Opinion


THE NATIONAL PRIVATE HIRE ASSOCIATION 8 SILVER ST BURY BL9 0EX tel: 0161 280 2800 www.npha.org.uk


OLD OR NEW – IT’S GOTTA BE TRUE


Hello one and all – happy February in 2012. Yes indeed, the time is getting on. Things are moving; some extremely quickly, others extremely slowly. But movement there is, and the front page is a clear indicator that perhaps – just perhaps – we are getting people to listen, like the Government for instance.


This movement to legalise (for the very first time, may I say) enhanced CRB checks for all drivers took a lot of work. There wasn’t one single group, trade or otherwise, licensing officers, unions, LACORS (as was) that didn’t sign petitions to the Government demanding these enhanced checks. And at the eleventh hour Boris Johnson raised his head over the parapet and shouted for enhanced checks for licensed London drivers as well.


So we’re going to get it; it’s going to be law within a reasonable length of time, and the only question then remaining is whether Mr Johnson has arranged with Transport for London to provide some means of examining the person’s original documents – passport, driving licence, bills etc – to prove who they are. That might be quite a big shift in the workload for TfL, who currently accept copies of the above documents.


This is for the moment, when of course the Law Commission is look- ing at the rest of our legislation, and are working extremely hard – they


A view from the trade by B. M. ROLAND e-mail: npha@btconnect.com


are still keyed up to go out to consultation in April. Of course some of the trade is getting twitchy. The big mountain to climb is the thought of full deregulation of hackney carriage numbers; and of the 93 coun- cils that are still left with the cap on in England and Wales, there are quite a few of these whose licence holders are nervous.


But can we do it sensibly, please? One of the union guys – as you’ll read in this issue – is shouting and yelling that he has to protect section 16 of the Transport Act 1985 from being repealed, because that would lead to total deregulation. He’s supposed to be going to e-petition on this. I haven’t actually been onto the e-petition list; there are an awful lot of them out there, 563 sheets to be exact, with about 20 petitions on each sheet. So that works out to over 11,200, and the vast majority of those have got just one vote. That is without looking at those petitions which were rejected: only another 538 sheets with 20 on each sheet. You’ll have to work it out for yourself; my calculator has just had a fit.


I don’t think this particular e-petition would deserve any sort of vote, because section 16 of the Transport Act is exactly what brought in deregulation, not the other way about. Section 16 was the invention of unmet demand surveys, which so many councils ran away from spending money on for so many years.


Still – all of you in deregulated areas have already sent me photo- graphs of over-ranking and congestion on your High Streets for sending to the Law Commission – haven’t you??! If not, why not??!!! If you’re not getting the message, listen very carefully: There is hard- ly a High Street in the country where huge numbers of hackney carriages are not trying to get onto a minute number of rank spaces,


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SilverPay Trusted card services www.silverpay.co.uk PAGE 8 PHTM FEBRUARY 2012


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