DON’T SIT ON THE FENCE
LET’S ALL DO SOMETHING TO STAND TOGETHER FOR THE GOOD OF OUR INDUSTRY
Article by Martin Walker Operations Manager Star Cars, Birmingham
martin@starcarsbirmingham.com
Most of you who know me, know I’ve been in the industry for over 30 years, most of my life at Star Cars in Birmingham, working for the Markham
family. And in that time, what changes we’ve seen: in regulation, in tech, and in driver and customer expectations too.
The one thing that remains though, is that whatever town, village, city or region you’re in, our industry delivers the only round the clock, door to door transportation service. And that comes with huge responsibilities.
RELIABILITY AND TRUST
As an operator, providing reliability, something that drivers and passengers can trust, is the part that keeps me awake. Knowing what’s coming down the track is key to getting this right. The role of operator is the only one I know where it’s essential to balance the needs and expectations of two customers – drivers who want work and passengers who want to make a journey. Even with advancements in tech- nology, this is still more of an art form than a science!
The 2015 Deregulation Act, though in many ways imperfect, gave the industry a fighting chance to continue to provide something of a service to drivers and passengers that resembled reliable. Those over- eager licensing authorities with unnecessarily restrictive controls were
TECHNOLOGY AND REGULATION
Technology and regulation play a major role in all this. And of course, mindset. Understanding threats, weaknesses, the challenges, and bumps in the road does give us insight into how we need regulation and tech to evolve, so that we continually deliver individually as operators, and collectively as a large and generally under-appreciated part of the public transport sector.
Retreating, in my opinion, is never an option. To retreat is to shrink. Selling up, whilst might find you an exit, is selling out our industry. We all have a part to play in the future of all this and rather than allowing the multinationals to hoover things up, the regulation and the tech is the bit we should all want to influence, to ensure our passengers can always rely on ethical, local, tax paying businesses, able to understand and service the local community.
When I took the decision to leave our previous dispatch system provider and head to Cab9, then the new kid on the block, it was because they had (and still have) a vision I could understand, which would enable me to continue to grow our business, with fewer risks. You may disagree with my choice of dispatch system provider, but the point I make is that we all have to find the technology, whatever it might be, that is right for us and our business to enable us to grow and / or be better than we were without it.
PRIVATE HIRE REFORM CAMPAIGN challenged to work
together with their neighbours, to simplify their approach to the licensing of drivers and vehicles wherever possible, in order to ensure kids could get to school, and the public could get about.
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Many of you will know that I am a strong advocate for taking on local and national government, to ensure effective regulation. In 2012 I was a founding member of the Private Hire Reform Campaign (PHRC), a group of operators from across the country with a desire to secure legislative reform for our industry.
OCTOBER 2023 PHTM
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