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

Lord Borwick Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 4th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Borwick]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I first must make my declarations of interest. I am currently the holder of a London taxi proprietor’s licence, as I own a single London taxi and employ a taxi driver. In the past, I spent most of my business life in the taxi industry. I was chief executive and a big shareholder in Manganese Bronze Holdings plc, which manufactured, distributed and financed the traditional London taxi and developed the first mobile phone hailing system in the world, which became the first wheelchair-accessible public transport system. I will always be grateful to the late Sir Bert Massie and a fine civil servant, Ann Frye, for pushing me to do that. Later I was chairman of the company that adapted the Mercedes Vito to make a wheelchair-accessible London taxi. All those interests have now ceased.

The Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Safeguarding and Road Safety) Bill will improve public safety while travelling by these modes of transport. Taxi drivers throughout the country are great people generally. There are quality systems in place in almost all boroughs. This is desirable because the customer, the traveller, is in a uniquely vulnerable position. Passengers are often alone, often away from home in an area they do not know. The customer chooses the first empty taxi plying for hire and has no way of choosing their taxi driver. That puts a burden on the authorities to get the regulation right. In most parts of the world, among the top 10 problems to be faced is the number of complaints about taxis. In London and many other towns around the country, taxis are among the features that a mayor gets compliments about. Drivers are proud of their knowledge and most had a warm sense of achievement when a taxi driver won “Mastermind” on TV a few years ago. Of course, they knew that they could have achieved that prize if only they had tried.

The main focus of the Bill is on formalising information-sharing between taxi and private hire vehicle licensing authorities, specifically safeguarding and road safety concerns identified by other authorities. Ensuring that serious and credible concerns about a driver are shared will facilitate more considered licensing decisions as authorities will have greater access to the relevant facts. As noble Lords may know, the authorities responsible for taxi and private hire vehicle licensing in England are lower-tier and unitary authorities such as district councils. The exception to this is in London, where Transport for London is the licensing authority. These licensing authorities decide whether each applicant for a taxi or private hire vehicle driver’s licence is fit and proper, and that is where this Bill can help.

In some areas, a phenomenon has occurred whereby a driver who loses his licence in one area reregisters with the adjacent licensing area and essentially carries on as before. It would be unreasonable to expect an authority to check each application manually with the other 275 licensing authorities for previous adverse history. So, it is the duty of the law, I suggest, to allow technology to perform this task instead. While the number of bad guys who get a taxi driver’s licence is small, their importance is great because they jeopardise the whole system of regulation of quality.

It is important to note that the Bill would only make more information available to licensing authorities. It does not change the criteria under which licensing authorities make their decisions, nor does it tie a licensing authority into making a particular decision. Licensing authorities are currently required by legislation to keep records of the licences they have issued. They must also make this information available if asked for it, but there is no requirement to share information with other licensing authorities about the licences they have suspended, refused or revoked. There is a voluntary database, the national register of refusals and revocations, known as NR3, which some licensing authorities use. However, the use of this database is far from universal. This means that there remains the possibility that a driver deemed unsafe in one licensing area and who has their licence revoked may well reapply for a licence and successfully hide that decision from a different licensing authority.

I am sure the Minister will agree that this situation is unacceptable, and it is one of the issues the Bill seeks to address by ensuring universal usage. To do this, the Bill would mandate licensing authorities in England to record in a database decisions to suspend, revoke or refuse a licence which are based on specific safeguarding and road safety concerns. For privacy reasons, the Bill ensures that the reasons behind the licensing decision would not be recorded directly on to the database; instead, this information would be held separately by the relevant authority. Licensing authorities would be required to search the database for each applicant. Where an authority identifies a record on the database relating to their applicant, the Bill would require them to contact the authority that made the entry to gather the details of that decision. The authority would then be required to have regard to the information provided. To be clear, the licensing authority would not be bound by that original decision. In fact, licensing authorities can, and undoubtedly will, make different decisions for a variety of reasons. Therefore, a driver’s inclusion on the database would not automatically preclude them from gaining a taxi or private hire vehicle driver’s licence.

