CROSS-BORDER CRISIS:
Article by Dave Lawrie Director NPHTA
info@nphta.co.uk 0161 280 2800
TALK IS CHEAP – IS THE WAITING OVER?
For many years now we have written articles, held seminars, had meetings with decision makers and been pushing for change, pushing for national standards and pushing to be recognised. Finally, we are now seeing discussions take place where it matters, at parliamentary level, including the Devolution White Paper, the Task And Finish Report, the Best Practice Guidance, and now more recently…
THE CASEY REPORT
On 6 June, we saw the release of the Casey Report which detailed 12 recommendations. This was then debated within Parliament on 16 June, and can be seen here for those with a little time on their hands:
https://www.youtube.com/live/-jMEzVvGqL8. Watch the first 1 hour and 50 minutes; that alone is a huge discussion to be held in Parliament on matters that affect the taxi and private hire industry.
The Casey report of course is focused on child grooming and CSE, the various sectors which were allegedly involved, and the regulatory bodies that had received reports, and effectively turned a blind eye. This has then naturally led to various discussions on national news outlets, and on most social media outlets, but what does this mean for us as an industry?
To be perfectly clear here, there were 12 recom- mendations within the report which were aimed at all other sectors responsible for the horrific grooming scandal, the only section of the report that mentioned taxi and private hire at all was Chapter 7: Taxi Licensing and Child Protection Measures, recommendation 11, which stated:
“The DfT should take immediate action to put a stop to ‘out of area taxis’ and bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers.”
Government response: “The DfT will legislate to address the important issues raised in the report, tackling the inconsistent standards of taxi and PHV driver licensing. lWe will work as quickly as possible and consider all options – including out of area working,
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national standards and enforcement – seeking the best overall outcomes for passenger safety.
Let us be absolutely clear here, whilst “out of area working”, or cross-border as we know it, is an issue, and absolutely needs to be addressed, as do national standards and enforcement, this has absolutely nothing to do with grooming at all, since grooming has been a tragic and horrific issue for over 40 years, whilst cross-border working has only really appeared since around 2012 - oddly enough, the same year that the Rotherham Casey report concluded.
So, whilst this bullet point is welcomed, it is wrong to suggest a connection between the two issues.
l In the interim we will act urgently to make improvements, including consulting on making local transport authorities responsible for taxi and PHV licensing, and determining how existing statutory guidance can be strengthened to further protect the public.
We suspect that this means the Devolution White Paper consultation will be released sooner rather than later, since this is exactly what this point means, the end of local licensing authorities, with the introduction of Mayoral controlled licensing.
lWe are also reviewing authorities’ compliance with existing guidance and will hold those who do not follow it to account.
Whilst there were some errors within the DfT Best Practice Guidance
of 2023 found here:
https://shorturl.at/LTMQ1, including not counting children under three as passengers, tinted window percentages, and the frequency of Group 2 medicals, we believe that the guidance should have instead been statutory standards in order to place more duty on local authorities to observe them. Whilst “some” local authorities did assess and adopt the new guidance, most did not, so with that in mind, maybe Statutory Standards would have been better.
OUT OF AREA WORKING Will this mean:
A) Putting measures in place to enforce the LGMPA 1976, which prevents a private hire vehicle from being “available for bookings” once cleared outside of their licensed area?
Whilst this is an active part of legislation, it is very rarely enforced, and is therefore practically ignored, but actually, this is very close to being the ABBA rule, where all journeys must start or end within the licensed
JULY 2025 PHTM
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