Taxi Driver Online

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have heard plenty on the national news about the child sexual exploitation scandal, which was most high-profile with regard to Rotherham, but also apparently afflicted 50 other towns and cities, like Rochdale, Oldham and Telford

But despite the acres of wall-to-wall coverage, you'd be hard put to hear the t-word mentioned, yet the high-profile Jay report into CSE in Rotherham said:


(As usual, the t-word is used generically, and I'd guess it was mainly about PHDs, if only because of their numerical dominance compared to HCs.)

But, more specifically, in the context of the possibility of cross-border working ever being introduced in Scotland, it's worth reading some of the stuff in this BBC report from a few months ago, in particular in relation to the cross-border king, namely Wolverhampton City Council. Which covers a city not much bigger than Aberdeen, but uses its conveyor belt licensing scheme to badge 40,000 private hire drivers, plate 30,000 private hire vehicles, and licence 400 despatch operations. (Operating the length and breadth of England And I'd guess a lot more than half of those badges and plates are working under Uber - remember that FOI request which suggested 17,000 of 27,000 Wolverhampton-plated PHVs at that time were attached to Uber...??)

But consider that in the context of the CSE stuff over the past few days generally, and this BBC report a few weeks ago. And look in particular at the highlighted part about Wolverhampton Council itself signalling that it may be rolling back the whole thing - maybe because the Labour-controlled council in the city there has been told that Starmer's Government will bring the whole thing down anyway


Fears children at risk due to taxi driver licensing

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr54pm5pj65o

Taxi drivers are buying licences in Wolverhampton to get round tough rules aimed at protecting children, a Labour MP claims.

One-in-five private hire vehicles in England, such as Ubers and minicabs, have obtained licences from Wolverhampton City Council, where they are cheaper and less stringent than in other parts of the country.

Drivers do not have to get licences from their own local authority, under a law introduced in 2015.

Rotherham MP Sarah Champion says this allows drivers in her constituency to bypass tough safeguarding rules introduced after a 2014 child sex abuse scandal.

"The frustration is that in Rotherham we have probably the best regulation in the country and we're trying to get that adopted nationally,” she told the BBC.

"We needed it because a lot of children who were being exploited were being raped in taxis or being transported from one children's home to the abuse location through a taxi.

"The problem is those regulations are only set by the licensing authority so unless we get national minimum standards then drivers can go to a different local authority with different regulations and still drive in Rotherham."

Only 1,781 of the 48,447 drivers currently licensed by Wolverhampton live in the city, with the rest operating as far afield as Newcastle, Somerset, Cardiff and Skegness.

The cost of a one year private hire licence in Rotherham is £210 and applicants must sit a child and vulnerable adults safeguarding test with a 100% pass rate. They also have to fit CCTV cameras to their vehicles, which can cost upwards of £350.

In Wolverhampton, by contrast, a one year licence costs £49.

Wolverhampton City Council insists it takes safeguarding seriously – and applicants receive training in at as part of a one-day course they have to take.

But Rotherham driver Lee Ward, a Unite the Union representative for South Yorkshire, said out-of-town licences were making taxi drivers "very frustrated".

"Unfortunately a lot of taxi drivers around here were tarred by the same brush as those who were criminals,” he told BBC News.

"These are innocent drivers who were all of a sudden hit by so many extra regulations, training, CCTV.

"They've all gone through that - with open arms and a glad heart - just to sit next to a taxi who has a license in another authority 100 miles away, with officers who never come to Rotherham or Sheffield to check their drivers.

"It just makes a mockery of what they are trying to do."

Wolverhampton City Council has generated millions from issuing licences to taxi drivers around the country but says the money has been ploughed back into reducing fees.

A City of Wolverhampton Council spokeswoman said: “The council would refute any suggestion of prioritising earning money over passenger safety."

In a recent report, the council said: “As the number of licensees increase, the likelihood of a serious issue taking place.

"There has been serious child sex exploitation scandals revealed in Rotherham and Telford, which involved taxi drivers.

"Licensed vehicles provide a ‘camouflage’ which allows vehicles to traffic vulnerable people, as well as the offer of free trips for grooming. It is the service’s goal to minimise risks by all legal means.”

Earlier this year, Louise Haigh - who is now transport secretary but at the time was in opposition - raised the issue of child safeguarding in a debate on taxi licensing, saying she had worked alongside victims and survivors of child sexual abuse in Rotherham.

