Taxi Driver Online

I remember looking at the registers the last time you mentioned them

Very messy, and don't really see how it's possible to extract any reliable figures from that stuff...

Would be interesting to know how precisely they compile the stats

Didn't the council, during covid, extend licenses as drivers couldn't access council offices, and council officers didn't want to leave their homes?

Thus, the driver drop you noticed might not only be the drivers that were licensed in 2019 that didn't renew, but also the drivers that were licensed in 2017 and 2018 that didn't relicense, and the cut-off time to relicense was those three months when the council started processing licenses.

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Sussex, I can't recall what they did in Glasgow for lockdown, precisely, and can't be bothered looking back. (Can't even remember what happened in Fife, except that when I renewed they gave us an extra three months on the new licences . But other than that it didn't make any difference to my licences, although maybe that was because my renewals didn't come up until it was all over, effectively. And of course in Scotland as long as you apply before the expiry date, licences are still extant until up to nine months after expiry, or until the council has processed it. In fact, I'm pretty sure the legislation was amended during lockdown such that councils were allowed up to 12 months to process renewals, so in effect this gave councils a whole year to process renewals, and thus badges and plates could potentially be a year out of date but still renewed.)

Anyway, the reason I don't think there's any point in sweating all that is because the survey doesn't even attempt to explain any lockdown effect, other than some waffle about drivers going to do delivery jobs and the like. They even cite the LPHCA numbers

They also cite DfT figures and Scotland-wide figures, which of course are nothing like the LPHCA's, but there's no attempt to reconcile it all, nor to explain the Glasgow-specific collapse in numbers early in 2022.

But if the likes of the LPHCA's numbers mean anything then it's maybe about the number of drivers not working rather than 'left the trade' as such. And, of course, that's different from the number of extant licences.

I mean, I didn't work for weeks on end, so maybe that's the kind of thing the LPHCA mean by 'left the industry'. But as far as the licence stats are concerned, I was always a 'driver' and plateholder as far as the official stats were concerned - the stats relied on by the Glasgow survey.

And it looks like they've fallen into the usual trap with their Scotland-wide figures. Which seem to include the likes of Dundee, so to that extent the badge numbers and driver ratios are all bollocks. They assume a taxi badge holder in Dundee is driving a taxi, while there's a good chance he may well be driving a PHC

The clue is in the stats - in 2024, for example, the Scottish Transport Statistics show 185 PH cars in Dundee, but only 22 PH badges

Do the Glasgow surveyors really think there are 163 idle PHCs in Dundee?

So their consultation included Unite and a couple of taxi associations. Not even any kind of PH representation group, by the looks of it

Then there's a big section on what they call 'Operator Consultation', including this:


Three 'primary' responses - oh my sides

But again there's the operator misrepresentation - they're obviously talking about booking offices rather than operators/plateholders - presumably the respondent representing 50% of the taxi fleet is Glasgow Taxis Limited (there can't be two respondents representing 50% of the taxi fleet; in fact, I thought GTL represented a good bit more than 50% by itself).

So that means the other two respondents represented a total of 18% of the PH fleet, while they would have preferred a higher figure

But which surely underlines the level of capture here - they'd prefer to deal with as small a number of players representing as much of the trade as possible, basically

And, of course, while the whole thing is all about limiting plate numbers, plateholders haven't been consulted at all, or at least not directly - only through the circuits, basically (of course, there will be an overlap between plateholders and circuits, but presumably there must be at least 1,000+ plateholders altogether )