The Bill gives licensing authorities access to more information relevant to their decision, which will help them to make the right decision. That decision may be to grant the applicant a licence. As noble Lords will have seen, the Bill builds timescales into that process to ensure that information is provided promptly, so that the process does not unduly delay a driver’s application. The database itself would be designated by the Secretary of State for Transport. This means that the Bill could mandate a database already in use, such as the national register to which I referred earlier. Although the cost of such a database is not expected to be significant, the Bill allows the database operator to charge a fee to licensing authorities to cover the associated administrative costs. The fees can be charged only if the Secretary of State has agreed the fee level.

The other key issue the Bill seeks to address is the safeguarding and road safety concerns an authority may have about taxi and private hire vehicle drivers working in their area but licensed in another. Again, the Bill does not grant any new powers; it seeks only to ensure the sharing of relevant information in a timely manner. As noble Lords may know, drivers can undertake pre-booked journeys in areas other than the one in which they are originally licensed. However, only the licensing authority that issued a driver’s licence can revoke or suspend it. This means that, where a driver is suspected of acting in an unsafe manner in one licensing authority’s area but is licensed elsewhere, the local authority is reliant on the authority which issued the licence to take action against that driver. While it is expected that one licensing authority would act on another’s concerns, the Bill would seek to formalise the process of reporting serious and credible safeguarding and road safety concerns. It would do so by requiring licensing authorities in England to share with the relevant authority concerns they have about drivers licensed in other areas.

The Bill acknowledges that drivers need protection from vexatious or frivolous complainants, but safety is rightly at the heart of the Bill, and drivers must be able to continue to earn a living where it is safe for them to do so. To achieve this balance, the concerns would have to be related to safeguarding or road safety concerns, as set out in the first clause of the Bill. The concerns would have to be serious and credible enough that the licensing authority would have considered suspending or revoking the driver’s licence were they one of their licensed drivers.

Where a licensing authority in England receives a safeguarding or road safety concern from another authority about a driver it has licensed, the Bill would require it to consider whether to suspend or revoke the licence. The authority must make its decision and inform the reporting licensing authority within 20 working days of its reasons. This would provide important clarity and consistency for licensing authorities on the action they must take when concerns are raised about a driver licensed in another area.

It might be said, as is so often, that this Bill should have progressed many years ago. Noble lords may surprise me and the Minister with some analysis which reveals a flaw we have not spotted. I am not sure that I look forward to that—but we are told that there is no room in the legislative agenda for amendments to the Bill and that, if any are promulgated, it will fail. That would be a shame.

The point has been made that there are several other ways in which the taxi industry can be improved by further legislation. My honourable friend in another place, Nickie Aiken, the Member for Cities of London and Westminster, has done great work on trying to solve the problems of pedicabs in London. Alas, this Bill is not the place to achieve that. The Bill has had widespread support in another place. It was first proposed by Daniel Zeichner, the Labour MP for Cambridge, and this particular incarnation was proposed and delivered by my honourable friend Peter Gibson, the excellent MP for Darlington. Perusal of Hansard reveals the enormous amount of work he did to progress it. On this lonely Friday afternoon, I hope that we in our House can do justice to the aspiration outlined by Peter Gibson to help travellers in his constituency and elsewhere.

The Bill should be seen for what it is: a vital next step to improve public safety when travelling. It does not grant new powers but, through sharing of relevant information, it makes better use of those which exist. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in support of the Bill this afternoon, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. Assault and refusal by drivers are exactly the sort of comments that would be added to the database and are relevant to the discussion as to whether that driver gets a new licence.

Of course, the range of wheelchairs carried by taxis nowadays varies enormously. We found that the type of wheelchair used most is, in fact, a baby buggy. Indeed, as we age over the years, it is possible to say that we all spend time in wheelchairs, and we are lucky if we do so only at the very beginning of our lives. But it is terribly important that disabled people be able to get a wheelchair-accessible taxi everywhere. A long time ago, I think in the original Disability Discrimination Act brought in some 20 years ago, the enabling legislation for statutory instruments to make all taxis wheelchair accessible was put in, so they await the moment when those statutory instruments are brought forward.

On false accusations, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Holmes, there is of course still the opportunity for such accusations to be appealed against by the taxi driver and dealt with through the appeals system in each borough. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, all Uber vehicles are licensed as private hire vehicles, so they are covered by the Bill.

I thank noble Lords very much for their help, and I beg to move.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.