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

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 10th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and support the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) in his efforts to put this Bill into law. I should declare at the outset that I chair the all-party group on taxis. I speak with some passion on this issue, because some three and a half years ago, on another Friday morning, I moved a similar Bill, fully anticipating that with support from across the House and the industry, and with local authority and passenger group support, we would see the Bill progressing. I very much hope that he does better than I did in my efforts.

The intervening time has been tough for many people, and taxi and private hire drivers have had a particularly hard time. Many will have heard, as I have in my constituency, of the financial hardship people have faced, and of issues associated with vehicles being laid up and insurance-related problems. Although some help has been given, it has often been patchy. I have to say that with the Minister responsible being in the Lords, many will share my view that not enough has been done, with the impact on London’s black cab trade being a case in point. In June 2020, there were 18,553 licensed black cabs but by 31 October that had fallen to just over 15,000—there has been a 29% fall in the number of black cabs operating on London’s roads. At the start of June 2021 there were just 13,884, according to statistics from the Department for Transport—we are talking about 1,000 fewer licensed taxi drivers. So it has been a hard time for the industry, and I am grateful to the various groups, including Steve McNamara and the Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association, for all they have done in pressing for help, but this has not been enough.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

This is an important Bill and I thank the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) for his work on it. I also thank Ministers and colleagues on the Opposition Benches who have also inputted into this important legislation. I wish to comment briefly on my hon. Friend’s point about the effect on the taxi industry; these are important key workers who keep our country moving and offer a vital public service. I hope that the Government will look to provide some further support for the taxi industry in the future because of the pressure they have been under. I ask colleagues across the House to consider the needs of disabled people in the Bill. There is a need to do so and ensure a level playing field across the country. I hope the Bill is also an opportunity for that important work to take place.

[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.

[Craig Williams (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

The hon. Member makes the point that until this is universal, there will be a way of gaming the system. As a Member from Wales—a cross-border one—it strikes me that, if this database does not cover Wales and England at the very least, there will still be that opportunity. Most taxi drivers in Montgomeryshire go west and east; they do not go north and south.

[Daniel Zeichner]

The hon. Member makes an important point. That is one of the issues of living in a devolved series of nations: we have to try to work with others. I have to say that I am not aware of that being the overwhelming problem at the moment, but should it be so, clearly it would need to be addressed.

It always seemed to me that part of this issue was setting up the database and getting that all resolved, but the other side of the coin was enforcement. When I had discussions with various people about how enforcement worked, I was struck by how complicated it is. Different rules seem to apply depending on who is doing the enforcing. Of course, that is made much more complicated by the difficulty that local council officers face having to enforce in their area while not being able to enforce against people who come from another area. That is why the proposals in the Bill are so important; they begin to address that problem. In theory, the only body that can enforce against that Perth licence holder is the local council in Perth, which would presumably require the council in Perth to be in Penzance to do so. One can see how that is not going to work and why we have that problem.

Another former Transport Minister, the hon. Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani)—this has been a long-running debate—pursued this issue. In fact, she was the Minister involved at my previous attempt. I pay tribute to her, because she worked very hard on this. She was a strong believer in national standards, but she always suggested that there would be occasions when we needed local flexibility, which immediately reintroduces the problem. If we have higher standards to deal with particular problems—sadly, we have seen particular problems in some parts of the country—we are back to square one. We need some kind of approach, as is suggested in the second part of the Bill, to make this possible.

I thank all those who spoke to me. I suspect they are the same people who have been talking to the hon. Member for Darlington. I was very impressed by the National Association of Licensing and Enforcement Officers. I always had great support from people at Transport for London and from the trade unions, particularly Unite and GMB. The hon. Member mentioned the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and Guide Dogs; they too have been pressing for action on this issue for many years.

I appreciate that time is always precious on Fridays, so I will conclude at this point. I genuinely hope that we will get cross-party consensus to get this measure forward. We have waited too long, and it really is time to get it done.