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Sussex wrote: roythebus wrote: If found in favour of the drivers, the same EU laws could be applied in the UK with similar economic effect. Will be shocked if the drivers win. the true story was told at the NTA conference a couple of years ago National Taxi Association
Conference Manchester 2012
Presentation (and Q & A)
By
John Ussher – President of The Irish Taxi Drivers Federation
My name is John Ussher and I am President of the Irish Taxi Drivers’ Federation based in Dublin.
I have been in the taxi business since the 60’s and what I intend to do this morning is just tell you exactly what it was like before deregulation, what is was like at the time of deregulation and what it is like since deregulation.
When I joined the business in the 1960’s we did not have the knowledge test and there was no control on the number of licences. Licences cost £3.00 each in the 60’s and one could buy 10 licences for £30.00 if he wished.
All you had to do was fill out a form if you had a full driving licence, fill out a form to say you know Dublin and they would give you a licence to drive a taxi.
So, after a couple of years in the business, a lot of taxi drivers got together and said that the way forward would be to control the numbers. So, we formed an organisation called the Irish Taxi Drivers’ Federation and we lobbied to have control introduced.
The number of taxis that existed when I started in Dublin was probably in the region of 500-600 at that time.
We continued to lobby up until 1975 when the Minister then decided to stop issuing licences everyday of the week, but he introduced a system that he would issue licences on the first 14 days of every third month. Again, we weren’t happy with that and we continued to lobby.
And in the year 1976, the Minister sent for us telling us that we would be very happy when we got to him, that he had some very good news for us and we all thought at that stage that we had got control of the licences and at the meeting with the Minister when we went in, he told us that he was not going to issue licences four times year anymore. That he was only going to issue under the first 14 days of September every year.
So, we explained to him our views on that which were, at the time, that it would be a sentence to death and they come along and tell you the good news that they are not going to kill you until September, come September it is not really very good news.
So, he said that we were the most ungrateful lot that he had ever met and ran us out of his office as quick as he could.
So, we still lobbied and protested about the fact that we did not have any control and in 1978 we eventually got control of licences and the system they used was that they would examine the service that we provided and if they felt that it was necessary they would issue a controlled number of licences each year.
The following year in 1979 they decided to issue 150 licences, and the system they used to issue the licences was a lotto. All names in a hat and we would pull them out. I was at that draw and I spoke at the time and told them that it was a disgraceful way to allocate licences and that a better system should be put in place.
What it meant, at the draw, was that the people who already had taxi vehicle licences could get a second one, and people who worked in jobs, firemen, teachers and everybody else could go into that draw and come out ahead of a taxi driver who was driving a taxi and did not own a licence.
I said we wanted a system that would favour the taxi driver, and the organisers of the draw was the Garda which is our police and they said that they were only commissioned to hold a draw and the conditions of who is eligible or not, was a matter for the Minister.
Anyway, we got them to change the system after that draw and he issued a point system, the point system would favour existing taxi drivers, anybody could apply for a licence and you went on a waiting list but you were allocated points and if you were driving a taxi, you would get more points than anybody else. So, at least we had a system, if licences were to be issued, you would have favoured taxi drivers.
We were in an awkward position because we were lobbying for a fairer system for the driver yet we did not want anymore licences but, anyway in 1979 and 1980 they introduced a points system. Now, at this stage licences had got a little bit of value and you could transfer your licence. They started off selling at £100.00 and then you went to £500.00 and then you went to £1,000.00 and before deregulation, and we are not talking Euros here, we are taking Pounds. Because the year of deregulation was the year 2000.
So, they were making, eventually, between £80,000 and £100,000 just before deregulation.
We also had a situation that if you were sick or elderly or whatever, you could rent your licence which is just a piece of paper that you owned. You could rent that for £250 a week which was the average rental fee for that.
So, there was a lot of taxi drivers who were ill and could not work and you were getting an income from the licence and it was widows of taxi drivers who were also getting an income from the licence and the people who bought the licences were mostly young people coming into the business who had remortgaged their homes and various things like that to get the money.
The Minister then transferred the authority to local councils in each area making them licensing authorities and they were to review the service in their area and decide for that area if more licences should be issued.
He also made it a condition that if you were to going to issue licences, that the licences would have to be wheelchair accessible licences.
