the Southampton trade had no idea what these new fares were going to be and were told that the details would only be available in the required Public Notice.
To be honest I was gobsmacked when Ian told me this, 88
because effectively there was no consultation with the trade at any point and certainly the period for the Public Notice could not be considered as a consultation in any way shape or form. As Ian reminded me, there is a Regulators’ Code to which councils must adhere, which pretty much clarifies that councils must have a mechanism in place for a transparent consultation process, see: Section 5
tinyurl.com/reg-code - in particular:
5.2 Regulators should publish guidance, and information in a clear, accessible, concise format, using media appropriate to the target audience and written in plain language for the audience.
5.3 Regulators should have mechanisms in place to consult those they regulate in relation to the guidance they produce to ensure that it meets their needs.
What then transpired from this is that the Licensing Depart- ment received lots of objections from the trade and consequently the proposed new fares have been withdrawn and everything is now up in the air with a delayed fare review! But never mind... those in charge still get their monthly pay packet.
BUSINESS AS USUAL?
I do have to say that business has picked up here in sunny Brighton & Hove, although of course there are still the quiet times, but that is part of the job as we all know.
Very certainly towards the end of the week we can see people getting out and about - and also paying the Uber surge prices whilst using cars not licensed here which has always been a puzzle. But hey-ho, I suppose it’s all about being hip and trendy.
One thing that always makes me smile is when say I am the first turn on a rank during the slow period, and after I’ve pos- sibly been waiting for half an hour or more, I get someone jump in and apologise saying: “Sorry driver, it’s only a short journey”. But of course I take it on the chin and smile and say: “No problem”, in fact I prefer the small journeys as the fare on the meter is loaded for the first mile and I can quickly get back on the rank. And more importantly, these people are not standing twenty feet away from me on the rank star- ing at their mobiles waiting for a Southampton, Portsmouth, Chichester, Lewes out of town car to pick them up.
IS THIS RIGHT?
I picked up a customer the other day who asked me how to get a Brighton & Hove driver licence as he was interested in becoming a cabbie. I explained the process that we have is an extensive knowledge test along with a driving route test
APRIL 2022
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