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Thoughts on Conference
By
Wayne Casey
I get unashamedly stressed at conference. I am miserable, really, I am, I truly have a love hate relationship with it.
In terms of the pre-conference directors meeting I have to ensure everything is to the directors liking, I have to ensure rooms and delegates are catered for and towards the AGM, I have to be around welcoming old friends and new.
I get forgiven for so many errors its untrue, as our members in the NTA realise, the pressure is on me and they accept me for my many human failings.
I am very proud of the NTA in regards to how we treat our speakers. We do things right, we try our very best to look after them, we put them up, sit them on our chairman’s dinner table and ensure all our members treat them as friends, even if on occasion if we don’t necessarily agree with them.
This is perhaps the one thing our current chairman has brought the NTA, speakers who have perhaps the same ideals as us, i.e. the vision of a good taxi service – but have perhaps a different idea of the route how we should achieve our joint goal. (see I can do diplomacy!)
The transcript of this year’s conference will shortly be available for general circulation courtesy of the NTA Secretary Tim Gray and his team at Sintons in Newcastle, but for this brief synopsis I will give my thoughts and condolences to our brethren in London, who were this year represented by the United Cabbies Group, through their chairman Len Martin.
I share the frustration of London Cab Drivers. For the most part they are hard working, they have spent a good number of years achieving their badge, and for the most part appear to have been dumped upon from a considerable height by the people legislated to look after them.
I don’t think I’m being unfair in the above paragraph either. If you had to believe everything you read in the press the London cab drivers main point of outrage, you would think would be ‘that app’ – but it actually isn’t. Its incompetent, stupid, and yes, very lazy licensing.
As was pointed out to the NTA, quite eloquently by the UCG, was the dire warning that very often our local authorities look towards London as the leading light of all things taxi. Yet this beacon of light has given licenses to people from ‘war torn countries’ effectively ‘on trust’, whilst at the same time not renewing the licenses of green badge drivers of many years, drivers with known and decent track records, and all because the DBS were rather busy, and rather sadly, because they (the regulators) were complete idiots
The word discretion must be missing from the TfL dictionary.
They have granted licenses to operators whose premises not only don’t exist, but in at least one case it actually was proved to exist, but was in fact an alley way.
I am talking about a regulator that is of such incompetence, it actually granted a license to a vehicle licensed in another country attached with Belgium registration plates.
When you couple all this with an income that is approaching £50 million per year, but results in minimal prosecutions for the touting, illegal plying and illegal operating offences that are widespread, you would get rather upset yourselves.
I mean, if you held a demonstration and it was taken as read by the ignorant journalists looking for headlines, that you were demonstrating about a particular mobile phone app, as opposed to the incompetence of your regulator, you’d be rather miffed yourselves wouldn’t you?
The London cab trade is very different to its provincial cousins – everyone of us knows that – but our frustrations are the same. Regulators who are in the majority of places not fit for purpose.
The membership of the NTA have a lot to learn from London – sadly its perhaps how not to run a licensing regime.
To be continued.
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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin
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