Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Matt Rodda and Daniel Zeichner(4 months ago)
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Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Safeguarding and Road Safety) Bill
Debate between Matt Rodda and Daniel ZeichnerFriday 10th September 2021
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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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.
Amazon Deforestation
Debate between Matt Rodda and Daniel Zeichner(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Daniel Zeichner
My hon. Friend makes an important point on the wider context of Britain’s role on the global stage. I would argue that although we are shamefully withdrawing from our positions of influence on the global stage, we remain important through many of our major companies and should use that influence and position of authority.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that we are approaching a very dangerous tipping point in the context of climate change and that the wider world faces catastrophic climate change if urgent action is not taken? That action must include an end to deforestation, radical action to reduce the consumption of meat in the western world, and Government intervention in markets.
Daniel Zeichner
That is the important point: the sense of urgency. Of course, this Parliament has declared a climate emergency, not that one would necessarily guess that from the Government’s actions, and actions are what count.
What a marked contrast there is between our Government’s feeble response and the responses of other Governments. Our European partners have called for trade sanctions, with Austrian MPs demanding that their Government veto the EU’s proposed trade deal with South America’s economic bloc, which is currently composed of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. That was due to concerns over workers’ rights, which is absolutely correct, but the environmental reasons are paramount. Similar concerns have been voiced by countries such as France, Ireland and Luxembourg.
Although I have been critical of the Government, I will add a rider, because as a country with an imperial and colonising past, criticism can always be levelled at the UK that, because we industrialised and polluted, it is hypocritical to blame others for doing the same. Brazil could argue that, as a post-colonial industrial country, it should have the chance to develop its economy, as the UK and other European countries did in the past, and it can point to our lack of environmental concerns during that industrialisation. Those sympathetic to Bolsonaro’s argument could point to data indicating that Brazil has historically contributed to around only 1% of global emissions since the start of the industrial age.
To criticise other countries for pursuing industrial development by saying, “We benefited from that kind of approach but now we know more so you should not put your economy first” is a poor argument. However, it is possible to develop the economy in a much more sustainable way if it is not driven just by short-term profit maximisation—that is the answer to the conundrum. The way forward is through international agreements, ratified by the countries involved, to secure a better future approach. Economic avenues could be pursued more sustainably to future-proof Brazil’s industry while maintaining environmental protections and regulations.
Many would argue that there is no need for self-inflicted harm. Greenpeace tells us that indigenous groups across Brazil are calling for global support to protect their rights in their struggle to safeguard the forests that they have inhabited for centuries. Greenpeace argues that environmental governance bodies in Brazil have been dismantled and weakened. For instance, the Climate Change and Forests Office and the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Climate Change have been closed, which has impacted policies and deforestation prevention, as well as resourcing. Minister Salles has slashed the budget and staffing of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or IBAMA. Highly trained units have reportedly been grounded, and the value of fines imposed for environmental offences has dropped by 43%. In August, the director of Brazil’s National Space Research Institute was forced out of office after the President refuted data on rising deforestation.
Of course, the Brazilian Government have a different account and reject the notion that
“Brazil does not take care of the Amazon, does not take care of the environment.”
People will make their own judgment, but at the centre of the issue is the fact that we are in a climate crisis. If Brazil rejects the chance to reform its practice, recommit to stopping the fires and return to anti-deforestation policies, and if the Brazilian President continues to take Brazil down such an environmentally damaging path, it is right that the international community thinks hard about how to proceed to best protect the environmental jewel that is the Amazon rainforest.
That is hard because it touches on the most basic issues of national sovereignty. Brazil has reaffirmed many times that this is indeed an issue of sovereignty, and it believes that its approach to the Amazon is one of domestic policy, but we cannot look at this issue in a vacuum. As was mentioned earlier, the Amazon spans not just Brazil, but Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. It is an internationally revered natural treasure, and parts of it that are lost, including some species that are found nowhere else on earth, will not be recovered. That is a global loss.