Opinion Donna Short, National Private Hire and Taxi Association 0161 280 2800
www.npha.org.uk donnadale.npha@
btconnect.com
YOU HEARD WHAT CORPORAL JONES SAID: “DON’T PANIC!!!”
It is little wonder that the BBC TV series ‘Dad’s Army’ is still showing repeats over 40 years after the last programme went out on air. OK, so the subject matter is old hat – the Home Guard during the Second World War – but the storylines, the charac- terisations, and especially the words that each main character turned into catch phrases, live on in perpetuity.
I’ll not do the poster “Keep calm and carry on” from elsewhere; that’s been hackneyed to death (you’ll pardon the expression). Instead just recall the image of the moustachioed butcher of Walmington-on-Sea, Lance Corporal Jack Jones, as he flails his arms about and shouts out time and again to all and sundry: “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!!”
Really that is our message this month, what with all that is going on and all that has been distributed and posted and talked about within the industry during the past few weeks. You will have seen inside this edition (and if not, get looking for it!) a synopsis of the Government response to the Task and Finish report on taxi/PHV licensing. You’ll also find another of our Fact -v- Fiction features,
a continuation of a campaign we started at the beginning of the year trying to cut through the – call it what you will – misunder- standings, fake news, wrong emphasis – being perpetrated across both national press and broadcast media, and within the industry itself.
It’s enough to make you scream… it is both insulting and fright- ening, the amount of inaccurate information that is floating around out there. As we discussed amongst ourselves here at PHTM, it really makes you stop short and ask how much (or how little) news anybody can believe about anything, worldwide, these days. So our objective was to just slow down a minute and analyse some of the wrong stuff to see if we can correct it. That is the purpose of the Fact -v- Fiction feature this month, so go back and have another look.
Also this month, continuing the theme we started off in February PHTM, we’ve put together a follow-up feature about the current (or proposed) Clean Air movement; this time in the “next five” cities/towns in line to take action in this regard: Birmingham, Derby, Leeds, Nottingham and Southampton. First off we put down what we know (at press deadline) to be each district’s CAZ (Clean Air Zone) plans; then we follow up with the views of some members of the trade in each of those districts as to how such proposals will impact on their business (polite version).
Again the message is clear: Don’t panic! It is crucial that if the CAZ charging; or the restriction of existing vehicle emissions being set at Euro 4 petrol/Euro 6 diesel will wipe out the majority of the trade; or there are not enough/not any charging points in your area, you’ve got to tell someone! Certainly in the “first five” there have been voices raised big time, as you will see in their contribution to the Clean Air feature.
And if you’re really fired up about any of the happenings that are occurring in the industry at the moment, that “someone” you
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MARCH 2019
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