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
22,000 TO ZERO IN 340 STEPS
Following the information that we gave you in the June issue, we are pleased to announce that, after some 12 weeks of phoning and emailing, the Taxi Accessibility Survey is at last complete. When we undertook this survey we did not appreciate the amount of questions that we would be asked by yourselves and councils alike, which led to more figures being sought, more explanations being requested and more analyses being made.
The full survey can be found on the PHTM website; in June we showed you the first four sections, but now it’s grown to 18 sections and as I write this Opinion, we’ve done 25 per cent of sections 19 to 22. More about those later. In the interests of clarity we set out information about each of the sections below.
SECTIONS ONE TO SIX
When we initially started our survey, it was prompted by talks with the Department for Transport and other stakeholders as to the effect of the amendments to Section 16 of the 1985 Transport Act contained within the Equality Act 2010. We sought from councils information as to whether they still regulated taxi numbers, or whether they had deregulated.
The response from local authorities clearly showed that there were four distinct categories that councils fell into:- Section One is a list of all those councils that still regulate or have re-regulated hackney carriage numbers, and which have a mixed fleet. These are the authorities which will be the target of the Section 16 amendment.
Section Two is a list of councils made up of those that have deregulat- ed, but have done so by restricting new entrants to the trade to the provision of wheelchair accessible vehicles, while the existing fleet of saloon cars was allowed to continue – in other words, maintaining a mixed fleet.
Section Three is the list of councils that have either never regulated, or have deregulated with no specific conditions as regards wheelchair accessible vehicles.
Section Four comprises those councils that already had a 100 per cent wheelchair accessible fleet, or which are working specifically toward that target. A number of these councils still regulate numbers, but because of their existing all-WAV fleets, section 16 amendments will not affect them.
Finally in Section Five, we decided to put in a separate sheet for Scotland.
On sheets One to Four we were able to obtain previous surveys done by the Department for Transport, and we were able to put in a range of figures from 1999 to 2007 and compare those with the figures provided by the councils on this survey.
We were asked whether the type of council – ie. city, borough, metropoli- tan borough etc. – was significant, so we put that in as well. We were asked whether the size of population in an area was significant, so we added those figures. Then we were asked whether the size of taxi fleets across the country had increased or decreased since 1999, and we put those figures in as well.
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PHTM SEPTEMBER 2010
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