ten stickers and two plates, as in Manchester. And more importantly, due to the “Eureka syndrome”, things can change on a daily basis. All it needs is a councillor or a licensing officer to wake up in the middle of the night saying, “Eureka! I’ve got it!!! If the drivers are all required to wear green shirts on a Wednesday, I can do visual checks on whether they have a licence or not.” The situation is quite clear: if we are changing our legislation, why should minimum standards be set? What we need is national standards - and those national standards to be outwith the control of local authorities. The Minister, Norman Baker MP, has already expressed his displeasure about the taking out of seats and removing tinted windows. Why would he want this to continue? For those of you who still retain some memory, cast your minds back to when the London legislation for private hire was being considered. Many questions were raised as to what vehicles should be licensed; costly research was tendered to universities which came back with a measurement strategy: width of seats, room for knees, room for feet, room for heads, elbow room to allow one to pick one’s nose – and what to do if you had three fat people rather than three thin people to get into the back of the car. Well, an awful lot of time was spent on that exercise – not by us; we mere- ly sent in a suggestion that, as we had EU type approval vehicles, if a motor manufacturer has spent millions of pounds ensuring that his vehi- cle was safe for carrying passengers, why shouldn’t it be licensed? And that is the way that London went. It is the way that I hope we will go. But is that a minimum standard? Perhaps it is... but if we look at the way the London Act is written, at section 7(4): “A London PHV licence shall be granted subject to such conditions as may be prescribed and such other conditions as the Secretary of State may think fit.” In fact, if you look through the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998, vir- tually every paragraph starts with “The Secretary of State may...” It does not say “The local authority may...” I have spoken to quite a number of licensing officers, who assured me that they would be ever so delighted if they had a universal set of rules. And that would be rather sensible when we look at enforcement, which we will do in a moment. But conditions of licence are for the most part what caused the Berwick syndrome, the Stockton syndrome, and all these other syndromes. Why is Manchester being flooded with out-of-area taxis? Because it has an extremely tough knowledge test. Does that ring a bell in various other places in the country? If you go up to the North East where all of this started, I wonder which councils have strict conditions, and which councils have/had virtually no conditions. Let us not be naive. And you out there have the info...


So to these questions, do not answer just Yes or No – say much more in support of your answers.


ENFORCEMENT


Enforcement, and how to go about it, is contained in some questions in the document. The suggestion is that licensing and enforcement officers would – due to the barriers being removed – be able to stop any licensed vehicle within their area on any enforcement role which they think appro- priate. But that’s not very easy if you’ve got 342 different sets of rules, is it? One set of rules, no problem. Testing of vehicles: I can’t tell you how many different vehicle tests there are up and down the country. Some are based on MoT tests and a quick visual scan; others are imposed by lengthy and stressfully pedantic visits to a local authority Chamber of Horrors testing room, where three weeks later, having made multiple re-visits, you may well be able to renew your vehicle licence. Oh I forgot... having waited a month to get an appointment in the first place. Or perhaps being refused a vehicle test because you did not apply within the sacred month before expiry date set for you to do so. So if all enforcement officers were to undertake the vehicle testing course as suggested by NALEO, perhaps we might get a level playing field in that direction. But – shock, horror – following the results of the Guildford Audit Commis- sion, councils at this moment cannot charge for enforcement against operators and drivers. And as I have never seen a motor vehicle actually enter the witness box at a Magistrates’ Court to be cross-examined as to why it had a bald tyre, most of the legal departments in the country are scratching their heads as to what enforcement to do. And of course also, ever since I have been in the trade, there has always been a continuing scream about the lack of enforcement. So if you were to supply the LC with this evidence you’ve all got lurking, maybe special efforts will be made to work on enforcement. Maybe we should have a national enforcement set of officers; perhaps they should be funded, whether from within the trade or not. At least if they were working on fixed penalty tickets, they would have an opportunity of funding themselves. But wouldn’t it be nice if they all operated under the same set of rules? You have the evidence...


So to these questions, do not answer just Yes or No – say much more in support of your answers.


