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English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for their amendments on taxi and private hire vehicle national standards, licensing authorities and enforcement powers, and all other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate.

For me, this is a bit of déjà vu because, as the commissioner of Transport for London 15 years ago, I personally, with others, worked very hard on the Law Commission’s work on taxi legislation, but, sadly, nothing was done as a consequence. As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, remarked, the work is, sadly, substantially out of date, principally because, in those 15 years, the growth of the private hire sector of this market, which many users regard as interchangeable, has been enormous. I will come back to that.

I will begin with Amendments 235A, 235D and 260A. The Government recognise the pressing need to reform the regulation of taxis and private hire vehicles. The current legislation is archaic and fragmented. I am absolutely aware of the challenges that the current licensing framework can cause, and of the huge variation in the supply and use of taxis and private hire vehicles across both urban and rural areas in the country.

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The out-of-date legislation includes inconsistent licensing standards throughout the country and the practice of out-of-area working, which other noble

Lords have described. Thankfully, we can tackle some of the inconsistencies that have induced this due to Clause 65. This grants the Secretary of State the power to set national minimum standards for the licensing of drivers of taxis and private hire vehicles, the vehicles themselves and private hire vehicle operators. The powers sought are necessarily broad so that we can make sure that the new powers catch all the complexities of the current legislative and operating landscape.

The Government are committed to using the powers to set national standards as quickly as possible. This will, however, be the first time that mandatory standards in taxi and private hire vehicle licensing have been set. It is vital that we have sufficient time to get these right to provide certainty and stability for passengers and the trades. We will need to consult on them and there is a risk that setting a deadline could negatively impact our ability to undertake a meaningful consultation of sufficient duration and draw the right conclusions.

Amendments 235B and 235C were tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, and supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson. I want to be clear from the outset that I hear and understand the concerns of the noble Lord and other noble Lords who have spoken, and of disabled people and users of taxis and private hire services in general. Many disabled people rely on taxis and, for the last 15 or 20 years, private hire services, for their day-to-day mobility. Those services, as has been remarked, must rightly be accessible to them. Across England, over half of taxis are wheelchair accessible but only 2% of private hire vehicles are. The majority of wheelchair-accessible taxis operate in our largest cities and the number of such vehicles available at one time will inevitably be fewer still, particularly when some or many of them are being used for home-to-school transport provision at some times of day.

The Government want disabled people to be able to reach the destinations important in their lives easily, confidently and with dignity wherever they are and wherever they want to travel. I am afraid, however, that this amendment is not the way to achieve that aim. First, it applies only to taxis which predominate in urban areas, potentially excluding disabled people in rural areas from the benefits it seeks to create because of their greater reliance on private hire vehicles, which would not be covered by this measure.

When the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 first introduced the concept of taxi accessibility regulations, private hire vehicles were a much smaller part of the overall vehicle mix than they are today. In fact, they were yet to be subject to licensing at all in London. In the past decade, however, private hire vehicle numbers have grown significantly and now account for 82% of the entire fleet of both categories of vehicle.

Wheelchair users should of course be able to make the same spontaneous journeys as other passengers. Away from our city centres, taxis rarely operate in a rank and hail market. They work for the local taxi organisation or private hire organisation that finds passengers a driver and vehicle. We have seen that passengers are attracted to the idea of pre-booking a vehicle as they can now do this in a very short time in

advance, be that a private hire vehicle or a taxi, and that is why we think the availability of wheelchair accessible vehicles should be looked at across the fleet.

Secondly, the noble Lord’s amendment would require every taxi in England to comply with a single set of standards, taking no account of the variety of access needs that disabled people have. This approach would not only be exclusionary but would risk infringing the Government’s legal public sector equality duty to consider the impact on people with all protected characteristics, including disabled people with a full range of impairments and access needs. The public sector equality duty also applies to all licensing authorities, as they are public authorities.

The Government take their responsibilities under this duty seriously and it would be remiss of us to accept an amendment which, in seeking to improve access for some, diminished it for others. Take, for example, disabled people who struggle with high step heights and with crossing large, open floor areas, or visually impaired passengers who may be disoriented within the larger passenger cabin of a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. The noble Lord’s amendment, while absolutely well meaning, would do absolutely nothing for such people and in many cases it might make it more difficult for them to use the taxi services they rely on, frustrating their everyday journeys.

This is not just our view. Having recently consulted further the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee, which is charged with advising Ministers on the transport needs of disabled people, it has confirmed that its view is that mixed fleets of wheelchair-accessible and non-wheelchair accessible vehicles provide a more inclusive service than one consisting entirely of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. This Government are ambitious about accessibility for all. We cannot accept an amendment that would not produce the overall result that the noble Lord seeks.

Thirdly, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, observed, this measure would impose a significant and potentially unbearable financial burden on individual taxi drivers and the taxi trade as a whole. We know that wheelchair-accessible vehicles cost more up front and can be more expensive to run. Vehicle prices vary but can range from £35,000 to £65,000, meaning that implementing this amendment could impose an additional cost to move the 26,000 non-wheelchair accessible taxis to accessible vehicles. It is our view that requiring the remaining non-wheelchair accessible vehicles to be wheelchair-accessible is likely to result in considerably fewer taxis for everybody to use.

