Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Disabled Persons) Bill

Lord Borwick Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 1st April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I want first to declare my interests in the taxi industry as the holder of a London taxi proprietor’s licence, the owner of a licensed London taxi and the employer of a London taxi driver. My experience is of very many years in the London taxi industry, as manufacturer, distributor, financier, developer and driver. I welcome this Bill, proposed by my noble friend Lord McLoughlin. He has such experience and wisdom in politics that the only thing I would dare to challenge him on is driving and being driven in a taxi. As much of my speech and this Bill is about disability, I should declare that my son has a learning disability.

In the mid-1990s, when I led the project to produce a new, traditional London taxi that would carry wheelchairs, I never thought that 27 years after the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 it would still be necessary to do something about discrimination. Alas, it is, and this Bill will do it, where perhaps it still rarely exists. My plan was to carry wheelchairs in the taxi without the majority of passengers even being aware that the taxi was wheelchair-accessible; you cannot discriminate against wheelchair users if you do not even know the vehicle is wheelchair-accessible. That is why I argued successfully that all London taxis should be accessible. Many of my sales staff told me that we could get away with only a few of our taxis being accessible—perhaps 3% or 5%—but I wanted 100% of our production to be like that.

In her speech on 4 March, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, told a story of being refused by two taxi drivers in the rank at Watford station, but that those were the only wheelchair-accessible ones on the rank at that time. All the others refused by being designed not to take her—or to be fairer, not designed to take her wheelchair. This is the problem that a lot of taxi systems in the world have found when they try to make only a small percentage of the fleet accessible. In London, we have a great system, because 100% of the fleet is accessible—that is, 100% of taxis but only a few of the private hire vehicles or minicabs. In 1995, there was a lot of agreement with my noble friend’s department that we would move to a system of 100% accessibility in the taxi fleet countrywide. This has not yet happened, and it results in a lottery as to whether a travelling wheelchair user gets to a rank that has an accessible vehicle at the front. This is wrong in my opinion.

There are other things about the Bill that could be improved, not least Clause 3, on providing lists of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. I am still confused. Does that mean lists of vehicle types or actual vehicles? Such lists are no doubt valuable. Google has achieved great things by producing lists of the obvious and making them free. But perfecting the way that separate licensing authorities produce and, in the future, publish the same list is not a great step forward for accessibility for disabled people. We need accessible taxis, and we are being provided with lists of accessible taxis. I would like to request a meeting with my noble friend, and perhaps also with the Minister for Disabled People, to discuss how the Department for Transport, which used to be a crusading champion for practical accessibility, could renew that proud ethos.

Lastly, I would like to wholeheartedly welcome the Bill. It is not a shot at the goal of universal accessibility; it is barely a shuffle in that direction, coupled with dire warnings that we must not amend it to make it actually do something useful. But it does no harm to the cause, and therefore I welcome it.