JULY 2012 PHTM


OTHER MATTERS??


In starting this lengthy rant, I picked out those items that I believe had been seized by the trade for attack, having visited a few websites and having taken one or two thousand phone calls. I am sure that in reading this, you will see that I have covered the major bits. But if you then pick up the 73 questions and proposals, you have to ask yourself: “OK, what else do we have to look at?” Well, in brief I think we have managed to get rid of the sug- gestion of a one-tier licensing system. It would appear that the LC wants to include London into the new legislation, but of course London will want to include us in their legislation because they always seen themselves as being the dominant groups. I don’t think so somehow, one way or the other. What to do about non-motorised vehicles – pedicabs and the like – being included in the licensing regime? This seems to be the top point highlighted by all the local press across the country... so if the LC wants public opinion from this consultation, I think the whole document has been unfairly trivi- alised by the press emphasis on this point. What about novelty vehicles? I have always scratched my head about fire engines with taxi plates on them. But who else is going to check whether they are fit for service or not? Should councils have the power to create or remove taxi zones? I strong- ly suggest that the readers in Durham, County of, particularly those in the City of, and Chester-le-Street, supply firsthand knowledge of the disaster of de-zoning. Taxi fares: I think I know something about taxi fares after all these years of doing the league tables and working out fare increase applications, but what are your views? There is very little, really, in the documentation about wheelchair accessi- ble vehicles – or indeed the Equality Act, and how this review might or might not affect that Act. But with the DfT consultation on the removal of the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee being live at this moment (yes, we checked the DfT website), who is going to assist on this particular matter? Norman Baker seems to go in favour of stakeholder groups sitting down and scratching their heads on it; but that’s another thing which may or may not attach to the new legislation. We do believe in disability awareness training, especially as there were two children killed in taxis because of problems surrounding which way they were secured in the vehicle. But is disability awareness training enough? If we had the full VRQ training, it includes disability, the law, and vehicle maintenance as well as customer service. If we added that to the DSA driving test, why shouldn’t we have a new qualification on our nation- al driving licence? A “T1” for instance, so that drivers could go anywhere in the country and obtain a licence once they’ve qualified, in the same way as bus and HGV drivers – who of course only need one licence to last them all their days, whereas we need one every year. It costs a few quid to become a bus driver, but if he is 25 when he gets his licence he’s got 45 years during which he needs to do nothing else licensing-wise. By con- trast, a private hire or taxi driver who has to, say, pay £150 for his paper licence each year, has to throw £6,750 into the pot for the same period of time. Got to be fair, that, hasn’t it? And finally, the reform of hearings and appeals: The suggestion here is that if you are refused a licence or your licence is revoked, the first port of call should be to the local licensing committee to reconsider its decision. Whilst we all desperately await the result of the Cardiff Judicial Review on penalty points, there is some question here as to whether appeals should be continued into the Magistrates and the Crown Court with regard to hackney carriage vehicles. Having spent the last 20 years listening to local authority committees, reports to committee and drivers’ explanations as to how they got into the mess in the first place, I would definitely say that the protection afforded by the courts is a must, and must not be removed. And until such time as Councillors who sit on taxi licensing committees are trained to know anything about the legislation, drivers’ rights, and one end of a vehicle from another, that first port of call is very often merely a delay in the licensing process. How many out there have had licences refused and not been able to get a committee hearing until your actual licence had expired, therefore guaranteeing you would be out of work for some considerable time? That of course was not done deliberately, was it? You have the evidence...


So to these questions, do not answer just Yes or No – say much more in support of your answers.


I’ve ranted on long enough... do get the message. 112 responses isn’t just not enough; it is unbelievable. I hope by the time September comes, the replies will be in their thousands – and they’re all going to contain some evidence. If you’re desperate and you can’t get things put together, you can give us a ring and we’ll see what we can do. We’ve only been doing it for 20 years. So perhaps we might assist; why don’t you check out our website, and join the Association.


.So until next time, sayonara PAGE 11


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