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The Guardian (London)
February 10, 2007 Saturday
LENGTH: 1281 words
HEADLINE: Work: A fare fight: Mat Snow climbs into the back seat to find the livelihood of cabbies is under threat from bureaucracy, racism ... and the colour pink
Not so long ago you knew where you were with the British cabbie. If he (and it was almost always a man) drove a black cab, he was a virtuoso of the U-turn - except in his political views, usually those of the self-employed small-businessman blue in tooth and claw.
Then there were minicab drivers, often bearing a marked resemblance to Van Morrison, who were only driving while the pieces of a million-pound Plan A - importing cut-price jeans from Asia, inventing a boardgame, owning a bar - fell into place.
But it's all very different now. In Warrington, for example, Andrea Winders and Tina Dutton run a women-only taxi service called Pink Ladies and a fleet of 14 candyfloss-coloured Renault Kangoos with full-blush interiors and steering-wheels. These taxi drivers include nurses and dancers topping up their income and the company tithes a tenth of its profits to breast cancer research.
Winders and Dutton had spotted a business opportunity in women's widespread anxiety that an evening on the lash might end in disaster at the hands of an illegal "tout" cabbie. "We believed our main customer would be young girls out at night, but we were so wrong," explains Winders, listing the school, shopping, doctors, hospital, meetings, station, airport, bingo and only lastly the party runs that actually bring home the bacon.
Busy setting up franchises in cities all over the UK - Edinburgh next - they tap into a labour market of women drivers, often single mothers, who want flexible hours and personal safety at work that comes with membership only customers and cash-free payment systems.
Recruiting only women behind the wheel is allowed under a clause in the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, but operating within the law remains Pink Ladies' biggest problem. They are not technically a taxi company, and operate under a section of the 1976 Local Government Act. But, explains Winders, the government abolished this section last October as an addition to the road safety bill.
The change is due to come into force later this year, and Pink Ladies is locked in talks with the Department for Transport in search of a solution that would permit its soon-to-be anomalous existence. Most likely Pink Ladies will also have to negotiate separately with each local licensing authority, each with a different set of requirements and regulations. Some, Winders sniffs, won't even allow the colour pink.
Who could fail to wish Pink Ladies well? Well, Steve Wright for one. "All this ladies' stuff, Pink Ladies and the rest, really gets up my nose," snorts the chairman of the Licensed Private Hire Car Association.
"It's just not right. All our drivers have to be criminal-record checked. We're not just interested in the safety of women, we're interested in the safety of everybody. My son is far likelier to be assaulted than my daughters are. When I ran a private hire operation, in 30 years I had five complaints about drivers. Politically correct things are not necessarily what they seem."
Wright claims the very existence of operations like Pink Ladies fosters a suspicion that licensed minicab drivers, if they're men, are potentially as much of a menace to women as the unlicensed and illegal touts.
But the biggest danger to taxi and minicab drivers now is over-supply. Under EU competition law, local authorities have had to end their cap on the number of licences they issue.
Wright reckons there are up to 40,000 licensed private hire drivers in the London area, far outnumbering black cabs. Mohammed Amjad, of the Birmingham Private Hire Association, calculates there are 5,000 private hire drivers in his area. George Simpson, one of two competing minicab drivers in Drumnadrochit on the Great Glen Way, says Inverness now supports 400 private hire drivers, quadruple the number before the law came into force.
The only factors holding back even greater growth are the falling returns and rising overheads. Imran (who doesn't want to reveal his full name) has been driving for a living in Birmingham for five years.
Among the charges he has to pay are: MOT (£57); driver's test £48; council car check £168; Criminal Records Bureau check £38; badge from local authority (£168 pa); medical (£53); disability (£50); and verbal awareness courses (£50).
He has to drive a four-door saloon no more than eight years old - in his case a Toyota Carina - which must be fully insured to carry passengers for hire. And he pays £80 a week to a private hire operator to rent the equipment by which he gets bookings.
"You can't pick people up off the street, nor use a mobile phone or give out your number to passengers. When drivers get unhappy at the rent, they band together and hand in their radios until the operator brings the rent down. Times are getting hard because there are a lot more drivers now, and I need to do nine, 10 hours a day, five and sometimes six days a week, to make a living. You don't see much of your family.
"Here in Birmingham I'd say 95% of private hire drivers are Asian, and I've noticed Somalians getting into the trade now. I work in an area where the clients are clean and respectable, but I've had lads who don't want to pay the full fare and get aggressive, a bit of verbal and sometimes racist abuse. I've heard of drivers being attacked with a knife, and a gun put to the head for 50 quid and their phone. And we're not allowed protection; even your steering lock has to be carried in the boot."
Security was the issue that prompted the foundation of the West Belfast Taxi Association. Stephen Long, general manager and a former driver explains: "We're a community transport service, unique to the British Isles. In the early 70s with the Troubles, buses were burned or used as barricades, so there was no public transport. Also, the religion of taxi drivers was very easily identified depending on their area; people would go to pick up a fare and be faced by a gunman.
"We lost eight of our own association members that way. People used their own cars to provide transport in and out of the city centre, then in the mid 70s the first of our London-type black taxis came on the road.
"Today, we have 227 self-employed members who all own outright and drive type-approved vehicles: the London-type Hackney Carriage taxis. We're a cooperative and shareholders of the property we own in the city centre. We're not the biggest taxi company in Belfast but we are the biggest community transport service in Europe."
The West Belfast Taxi Association isn't the only success story, however. George Simpson, of Drumnadrochit, prospers in what is seasonal work by having his finger in several local transport pies. His sole bad moment came when a passenger did a runner - and since he'd collected him from Inverness prison, he had little choice but to laugh about it.
Likewise, London black cab driver Tony Norris has also encountered a single instance of trouble in 20 years when he was attacked by a motorist he'd tooted in Shaftesbury Avenue for cutting inside while he was executing a U-turn.
"Cabbing has always been kind to me," he says. "Until my early thirties I was in the building trade and I saw that my father, who was a cab driver, didn't have to chase people for money. But if London taxi drivers were restricted to a 48-hour week, it would be extremely difficult to meet the costs.
"A taxi costs £36,000, which on average in London will do at least 30,000 miles a year and you could expect to keep it for 12 years. Today, all London taxis have to have a wheelchair facility, electronic receipt printers, and now there are rules on exhaust emissions. To cover these costs, a driver may have to work seven full days a week and unsociable hours too. That's our choice."
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