From 2003, but have things really improved?
Life as a minicab driver
By David Cohen, Evening Standard reporter.
It is 4.30am when he opens the front door of my minicab and, without so much as a "do you mind", tosses my belongings into the back seat and gets in. Slurring his words, he asks me: "Where can I get a girl eh?" I tell him if it's women he's after, he's come to the wrong place, this is a minicab rank,
not a massage parlour. He curses and abruptly instructs me: "What you waiting for? Take me to Stoke Newington."
As I ease my beat-up minicab into Shaftesbury Avenue and crawl north through the West End traffic, I ask what he does. "I kill people for a living," he says. I assume it's the drink talking but his reply makes me uneasy.
Before I can quiz him further, he passes out. Every time I turn a corner, he topples onto me, his mouth drooling threads of saliva onto my jacket. I try to nudge him upright but he won't shift. So I elbow him hard. And this time he goes flying and slumps against the passenger door.
This is turning out to be quite a journey - though, as I will discover in my fortnight as an undercover minicab driver, not wholly unusual.
I will drive prostitutes, self-confessed criminals, good-time girls, abusive youths as well as well-behaved and occasionally charming passengers. But, until they get in, I will not know who is who.
Many will have had too much to drink and will require, as in the case of my current passenger, firm handling.
"Wake up!" I shout, as we enter Stoke Newington. My passenger doesn't stir. I have to elbow him hard again and he sits up with a start. "Why you come to Stoke Newington?" he mumbles. "I said St John's Wood."
Arguing with an inebriated passenger is pointless, and so wearily I turn around and head back west. After 10 minutes of scudding along in silence, my passenger opens his eyes and with a sadistic smirk, says: "Actually, I want to go to Stoke Newington."
I pull over to the kerb on a dark, isolated street and shout: "Out of my cab! Now!"
"You don't know who you're dealing with," he says menacingly.
It's at times like these that you come face to face with the bottom line of what the minicab business is about: a precarious trust that exists between total strangers. As the driver, you don't know who is getting into your car, and passengers have no idea of the nature of the character who is driving them.
In this case, crisis was averted when the passenger apologised and I duly delivered him to Stoke Newington. But not all squabbles are harmlessly assuaged.
Statistically, he was wise to back down, for - as my inside story will illustrate - even when you book a cab through a bona-fide licensed minicab operator, it is no guarantee that the driver even has a driver's licence, let alone a clean police record.
The job attracts loners, outsiders, barely literate asylum seekers and, because no references are required, former criminals.
In a recent police operation, half the minicab drivers pulled over had criminal records, including convictions for serious assault and sex offences.
Last year, there were more than 1,000 assaults on passengers in minicabs in London, including 214 sex offences and 40 rapes.
Scotland Yard fears that the real number of attacks on passengers could be five times higher due to under-reporting. But the driver is acutely vulnerable, too. Recently, one north London minicab man was stabbed 16 times by racist white thugs. He was lucky to survive.
What is it like to be a minicab driver? The current film, Dirty Pretty Things - about an educated illegal immigrant who works as a hotel concierge and moonlights as a minicab driver - tells the sordid story of an honest man trying to survive in a subculture populated by marginal, desperate characters. Is the world they inhabit as bad as all this?
The story of how I got a job as a minicab driver is illuminating in itself. It is 6.30pm on a Thursday evening and I am walking through a cobbled Soho street when I see a neon sign that says "drivers wanted". I walk up and, within seconds, a spry elderly man emerges from an old Peugeot parked alongside. "Cab?" he asks. "No," I reply, "I would like to join as a driver."
"Where you parked?" he asks, his English delivered in punchy Nigerian cadence.
"Just around the corner," I reply. "Are you in charge?"
"Bring it and park there," he says, pointing towards a double yellow line.
"Your driver number will be 09. But you have to pay me rent first, sixty pounds a week."
Minutes later, I am parked up and ready for business as a minicab driver for what I'll call Moonlight Cars and its 66-year-old "guvner", "Mister Sam".
Just like that! I am not asked whether I have a driver's licence or minicab insurance, whether my car is roadworthy - let alone whether I know my way around London.
There is no paperwork to fill out, no "knowledge" to pass. In fact, he does not even ask my name. Mister Sam is content to address me over the coming weeks by my driver number.
Unbelievably, Moonlight Cars is a licensed London minicab operator - one of the 2,136 licensed by the Public Carriage Office last year. As a licensed operator, they are meant to ensure that their drivers carry a valid driver's licence, have taken out hire and reward insurance, and that their vehicles have up-to-date MOTs. They are expected to keep copies of these records, as well as various other details, on file to be available for inspection at any time.
But Mister Sam seems totally relaxed about flouting the regulations. "I have about 25 drivers working for me, and only about five of them are qualified," he later tells me.
The Public Carriage Office, part of Transport for London, says it visits each operator, unannounced, once a year. But it admits that the regulatory framework will remain weak until phases two and three of its three-phase process are complete.
