Taxi drivers: Hard done by or architects of their own misfortune?Most people would think twice about getting in a car with a stranger yet everyday thousands of us jump in a black cab to take us home, to work or to shelter from the weather. We regularly hear what a difficult job it is to be a taxi driver and that is not in dispute, long hours for low pay and occasional abuse off drunken customers, that could however describe life for anyone working behind a bar yet nothing is considered wrong about complaining about bad bar service.
What have taxi drivers done to earn our trust, what standards must they meet to be trusted to ferry people home and who can you complain to when a taxi driver abuses the trust automatically placed in them every time you get in the car.
These were the questions that went through my head after getting out a hackney carriage and watching it speed away to realise I had been dropped nowhere near where I wanted to be for the third time in my first month in Manchester.
According to a freedom of information act request put in to Manchester City Council, last year the council received 156 complaints about private hire cabs and 329 for hackney carriages.
For the first half of this year the council received 91 complaints about private hire cabs and 185 about hackney carriages.
Of those 185 complaints 38% were about behaviour followed by 19% for over charging and conduct, 12% for dangerous driving, 8% classified as other, 7% overcharging, 4% route disputes and 3% for refusal to hire.
For a city with over 5000 licenced cabs this would imply very few complaints, maybe I was just being unlucky with my randomly allocated taxis.
Undeterred I decided to dig deeper, I surveyed 50 people asking a] have you ever been unhappy with the service provided to you by a taxi driver b] if so how often: once, occasionally or regularly c] was it a private hire cab or a hackney carriage and d] have you ever complained to the proper authorities about your treatment - the Council’s licensing department.
Of 50 people I interviewed five people had no reason to complain about the service they had received.
Nine of the remaining 45 said that they received the most unacceptable service from private hire cabs that left 36 people unhappy with their treatment by Hackney carriage drivers.
That is 72% of people surveyed who have had unacceptable treatment by hackney carriage drivers and 26% of people interviewed said they regularly received unacceptable service and all of those were referring to hackney carriages.
Any other business that offered unacceptable service to over a quarter of its customers on a regular basis would go out of business quickly.
An even more telling fact is that out of 50 people interviewed only one person had complained to the Council's licensing department and that was me for this article and I am still awaiting my response.
That statistic puts the council's complaint figures in a completely different light.
I found the most common complaints were about lack of local knowledge and over charging or asking for payment up front when the council requires hackney carriage drivers to use the metre.
One man described his driver not having heard of Macclesfield before, and numerous paying completely different amounts for the same journey.
Another told of a taxi driver not realising where he had agreed to drive to and changing his mind half way there, forcing the passenger out of the cab, leaving the customer with an hour walk home in the middle of the night
Six people interviewed even described instances of being locked inside the taxi after arguments with the driver, one person even having to ring friends to rescue them from inside a locked cab with a cabbie demanding more money.
So am I the first person to come to this realisation, apparently not.
A report from the Licensing & Appeals Committee from 30 August 2011 titled Hackney Carriage and Private Hire driver training and assessment by the Assistant Chief Executive of Neighbourhood Strategy and Delivery states that two thirds of all taxi complaints relate to hackney carriage drivers.
The report also states that a vehicle inspection manual was developed in consultation with the trade following requests for guidance on the standards required for vehicle tests.
It says: ‘’The vehicle test manual was introduced in December 2008 since the introduction of the manual there has been a recognised fall in the number of vehicles failing on large numbers of vehicle defects, however, there are still 50% of vehicles failing their test.’’
So not only are we experiencing bad service but 50% of cabs are not even up to the Council’s standards for road worthiness and that is an improvement.
The report also states that after a mystery shopper exercise at Piccadilly station taxi rank most drivers claimed not to know that their cabs where wheel chair accessible claiming not to know their own vehicles came equipped with ramps and swivel chairs.
Another interesting fact disclosed in the document was that only 30% of taxi licence applicants passed their knowledge tests and it was not unusual for drivers to need directions to popular Manchester landmarks.
Also since 2004 the renewal process for taxi licenses requires no demonstration of competence what so ever as tests were deemed ‘labour intensive’.
Overall the review recommended addressing training in customer care, conflict management, disability awareness, driver assessments, driving skills, legislative requirements, requirements of licensing conditions and the implications of failure to abide by the legal requirements and, route knowledge.
So practically every skill required by a taxi driver.
Slightly in contrast with a statement released last month by Councillor June Hitchen, Chair of Manchester City Council’s Licensing Committee regarding an NVQ qualification achieved by a mere 700 of the city’s 5000 plus taxi drivers: “We’re keen to make sure the hackney and private drivers we license in Manchester are among the best in the UK.
“People using cabs to get home from nights out in the city centre should be reassured that so many of our drivers have now received this qualification, and that they can see for themselves whether drivers have had the training.”
Next time you are unhappy about your taxi experience go against your British training and complain, simply visit this address
http://www.manchester.gov.uk/forms/form ... laint_form giving the taxi drivers name or even his registration number with a brief description of your problem.
source:
http://mancunianmatters.co.uk/content/06012004-taxi-drivers-hard-done-or-architects-their-own-misfortune
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