Taxi and Private Hire Licensing Reform

Debate between George Freeman and Jonathan Lord

Thursday 3rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (George Freeman)]

It is a great pleasure and privilege to open the batting in my new role as Minister for the future of transport with you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, as umpire, even if not before a packed Chamber—I am more of a night watchman covering for the Minister for taxi regulation.

I thank the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) for his kind words, and I congratulate him on his assiduous pursuit of this issue in his time in the House. I know how strongly he feels and how widely he is respected across the House for his work, particularly through his chairmanship of the all-party group on taxis, of which you, Madam Deputy Speaker, are also a supporter. I know that you have taken a close interest in the issue.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this debate at the perfect time, as the Government are thinking about their legislative programme. I am particularly delighted to be responding on behalf of my noble Friend the taxis Minister and in my capacity as Minister for the future of transport—a new role at the Department for Transport—responsible for using our research and development budget, procurement and regulation to drive decarbonisation and digitalisation and to tackle disconnection in the Department.

As this debate and the hon. Gentleman’s work have shown, the 360,000 licensed taxi and private hire drivers in England play an important role in our transport system, meeting those journey needs that mass transit does not. They help people to reach shops and vital services and they get people home safely at night. As he and others highlighted and attested, they often offer those services to communities free of charge—gratis.

Taxis and private hire vehicles provide a particularly important service for disabled passengers, supporting their independence, allowing them to get to work, shop and visit friends and family—things that most of us are lucky enough to be able to do without a second thought. We know that disabled passengers make twice as many taxi and private hire journeys as non-disabled passengers. For those reasons and many others, the Government want the sector to thrive so that it can continue to meet the public’s needs and expectations.

There is clearly a problem. We agree with the comments made tonight and those made elsewhere in the House that the legislation that governs the taxi and private hire vehicles sector needs reform. That has been driven by a series of issues: the pace of innovation in mobility; the out-of-date nature of some of the legislation; the urgency of the decarbonisation, digitalisation and automation revolutions; the safety of passengers; and the need to ensure accessibility for those who suffer from disabilities.

[Mr Lord]

Woking has introduced some class-beating emissions standards for vehicles. I am sure I am not alone in hoping the Minister might give some comfort to other towns and cities that they will also be able to have clean air from their taxis in the years ahead.

[George Freeman]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I will touch on that later. Part of my work on the future mobility zones is to drive the power of future mobility to help support clean air.

The use of apps to book vehicles is increasingly popular with passengers and this, perhaps more than any other factor, has thrown into sharp focus the fact that legislation drafted in the 20th century for private hire vehicles, let alone Victorian taxi legislation, has not kept pace with technological change and progress in the sector. As with other forms of licensing, the sector is licensed at a very local level, with 284 licensing authorities in England setting the standards they feel appropriate for their area. Unlike other forms of licensing, however, those that are licensed are by the very nature of the trade mobile and so will occasionally operate outside the area that granted the licence.

The increased use of technology has also added to the complexity by making it far easier to book a private hire vehicle, thereby fuelling an increase in the number of licensed vehicles across England in recent years. Numbers are up by more than 58% since 2005. This growth has been driven primarily by an increase in private hire vehicles, which today make up over three quarters of the total. The sector is clearly providing a service that passengers value, but the level of this increase does raise serious issues.

Let me now say a word about what the Government have done, and what we will do. We have recognised the issues relating to the regulation of the sector. As the hon. Gentleman said, the previous Minister of State convened the task and finish group on taxi and PHV licensing. I echo the thanks of others for the work done by the members of the group, particularly its chair, Professor Mohammed Abdel-Haq, who is with us this evening. The group considered submissions, and took oral evidence, from a wide range of stakeholders over a number of months.

