gone are the £300 days
(the £300 a day is mentioned in the comments on the following link,the main article is quoted below)
http://philtheone.com/2012/10/grim-future-for-blackpool-taxi-drivers/Quote:
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Grim future for Blackpool taxi drivers
Posted by Philtheone at 11:49 am Uncategorized.
Oct 262012
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THE COMPANY that created the famous (but not really ‘iconic’ to Blackpool as the Gasjet suggests) bomber taxi has gone into administration. A shame, but I am sure someone will mop it up and get it running again. A more sinister harbinger is approaching for local taxi drivers though.
At the moment there are 256 hackney carriage licenses in Blackpool. There are no limits on private hire vehicle licenses: currently there are approximately 450 of these in circulation, with 828 licensed drivers. With the 699 licensed hackney drivers, taxi drivers make up about 1.1 percent of Blackpool’s population.
A hackney license allows a taxi to queue on ranks and pick up passengers from the street; this is as opposed to a private hire taxi that must be pre-booked. The hackney licenses have no value in themselves but they are traded for around £35,000 as they are limited in number and the council does not regularly issue more: buying a license is like buying a business.
In July 2011, the coalition government asked the Law Commission to do a review of the laws relating to taxis and private hire vehicles. This review will evolve into a draft Bill which will be put to parliament in November 2013. The most important and potentially most damaging proposition as part of this review is that local councils will no longer be able to limit the number of taxi licenses.
This is not a new concept; the Office of Fair Trading tried to pressure local authorities into deregulation around 10 years ago, and some authorities capitulated with mixed results. Should it go ahead in Blackpool, a flood of new taxis will appear on the roads, squeezing out ‘professional’ full-time taxi drivers.
From observation rather than statistics, Blackpool does have rather a large number of taxis already. The council must do a survey every 3 years to evaluate whether there is any unmet demand for taxis, and the latest results reveal no unmet demand. If unmet demand is found, more licence plates can be issued. The Law Commission’s proposals for deregulating the industry such that anyone can get a license and slap it on any old vehicle is going to have damaging effects which may in the long run see taxi numbers reduce, potentially creating demand for taxis that the council will no longer have power to influence.
What?
Many of the post-deregulation taxis will be part time; people who slap plates on their family saloon at the weekend to cash in on busy periods. This will affect the viability of the professional driver as the busy periods – during which a Blackpool driver can take £300 per day – will become less lucrative. Flooding the market with part time vehicles is only going to push out the current hackney cabs that are on the road 24 hours a day. Part time drivers will only come out to play when it’s busy and if the numbers of professional drivers reduce, it means during quiet periods there will be even less taxi capacity than there is now.
If this happens, the council will be powerless to do anything because the role of the full-time professional taxi driver will have been eroded by the volumes of part time cars soaking up business like Spongebob Squarepants. Whilst at the moment a hackney license is quite desirable, in the scenario just described nobody would want one.
Full time taxi drivers need to earn a living in order to reinvest in their industry. The rules in Blackpool at the moment are quite loose; taxis of any age can operate as long as they are in good condition. The previous Conservative council wanted to change this but met fierce opposition from cab owners. A new bomber taxi costs in the region of £30,000, so if the profitability of full time driving was not enough, there would be nothing to reinvest in new vehicles. Drivers would be more likely to ditch their bomber and run their family saloon instead.
However, any influx of part-time drivers in their Mondeos or Passats are unlikely to be able to transport passengers with wheelchairs, so deregulation could also reduce the quality of the overall taxi service. At the moment, 180 of the hackney carriages licensed in Blackpool are wheelchair compatible, but this could be impacted if these drivers become disillusioned. Taxi user and disability champion Stephen Brookes MBE should be all over this one.
There is a safety element, too. Whilst I am sure any license applicant would be vetted by an authority’s Public Protection Committee, deregulation opens the door to rogue drivers who just drive a normal car of any type, size and colour, don’t have a radio firm’s livery and are intent on luring drunken females into their vehicle and giving them a Jim’ll Fix It badge. There are also concerns that fares could be set ad-hoc, so I could be driving down the Promenade and decide I wanted to be a taxi, then flag down some old dear, take her to Cleveleys and rip her off with the fare.
The Unite union are against the proposals to deregulate, citing much of the above as their basis. Incidentally, the Transport Select Committee of MPs recommended against these proposals too, but the government have simply ignored this.
The current owners of hackney license plates in Blackpool have invested a lot of money into them which they would potentially hope to recover if they were to exit the taxi trade or retire. Following deregulation, the value of plates will drop to zero and owners will lose their investment.
There is a 253-page consultation document from the Law Commission published on the Blackpool Council website as well as a summary of the proposals. The consultation is hard going but the summary is probably worth a look.
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