12 PRIVATE HIRE AND TAXI MONTHLY
A view from the trade by B. M. ROLAND
Opinion
THE NATIONAL PRIVATE HIRE ASSOCIATION 8 SILVER ST BURY BL9 0EX
TEL: 0161 280 2800 FAX: 0161 280 7787 e-mail:
npha@btconnect.com
ALL FOR ONE... OR ONE FOR ALL?
I hope by now that many of you will have had the chance to download and read the consultation on “Improving Access to Taxis” issued by the Department for Transport - which in simple terms can only be described as a 14-year flashback, to when we first were confronted with the Disability Discrimination Act.
The document in many respects highlights the fundamental flaw in the orig- inal concept of part 5 of the DDA, and that is that one hundred per cent of the taxi trade should provide a total fleet of wheelchair accessible vehicles for the small percentage of people in this country who are fully wheelchair bound.
Now don’t get me wrong - accessibility is important, and if you read the doc- ument, that point is stressed over and over again. But we are told in terms of praise that an awful lot of railway trains are now accessible, and a lot of buses too. And you can even get the odd wheelchair on an aeroplane.
But that has always raised a percentage problem in my head. With an
MARCH 2009
accessible bus you can get one wheelchair passenger in; on an accessible train you can get two wheelchair passengers in. In a plane you can get one wheelchair passenger in. And when the train, the bus or plane arrives at its destination, those one or two wheelchair bound passengers arrive at the terminal to find an entire fleet of accessible hackney carriages waiting to take them on.
This to me has always been overkill.
And that raises the next percentage problem, and that is: in the last fourteen years, what percentage of time has been spent by the Government, the Department for Transport, disabled rights groups, in sitting down with the trade and discussing the future? The percentage is so small you’d need a magnifying glass to see it.
However, in those areas that have moved towards accessibility, a lot of les- sons have been learned. The biggest lesson is also a percentage problem: the huge number of passengers who are disabled but not in wheelchairs, who cannot use wheelchair accessible vehicles without extreme degrees of discomfort and pain.
Every time a council moves to go forward with full wheelchair accessibility, we ask the question: Have you spoken to this section of the population? Our evidence is that no, they never have. Once again, the percentage prob- lem of those councils that have forgotten all about the concept of accessibility for all, rather than just the wheelchair users, is massive. This could have been due to the way the Government have over the years announced “You’re all going to be wheelchair accessible” and then gave dates for accessibility, and left us wondering where to go next.
As you will have seen in last month’s issue, this consultation document posed 19 questions. Those 19 questions are going to take some consider- able time to answer. There are many many issues to be resolved, and we have only been given 12 weeks in which to do it. By the time you have read this, five of those weeks will have already gone. Many of you, far from hav- ing considered your own particular position, will not even have considered the document in depth because it is written in what can only be described as the language of spin.
I have had meetings with taxi drivers, and meetings with disabled groups. I attended a meeting of licensing officers. The amount of head-scratching was unfortunately patently obvious at all of these meetings. There is a huge amount of mathematics in the document, suggesting that if the programme went forward to its ultimate aim - the “enhanced standard” - it could cost the trade £772million.
I am totally unused to playing with calculators... as you will have seen from my League Tables over the past ten years. But if there are indeed approxi-
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