Professor Abdel-Haq managed to draw out a commendable amount of consensus among group members, but the report also includes annexed contributions from individual group members, which identify the often complex areas of disagreement. A notable example is the question of what approach should be taken in tackling the issue of cross-border or out-of-area working. As I have said, this trade is mobile, and authorities do not have complete control over the drivers and vehicles that operate in their areas, which means that authorities with higher licensing requirements have concerns about the potential migration of their private hire vehicles to other authorities.

The Government welcomed the report in their response earlier this year, and made a commitment to legislate on a number of key matters: national minimum standards, national enforcement powers and a national licensing database. I believe that, taken together, those measures would enable passengers—wherever and whoever they might be—to know that their driver had passed a nationally agreed safety standard, and was working with robust oversight.

In the meantime, the Department is making full use of the tools that are currently available to shape and influence, doing what it can to support licensing authorities in the use of their extensive existing powers. In particular, passenger safety remains in the forefront of our minds. I know that many licensing authorities have learnt lessons from some of the previous licensing failures mentioned by the hon. Gentleman: Rotherham, Rossendale and Southampton—to name but a few—have reviewed their licensing functions, with a focus on robust safety measures. However, we must ensure that those lessons are clearly and strongly disseminated across the country, and that all licensing authorities have that focus.

Earlier this year, the Government consulted on draft statutory guidance for local authorities in England and Wales, describing their view on how taxi and PHV licensing powers should be used to safeguard children and vulnerable adults. The draft was the subject of extensive engagement, including a review by the task and finish group. We received more than 500 responses, very largely in support of the proposed measures, but also making valuable suggestions for improvement. Consultation serves an important purpose in securing wide and expert input, and that will be reflected in the final version of the guidance, which I am delighted to confirm will be issued very shortly. Licensing authorities will be required by law to have due regard to the guidance in formulating and implementing their licensing policies, and the Department will monitor its use and impact.

Baroness Vere, the Minister responsible for taxi and private hire vehicles, and I, as Minister for the future of transport, are well seized of the potential for technological innovation in transport to change the sector and fuel demand, and the likelihood that it will continue to blur the lines between different modes and challenge existing regulatory structures. As the Government said earlier this year in our response to the task and finish group report, in our work on the future of mobility we will consider how we can support new technology and innovation through regulatory frameworks. I am delighted to have this opportunity to announce to the House that I will shortly be launching a very wide consultation on the future of mobility, which will look into how existing and future transport systems can interact. In the long term, as part of our future of mobility review, we will consider how to introduce a regulatory framework which recognises the changes that the sector has undergone and can adapt to innovation.

I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is meeting the taxis Minister shortly to discuss these issues, and that, as I have said, he has raised them at a time when the Government are pulling together their final plans for the Queen’s Speech; it has been announced that it will take place on 14 October. I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman in any future discussions.

Question put and agreed to.

GM Food Technologies

Debate between George Freeman and Jonathan Lord

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[George Freeman]

I could not agree more. My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and I was just about to turn to the extent of the global nature of the matter.

As chair of the all-party group on science and technology in agriculture, I recently had the great privilege of welcoming two people from around the world who are involved in biotechnology: a gentleman from Brazil who specialises in soya, and a gentleman from Uganda who specialises in bananas. No sooner had I given them the warmest of parliamentary welcomes—I confess, possibly with a sense of welcoming people from the Commonwealth to the mother of all Parliaments—than I ate my words, because they had not come to find out what we thought about the sector but to share how much progress and investment they were making, what extraordinary innovations they were driving, the local benefits in terms of food production and productivity, and the health benefits in their countries. In response to my hon. Friend’s point, that is happening around the world in any case, and the question for Britain and Europe is whether we want to participate and bring our expertise, insight and science to bear, or sit on our hands and become irrelevant, missing out on all the opportunities that we have touched on.

It is worth looking at some of the global data. I was very struck when I looked at which countries are the biggest adopters. One would expect to see the United States of America at the top of the list, but the next 10 are Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, China, Paraguay, Pakistan, South Africa, Uruguay and Bolivia. The fact is that the technology is being adopted rapidly by some of the fastest-developing second world countries, not because they are threatened by global mega-corporations or because they are under compulsion but because the technology offers extraordinary benefits to their rapidly growing populations, their domestic economies and their ability to develop as nations.

