Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Disabled Persons) Bill

Neil Hudson Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 18th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Neil Hudson (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I rise in support of the Bill and I pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright) for this important piece of legislation which will widen access and improve the Equality Act 2010. I very much welcome that it has support from the Opposition.

As we have heard today, connectivity is a huge issue in rural areas. I do not want to get into Top Trumps on the sizes of rural constituencies, but Penrith and the Border is the largest and most sparsely populated constituency in England. It can sometimes take up to two hours to get from one end of the constituency to the other by car. Having said that I did not want to indulge in Top Trumps, I just have.

[Chris Loder]

We cannot not respond to such points made in the House. West Dorset is 400 square miles and has 132 parishes. I cannot quite remember the statistics for the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns), but I think hers is slightly larger than mine. Is the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) more beautiful than West Dorset? I am not quite sure on that point.

[Dr Hudson]

Yes, it is more beautiful. [Laughter.] Let us put the Top Trumps to one side now and get to the heart of this very important Bill.

My colleagues in rural constituencies, and also those in urban constituencies, have highlighted the importance of my right hon. and learned Friend’s Bill in connecting people, in getting them from A to B, in equality of access for all people who need it, and in ensuring that disabled people have equality of access. That is so, so important.

Points were made about there being many, many good taxi drivers and private hire vehicle drivers who are doing the right thing. Again, I want to thank those drivers for doing the right thing. The Bill will set the balance and get that to be uniform. For too long, unfortunately, disabled people have been facing behaviour that makes their lives very, very difficult. When there is outright refusal of service, it is incredibly distressing. I welcome the Government’s intention to go further and move towards disability training as part of the standards for licensing. I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the Minister on that point.

I also echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on the importance of having a database, so that people hiring vehicles know exactly where and when they can access them. That is a very important point and I look forward to movement on that.

I welcome the important tenet of the Bill to refrain from charging disabled people extra. It is so important to get that on to the statute book.

I very much welcome my right hon. and learned Friend’s work on the Bill. Notably, he has consulted widely with disability groups as well as transport groups, and inserted practical safeguard balances into the Bill so that people providing services will not be penalised. It is well-balanced legislation that will move us forward positively.

As the Bill comes on to the statute book—as my right hon. and learned Friend said, that will be a couple of months after Royal Assent—it will be beholden on licensing authorities to become involved, but as has been mentioned, there are many pressures on local authorities. In Cumbria, we face radical local government restructuring to create two new unitary authorities. I have said many times that I am passionately against the restructuring, which is the last thing that a huge county such as Cumbria needs, and it is the worst possible time to be changing everything as we come out of a pandemic. That said, we are where we are and we need to make it work, but there will be pressures on the Cumbrian system to institute such changes.

I have been concerned about how the restructuring in Cumbria is leading to paralysis and inertia in decision making and in acting on legislation that may come through. To illustrate that, the local Liberal Democrat-led Eden District Council is delaying decisions on waste collections, so some villages in my constituency do not get green waste picked up while others do. The Liberal Democrat administration is blaming the previous Conservative administration and local government reform, and it is blaming central Government for the restructuring, which it cannot do anything about. That is not good enough. We cannot have delays in decision making because of such restructurings.

It is so important that we have connections across my constituency, so taxi drivers and private hire vehicle drivers are really important in that. It is also important, as colleagues have said, to have connectivity to other services. Rural buses have been highlighted often, and we have many fantastic local services for which volunteers have stepped up, such as the Fellrunner bus and the Border Rambler bus. Unfortunately, over the years we have seen increasing pressure on the rural bus network, so we have lost services.

Sadly, in 2014, Cumbria County Council took the retrograde decision to stop using central Government moneys to subsidise rural bus routes and, accordingly, some routes had to close as they were not financially viable. I urge local and central Government to ensure connectivity by working hard together and using moneys sensibly. In rural areas such as mine, people depend on the bus network, taxis and private hire vehicles.

Trains have also segued into the debate and, in my part of the world, I very much believe that we must improve train services. I have been campaigning for the reopening of Gilsland station and for the extension of the Borders railway from the borders down through Longtown in my constituency and on to Carlisle. We need joined-up thinking. The Bill is so important in improving equality of access to private hire vehicles and taxis, but I urge the Government to work with local government to ensure that our rural bus network is improved, bolstered and supported and that the train network is supported as well.

I raised many of those issues a couple of weeks ago in an Adjournment debate on support for levelling up rural communities. Bills such as this are very much about levelling up society, are they not? It is so important that such Bills come together, but we also need joined up-government to ensure connectivity across all walks of life. I firmly believe that this is an important Bill, which highlights the need to join up people in our communities, whether they are urban or rural.

We have highlighted some of the pressures in rural communities. Last night, I chaired a roundtable of rural stakeholders in my constituency. The pressures faced by such people, including farmers, due to the cost of living crisis include increasing fuel and diesel costs and increasing fertiliser costs. People in rural communities also have the cost of putting oil into their heating systems. I urge the Government to listen to those concerns and hope that, in the coming days, the Chancellor will try to mitigate some of the pressures that face our rural society.

In conclusion, I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam on the Bill, to which I give my full support.