We then worked out the percentages of wheelchair accessible vehicles on the fleet and added that in. Sections One to Four therefore are pretty heavily laden with figures.
Section Five for Scotland was somewhat easier because we were only able to get the number of wheelchair accessible vehicles from 2007 onwards. But again we put in population, fleet sizes and percentage of increase or decrease.
Having done all of that, we were then able to provide a list of all those councils that are still regulated or re-regulated – 112 in all – and they can be found in Section Six.
SECTIONS SEVEN AND EIGHT – ANALYSIS
Sections Seven and Eight contain a breakdown of the information found in the first six sections. As you will be aware, much speculation has been going on about what percentage of fleets that the Government might be looking to set as a parameter for wheelchair accessible vehicles. In doing this survey, we gained the impression that those councils that have already reached 30 per cent or above WAVs were least likely to be affected by any change, and most likely to be able to reach an agreed per- centage over a reasonable length of time.
We therefore drew a red line under the 30 per cent mark, and analysed section by section. I do believe that Section Seven will certainly raise some eyebrows; it certainly did when we presented the figures to DPTAC.
Section Seven is the analysis of the rise and fall of taxi plates since 1999. I personally was very surprised to see that nearly 12 per cent of councils in the country (37) have fleets that have reduced in size. In putting together these statistics, where the figures in a local authority raised an eyebrow we phoned the councils and asked for an explanation, and the responses will be found at the bottom of each sheet.
SECTION NINE
This section examines the possible footprint of a local authority once a percentage of WAVs had been set. In doing this we ran out a sheet sorted by the number of wheelchair accessible vehicles in each area, and these lists will be seen further on in Section Twelve onwards.
The reason we did this was to pick out the first council on the list which fell below the 30 per cent mark. This happened to be Brighton and Hove. Brighton has a very large number of hackney carriages, some 528 at the
moment, of which 124 are already wheelchair accessible. The trade was having a meeting about these percentages, and we sent them an analysis sheet.
We picked three percentages at random: 35, 40 and 50 per cent WAV level, so that we could show the trade that if, for instance, they had to get to 35 per cent, they could do that with no increase in their fleet, by they themselves changing 51 of their vehicles to WAVs. If however they were not prepared to do this, and the only way they could increase the fleet was by deregulating in favour of wheelchair accessible vehicles only, then they would need a further 90 vehicles to get to the required 35 per cent.
To get to 40 per cent they would need another 120 vehicles; and to get to 50 per cent they would need another 200. I will not go into an analysis of my thoughts on these matters, but I hope this gives you pause for thought.
SECTION TEN
This is a runout of all licensing authorities in England and Wales in alpha- betical order, with just the figures from 2010. You will see at the foot of this that the hackney carriage fleet in England and Wales has reached 77,588, of which 22,000 are licensed in London. We have given two sets of per- centages, with and without the London figures, to show the percentage of WAVs across the board.
SECTION ELEVEN does the same for Scotland.
SECTIONS TWELVE TO EIGHTEEN You will recall that we were asked to put in the type of councils, and the populations, to see if they had any relevance. We had to think long and hard how to analyse this. As we have said, we sorted the whole of England and Wales from the highest number of WAVs to the lowest. These will be found on pages 12, 14 and 16 of this issue. At the top you will see London with 22,000 wheelchair accessible vehicles, and at the bottom you will find West Lindsey with nil. They’re only at the bottom because of alphabetical listing; there are actually 14 licensing authorities with zero hackney carriage WAVs.
Opinion continues on page 12
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