Part of my argument is that the technology is being adopted globally whether we like it or not, and it is bizarre that in this country we are getting into a situation in which it is almost impossible to debate the technology, and in which the European Union appears to be encouraging a national framework that countries can opt into or out of purely on the basis of emotional and political rationales—I will come on to that in a minute. As the eurozone teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, it seems peculiarly bizarre not to be involved in this major area of global growth.

I want to look at some of the things that some of the organisations involved have said. I draw Members’ attention to the Food and Drink Federation, which has issued an excellent briefing on the subject. The federation believes that

“modern biotechnology, including GM, offers enormous potential to improve the quality and quantity of the food supply but the impact of this technology must be objectively assessed through scientific investigation. Robust controls are necessary to protect the consumer and the environment; and consumer education and information are fundamental to public acceptance.”

I could not agree more. It goes on to stress the importance of choice:

“However, we believe that the time has come when serious consideration should be given to reopening a free and unbiased debate about the environmental, safety and consumer benefits of GM. FDF therefore welcomes”

the debate today. It also supports the foresight report’s conclusions that we need to produce more from less and with less impact. I am pleased that the report makes a call for the recognition of the role of GM.

[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

I am very taken with all my hon. Friend’s arguments, but I think it comes back to the key argument of the need for more food. He talked about some of the extremists who have caused problems, and I am drawn to the analogy of the nuclear industry. There were some extremist arguments about nuclear, but the most intelligent of the campaigners came to realise that we needed an energy-secure and carbon-neutral fuel. Surely there is a similar argument, based on scientific evidence, that can engage those who have campaigned against GM, because of the need to feed the world, particularly its poor.

[George Freeman]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, not least because, as with the nuclear debate, people are now beginning to shift positions. George Monbiot has done so on nuclear, coming around to admitting that it has a very important part to play in the true green mix. Some early opponents of GM are now convinced by the evidence, and say, “After the number of years and the number of crops that have been grown around the world we really need to change our tune.” For that reason, it is particularly interesting to look at a briefing from the anti-GM campaign, which this weekend is staging a protest in Norfolk against the blight-resistant potato, about which I will say something in a moment. Interestingly, the briefing states:

“The campaign against GM crops ten years ago was so successful that GM almost completely vanished from our fields and supermarkets, and many people have forgotten the issues associated with the technology. But in many other parts of the world peasant farmers have been desperately fighting its spread”—

not very successfully, we might observe. It continues:

“With the renewed threat of GM on the horizon campaigners need to get together again to show the rest of the country…that we’re still here, and we’ve got an even better case than ever.”

In that language, one can hear the lack of rational debate. There is no discussion of the evidence or the latest science or findings. It is an emotional call to arms. I respect people who are concerned about the technology, but rather than ripping up plants, attacking and destroying experiments and hysterically screaming down those who want to discuss the issue, we must engage in an open and rational debate.

The blight-resistant potato is an important example of the potential involved. Many hon. Members will be aware of the groundbreaking work going on at the Norwich Research Park, led by Jonathan Jones and his team. Those who know their potato will know that the average potato crop receives more than 10 sprays of blight treatment chemicals, which are expensive and not terribly nice. That involves tractors, fuel, time and labour. It is high-energy, high-input agriculture. A blight-resistant potato would require none of that, and would have a huge impact on creating the low-input, low-energy agriculture that we all want. Sadly, campaigners will be coming to Norfolk this Saturday to try to stop that experiment. We need more science, we need a more rigorous and open debate and we need proper scientific and evidence-based policy making. I believe that we need political leadership from a generation in Parliament to stand up for this country’s potential around the world, educate the public and engage in an open debate.

With that, I will sit down and allow the ministerial spokesman to share his wisdom with us. I thank you for this opportunity, Mr Betts.