She said: "Following the scandal, Rotherham council set very high standards for its taxi drivers, including installing CCTV in cabs and requiring national vocational qualification level 3 on child safeguarding."

She called on then Conservative government to bring in "robust legislation" and national minimum standards to protect women and girls.

Sarah Champion has written to Haigh asking for new laws to ensure taxis must be licensed "in the local authority area in which they routinely operate".

A Department for Transport spokesperson said: "Everyone deserves to feel safe when using a taxi or private hire vehicle and we’re aware of concerns around licensing.

"There are safeguarding procedures in place and all drivers must undergo enhanced DBS checks, but we are carefully considering the options available to improve safety and accessibility in the sector."

MPs are due to debate the issue later on Monday.

Also consider this from the Telford enquiry which reported in 2022, and which I've read from cover to cover over the last couple of days, as well as the Jay and Casey reports


(The W-word is used 22 times in the report, and there's quite lot about cross-border co-operation and enforcement stuff, or the lack thereof. Which may in turn of course be why Wolverhampton often seems so keen to publicise its enforcement operations these days, and maybe why now a couple of years later the council there is signalling its intention to roll the whole thing back.)

Actually, even the 'Taxi Licensing and the Night-Time Economy' section of the Telford report totals 347 pages, but obviously in the days of pdf files it's easy to skim through stuff and search for specific words and phrases etc. And if anyone wants to have a look through, the taxi-specific section is only 40 pages or so, and contains some interesting stuff about badge-swapping, CCTV and tinted windows etc. And, more specifically, it gives the impression that the author of the report thinks that in terms of enforcement and compliance things often swing from one extreme to the other, which is something I often comment on on here more generally.

(But, with regard to the author's approach to tinted windows, I suspect many on here would think the author himself reverts to a slightly nit-picking and over-the-top approach - pettifogging, as it used to be called )

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... +THREE.pdf

Lastly, came across this yesterday when looking into some of the PHC overprovision stuff

It's from a Holyrood debate about the bill, and is from 2015, and it's a Labour MSP - I think Labour were largely in agreement with the SNP Government about most of the stuff that ended up in the legislation.


Of course, I don't even think Uber had even landed in Scotland at that time (According that Google AI think that's always popping up now, Uber launched in Glasgow in October 2015, and in Edinburgh a month later, thus a few month after the statement above.)

But I'm not sure if the bill even included stuff regarding "concern about whether the bill will be robust enough and future proofed enough to prevent taxi app companies from bypassing local regimes".

But, as the current Aberdeen scenario seems to have underlined, even the legislation passed in 1982 appears to be sufficiently 'robust and future-proofed' to prevent the 'bypassing of local regimes'

Was looking at the Wolverhampton licensing registers last night, and seems my figures above are way out of date.

So in terms of population and drivers:

Rotherham

Population - 266,000
Badges - 1,200

Aberdeen City

Population - 225,000
Badges - 1,100

Wolverhampton

Population - 264,000
Badges - 49,000


The numbers above may not be wholly accurate, and probably a bit out of date. But they're in the right ball park, and the disparity caused by Wolverhampton and its cross-border cars working the length and breadth of England should be obvious.

But with a head of steam building up over it all over several years now, and with the Labour government obviously set on reversing it, it'll surely end in the next few years.

And it's not just GB News with wall-to-wall coverage at the moment about the rape gangs in Rotherham, Telford etc - it's all over the UK press and media

So the confluence of the two issues - grooming gangs and cross-bordering - is surely why it will end. And why it won't happen in Scotland

(Obviously Labour are on the back foot over the CSE stuff down south, but it's Labour who are committed to ending the cross-border working. To that extent, because it's the right of politics down south who are banging on about CSE (aided by Elon Musk, obviously), then they can't really then object to reforming cross-border working, for obvious reasons. And particularly in view of the likes of the example from the Telford investigation above which slammed the whole thing, particularly with regard to varying standards and enforcement issues.)

And, of course, Wolverhampton Council itself obviously knows the writing is on the wall, hence the stuff in the other threads.

No one council (outside of London) can safely control 49,000 drivers, especially when a significant majority of them have no clue exactly where Wolverhampton is.

Wolverhampton has abused the licensing system for financial gain.

Drivers licensed by Wolverhampton have abused the licensing system for financial gain.

Operators licensed by Wolverhampton have abused the licensing system for financial gain.

None of the above gives a flying f*** about the safety of vulnerable children and young adults. If they did they would mend their ways.

Shame on the lot of them.

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IDFIMH