In short, this measure could substantially reduce the taxi industry, removing travel choices for millions of passengers. No Government could accept such an impact, particularly when the consequence is a more divided, less inclusive, smaller taxi trade that is less able to serve the people who rely on it.

Thankfully, there is another way in which we can seek to meet the need of all disabled people to have access to taxi and private hire vehicle services. Existing government “best practice” guidance recommends that each licensing authority develops inclusive service plan setting out how accessible taxi and private hire vehicle services are in their area and the steps that they will

take to improve accessibility further. Such authorities already have the power to require vehicles to meet specific standards, and I encourage them to act to ensure that there are sufficient wheelchair-accessible vehicles to serve passengers who rely on them, as part of a mixed fleet meeting a variety of access needs.

Further, as I have previously stated, we intend to use the new national minimum standards powers proposed in the Bill quickly to require taxi and private hire vehicle drivers, operator licensees and staff to complete disability equality training. The introduction of the standards provides an opportunity to go further, however, by looking again at other accessibility standards that taxi and private hire vehicle drivers and operators are required to meet, so that the services they provide are available to everyone.

The measures that I have outlined can and will help make taxi and private hire vehicle services more accessible. Nevertheless, I fully recognise the importance of the issue that the noble Lord’s amendment seeks to address for the many wheelchair users who depend on these services. For that reason, I commit that we will consider further how we can continue to support independent mobility for all disabled passengers, including wheelchair users, while safeguarding the vital taxi and private hire vehicle services on which so many rely as part of our continuing review of taxi and private hire vehicle legislation.

I turn now to Amendments 235CA and 235E tabled by my noble friend Lord Blunkett. I thank my noble friend for his amendments and assure both him and other noble Lords that we are looking hard and long at comprehensive reform of the whole of taxi and private hire vehicle legislation. National minimum standards are not the end of the conversation. That is why, on 8 January, my department launched a public consultation on making all local transport authorities, including strategic authorities, responsible for taxi and private hire vehicle licensing.

We agree that there is a case for taxi and private hire vehicle licensing to sit with the body responsible for local transport planning. Local transport authorities better reflect local travel patterns—particularly in the case of strategic authorities, which generally cover much larger footprints across whole functional economic areas and reflect travel-to-work patterns and local labour markets. It should also help reduce out-of-area working.

If, following consultation, we decide to proceed, we have heard a mix of evidence on the role of elected Members versus officials in decision-making, and would want to give more detailed thought to this as part of our proposed wider reforms, and likely through the planned spring engagement. We will of course consult further with my noble friend and other interested members of your Lordships’ House.

I turn to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. I am grateful to her for raising the important issue of enforcement powers. We agree that enhancing licensing authorities’ enforcement powers will be a must as part of the wider reforms we are considering. This is one of the key options to address the challenges that out-of-area work can create. We

have already started considering what enhanced powers might look like. I assure her that stopping powers are being considered. However, any new powers would need to be backed by sanctions to make them effective, and it is likely to be difficult to work through the detail and impacts of any new offences in the time available for the Bill. But we will seriously consider what can be brought forward on Report to quickly enhance enforcement and public safety.

On wider reform, as I have said, the department intends to start stakeholder engagement in the spring, looking at the broader issues around taxi and private hire vehicle regulations, and to build consensus on what the best mechanisms are to tackle these issues. As I have previously said, the Government recognise the challenges caused by out-of-area working, so a national solution is needed. There are a number of options to address the issue, and at the heart of this is the fundamental question of whether options that restrict the ability to fulfil journeys based on where an operator, driver or vehicle is licensed are best for passengers and the sector more generally.

We are worried about the effect of preventing passengers close to the boundary of a licensing authority from being able to use a preferred operator for all their journeys, despite their being subject in the future to the same national minimum standards we are seeking to introduce in the Bill. That is a particular concern; as we know, vulnerable passengers disproportionately rely on taxis and private hire vehicles. The geographically selective nature of the amendment would make the regulatory framework for taxis and private hire vehicles even more fragmented and inconsistent. The Government are focused on greater consistency across the nation.

We acknowledge the role that all strategic authorities and Transport for London can play in improving the regulation of the sector. As I mentioned previously, the department recently launched a consultation on making all local transport authorities responsible for taxi and private hire vehicle licensing. If taken forward, this would reduce the number of authorities from 263 to 70, which we believe would better reflect the way people travel to live their lives, how technology has fundamentally changed the way the public engage with these services, and the way technology can be leveraged to enhance safety and provide a better and more effective licensing regime.

Options to address the enforcement challenges when a taxi or private hire vehicle is working away from its home area, and ones that would prevent or restrict drivers licensed by one authority from working in other local authority areas, continue to be considered as a matter of importance. The Government are acting to improve the regulation of this vital sector, in the first instance by setting national minimum standards. We are looking hard at the regulation of the sector holistically to achieve the best overall outcome for passengers.

With those reassurances, and for the reasons I have set out, I kindly ask that noble Lords do not press their amendments.