Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Safeguarding and Road Safety) Bill

Debate between Chris Clarkson and Daniel Zeichner

2nd reading
Friday 10th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The taxi and private hire sector is often misunderstood. It plays a key role in our transport sector. Extraordinarily, it represents the largest number of people employed in transport. My hon. Friend is right that for so many people, particularly disabled people, taxis and private hire vehicles are a lifeline. The fact that they have been under such pressure is a cause for further action from Government.

Three and a half years is a long time to wait, and in the meantime I am grateful that Members across the House have pressed relentlessly for action. The hon. Member for Darlington has already praised the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) for his role when he was Minister. He established what was known as a task and finish group led by Professor Mohammed Abdel-Haq. His group achieved remarkable consensus, because there are competing views, particularly between taxi and private hire. It came back with 34 recommendations, a number of which include the very proposals we are discussing this morning.

There have also been repeated questions to Ministers and Westminster Hall debates. I remember when I was a member of the Transport Committee hearing a passionate appeal from a professor who feared we would see further incidents of the type that the hon. Member for Darlington has already referred to. He felt it was only a matter of time, without improvements in licensing, before we would see further tragedies. At Transport questions on Thursday morning, it sometimes felt like a permanent item on the agenda that Ministers would be pressed on this point. I am sure that many Members across the House will have heard over the past few months from a whole range of constituents about these issues, as well as from safety campaigners, disability organisations, trade unions and so on.

Technology has also produced huge challenges and changes for the sector in recent years. Something that has come across to me in my discussions with people going around the country is just how different the situations are in different parts of the country. I have already made reference to the black cab trade in London, and we hear about that, but there are different patterns in different towns, cities and market towns across the country. I thought that London and Cambridge were different in their approach, but in learning more about Liverpool, Brighton, Manchester, Rotherham and Wolverhampton, as have already been mentioned, and then looking at the market towns and rural areas, we see it is not a simple task to regulate all these different situations.

There are many, many things we need to tackle, and for those who want a quick history, I refer people to my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), who had an excellent Adjournment debate a few years ago, where he traced the history of taxi legislation all the way back to the Victorian era. It is astonishing how much of the legislation still refers back and is based on so much of that. When I was talking to Department for Transport civil servants, they pointed me to the volume of legislation, which I am sure the Minister is intimately familiar with. It is lengthy, complicated and, frankly, it probably needs an overhaul, exactly as my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) suggests. The world has changed and unfortunately the legislative situation has not changed to keep up, and it cannot be done in a private Member’s Bill, as the hon. Member for Darlington clearly acknowledged. There are so many things we need to do, but this is a small part related to passenger safety.

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

As a former member of a licensing panel, I completely agree with what the hon. Gentleman just said. Does he agree that the Bill is a valuable first step in bringing uniformity and rigour to how different authorities license their taxi drivers? I think particularly of Rossendale Borough Council, which is next door to Rochdale Borough Council, where I am an MP. They have completely different standards, so we see a preponderance of Rossendale licences in our area, rather than Rochdale ones. There is clearly a disconnect between how they license their taxi drivers, and people are exploiting that.

[Daniel Zeichner]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. Rossendale, I am afraid, did feature extensively in some debates. When my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish had his Adjournment debate many years ago, he referred to that issue in particular. I have to say it is astonishing how many Wolverhampton plates still turn up in Cambridge. I was not aware of the Perth example, but one can see the problem. This system was devised in an era where people worked locally, but the world has changed completely with the kind of technologies we have, which is why the legislation needs such a major overhaul.

I was going to go through the details of the Bill, but the hon. Member for Darlington did so impeccably, so I feel no need to trouble the House with them again. He has obviously done very good research. I had intended to contact Tameside to see where the NR3 database had got to. I was struck that it had not yet achieved universal coverage. That is the key point: until it is universal, there will always be the possibility of gaming the system.

There is a danger in this whole debate of implying that there are large numbers of people doing this. The hon. Member was absolutely right to make the point at the outset that most people are not behaving badly, but some are.