Phase two, slated to begin this year, involves licensing the estimated 40,000 drivers working for licensed operators. Phase three will impose another threshold, withdrawing licences from those whose vehicles are not "fit for use".
It is doubtful whether my vehicle - a blue 1990 Citroen Diesel BX hatchback that I picked up for £175 - will pass the "fit for use" test when it is implemented. But it does have minicab written all over it. Its upholstered seats are well worn, there is foliage growing out of the front bonnet, the sun-roof leaks when it rains and the engine feels like it might pack up at any moment.
My first night, I make three cab journeys. I take a quiet American to his home in Battersea. I take a lawyer and his drunk female colleague to the King's Road where they talk, oblivious to my presence, in vivid detail about who in their office is having sex with whom, and who is having a nervous breakdown.
They think nothing of spilling their secrets and burping loudly, and after a while I realise that it is because, to them, I am invisible. When we arrive at the destination, they toss £20 into the passenger seat and, without even a "thank you" or a "goodbye", disappear into the night.
My third clients - two young women - are perhaps the most outrageous.
"Mind if we smoke?" asks one. "I prefer if you don't," I reply. "I'm sorry darling, but we have to, I'm a wild child," she says, and immediately I smell marijuana.
There is nothing I can do but surrender, and soon they forget I am there and enthusiastically start singing the lyrics of a song they were playing in the lesbian nightclub they have just frequented. "Lick my neck, lick my back, lick my p****, lick my c****".
Later, I ask one of the other drivers, a devout Muslim named Akbar, whether he minds being treated as invisible. "Actually, I prefer it," he says. "Koran says we should not talk nonsense, and all my customers talk nonsense."
My fellow drivers are a motley crew. Some are asylum seekers who have been here less than six months and don't know where Baker Street is. Others, like Akbar, have been working for years. Only two of us are white, the rest are black and most are Muslim. The more experienced you are, the quicker you will complete your journeys and the more money you will earn, Akbar tells me.
But Akbar is not exactly minting it. He makes £1,400 a month, he says, before hire and reward insurance (£220), petrol (£40) and rent to the guvner (£240), clearing just £900. And, out of that, he must pay maintenance of his car and support a family. Of course, for most drivers it is a tax-free existence.
The real money is to be made as an operator. Mister Sam is open for business between 6pm and 6am, seven nights a week. For this he receives about £4,000 a month in rental from his two dozen drivers.
He sits in his car in his socks, shoes off, pouring tots of Teacher's whiskey into the lid and using it as a shot glass. He has five children, including a son who helps him run the business, and he has done this since 1985.
Later he shows me his "illegal drinking den" on the first floor, which was closed down by the police 18 months ago - a tiny room with no fire-escape that earned him £500 a night. And then there are the two "working girls", as he calls them, who hire rooms on the second and third floors of his building, and who each pay him £800 a week, he says.
It's all perfectly legal, mind you, prostitution being a regulated, legitimate business in the West End. The cardboard poster advertising their services - "busty Swedish girl, 19-years-old" - is displayed next to the rotating orange flashing light sending a signal into the night that there are "minicabs here".
All in all, I calculate, Mister Sam clears a cool £10,000 a month. His biggest expense is parking tickets, with overdue tickets jammed into his cubbyhole totalling £3,000.
To work for Mister Sam is to get drawn into a murky underworld in which the boundary between legal and illegal, licensed and unlicensed, is as smudged as the bright city lights reflecting off my rain-splattered windscreen.
Around him coagulate a bunch of shadowy characters, including Nick the Italian who used to be his barman who now makes his living selling weed and crushing aspirin to sell to unsuspecting tourists as cocaine.
And then there are Mister Sam's "regulars", including prostitutes and conartists. One regular gets into my car and starts pulling £10 notes out of her glove. "I'm a criminal," she tells me. "I steal from men with their brains in the pants." She's what they call a clipper, she explains - she promises men sex and then disappears with their cash.
But low-life can be as seductive as it is repulsive. And ironically, the people who are most respectful, and tip the best, are the people whose occupations are the most questionable.
After a while, working nights as a minicab driver starts to rewire the internal clock, as well as the psyche. Arriving home at 6am, sleeping when most people are up, working when most people are asleep, drivers - even those who enter the job clean and apparently normal - begin to cast themselves as outsiders.
He has no name. To the guvner, he is a number, to the customer he is "sir" or "mate". The traffic wardens are his enemies, as are the police. If he is not already on the precarious margins of society when he becomes a minicab driver, the job will push him there.
In such a situation, it is tempting to glamorise the job. He is a nightrider, free as a bird, cruising the city. But the facts are that most times, when he looks in his rearview mirror, he will see people there but he will feel utterly alone. And that, he will tell you, is as good as it gets. For he will know, better than anyone, that his minicab is a risky space in which anything can happen.
