12 PRIVATE HIRE AND TAXI MONTHLY Opinion
A view from the trade by B. M. ROLAND
THE NATIONAL PRIVATE HIRE ASSOCIATION 8 SILVER ST BURY BL9 0EX
TEL: 0161 280 2800 FAX: 0161 280 7787 e-mail:
npha@btconnect.com
17 YEARS... 200 EDITIONS... WHAT’S CHANGED?
1992 seems an awful long time ago. The headline on Issue One was “Council’s vision blurred by Department of Transport suggestion”. Now of course, over those 17 years the Department of Transport changed to the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, and now it has become the Department for Transport. So at least there have been three identifiable changes. But the headline in our September 1992 issue introduced an article about the improvement of MoT testing standards; and we were in those days particularly concerned about the advertising of taxi firms’ names in the front windscreen. Moving on, in my very very first Opinion there was a report on licensing London minicabs, with a photo of Steven Norris, Minister
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of Transport in those days. I started the first Opinion with the fol- lowing words: “The long-awaited much heralded report on the licensing ofminicabs in London has just been published. Thirty four pages thick (including the submissions of interested parties) and printed on nice white paper, it contains little that was not known before the Working Party’s deliberations. Its conclusions and rec- ommendations in a nutshell say ‘Yes, minicabs should be licensed’ but they are unable to recommend what form such control should take.” Well, at least we have had minicabs licensed in London. But things have not moved on an awful lot on other fronts. As you will know from our last issue of PHTM, the latest DfT consultation is about improving access to taxis. 102 pages on nice white paper. But again, I have to say that the document doesn’t really know where it wants to go. And that, I think, is the position that we were in in 1992. Let’s see what had changed. In those daysmost of the drivers came into the trade because there was nothing else they could do. In 2009 literally thousands of people are at this moment being laid off by companies all over the country, and finding no eager employers waiting to welcome them with open arms, are climbing up the Town Hall steps to get taxi licences. The only change between 1992 and now is the CRB check, a med- ical, perhaps a DSA test, perhaps an English test, perhaps the need to take a BTEC. Have we moved forward? I have to say that, how- ever slowly, yes we have. If we carry on at this rate, we might reach the level that had been achieved by bus drivers by 1992, by or in another five years, ten years... It should be noted that bus drivers have moved on a lot since then, and they are now all taking a Certificate of Professional Competence, as imposed by EU Regulations. But will all this change our drivers’ attitudes? The guy behind the wheel is the guy who looks after his vehicle. Some drivers always ensure that their vehicle is up to scratch, but quite clearly in Swoop Central in our paper, over the last 200 edi- tions the number of vehicles found to be defective has hardly altered at all. In that time council after council has imposed condition after condi- tion on vehicles to improve standards: age restrictions, vehicle types, colour liveries, signage, more tests per year. And yet, next Friday night when VOSA and the council does a swoop somewhere in the country, the results are likely to be exactly the same as they
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