Now, a wheelchair accessible licence in Ireland is very, very expensive. I think you can buy a London Taxi here for around £40,000 and I think we would be paying about €60,000 over there but the earning capability would not warrant that type of investment.
With Dublin local authority we had an excellent working relationship and we went through 11 years without any licences being issued. Some people had said since deregulation that we were probably victims of our own success but, after 11 years, the Minister decided to take back the responsibility and he issued licences. Which was met with resistance by taxi drives at the time. We had protests etc. and the licences that he issued were wheelchair accessible licences. I forget the amount, I think it was in the region of 150, and because we had gone 11 years without saloon cars being issued licences, we began to get a little bit of bad publicity. Particularly, at Christmas time when everybody wants a taxi, and as people would tell you to get a taxi every Christmas and they expect you to be there for the rest of the year.
So, a lot of newspapers, television were on about the lack of taxis and they devoted a few main programmes in Ireland to the lack of taxis and this resulted in the government getting a little bit nervous about the bad publicity they were getting. They handed back the authority to the local council and they kicked it into touch and the concern got to the Prime Minister eventually about the lack of taxis and he sent for us and said that he was going to set up a different system, a taxi forum and that they would examine the service and decide how many licences should and should not be issued. He was taking it away again from the local authorities.
He asked me would I sit on that taxi forum, which I did and I felt it was working well. We would review the situation, the forum was made up of all different government departments along with ourselves and the police and everybody else.
We were of the opinion that it was working well but we were still getting bad publicity. So, in 1999 the government decided we had a coalition government and the senior partner in government was the Fianna Fail government and they favoured taxi amendment, the smaller party did not have a lot of time for taxi drivers and we were aware of that.
So, in the year 1999 the government decided it had to do something. So, they sent for us again and this time it was again the Prime Minister, and he said that he was going to offer every existing licence holder in Ireland a second licence. Now at this stage, the licences were changing hands for around €45,000. So you were offered a second licence all existing licence holders to get a second licence.
So, there was a little bit of I don’t want that, I do want it, so, we had a general meeting with all taxi drivers to see whether they were in favour of accepting the second licence. It meant the fleet would have doubled but it would have been our licences that would have doubled the fleet.
There was a majority in favour of accepting the second licence, the majority was in favour as I say. But, before we could accept them, before we could get a second licence, the private hire operators decided that their constitutional rights were being denied to them, that they could not get a licence and we were being offered a second one and they initiated a High Court case where they took the Minister to court. The Minister on the day was a Minister from the junior party in government and it was our opinion that it would suit this man to lose this case. So we asked the High Court if we could be joined in the proceedings, and at a cost of a quarter of a million Euros, a quarter of a million pounds, I should say, we got the ex-Attorney General to represent us in the case and the case went ahead and unfortunately, we lost the case and the private hire operators, who had said their constitutional rights were being denied, won the case. So we had lost the case.
We left there very upset that we were not getting our second licence, there was no mention of deregulation whatsoever in the Court. We went and had a meeting with the Minister a week or so after the Court case and we asked him to appeal it at the Supreme Court. He refused to do so.
We all knew, as I say to you, he was never in favour, it suited him to lose the court case.
After that meeting, he sent for us again.
He asked us to meet him in his office at 8:00 o’clock in the evening which is a very unusual time to have a meeting.
We went to the meeting at 8 o’clock. Going into that meeting, our licences were worth about €100,000 or 80,000 Irish each, when leaving that meeting our licences were worth 6,000. Everyone of us had lost 93,700 in that hour. The value of our licences going into that meeting was 370 million and coming out they were worth 23 million.
He then informed us that he had legal advice from his legal team that as a result of the court case he would have to deregulate and I told him that we had the ex Attorney General’s advice, and we had it with us which was in writing, that he did not have to deregulate, and asked him to show us his advice and we would show him ours.
We put our advice in an envelope on the table. I said, show us yours where you were told you would have to deregulate. He never did, he never showed us, he refused to show us, to this day we do not know if he ever got legal advice to that effect but, he made it clear to us it was not him it was the Courts that had decided deregulation had to come and that was fine until the next election. In his pre-election manifesto, he never mentioned the Courts he stuck his chest out and said he deregulated the taxis, which we knew all along.
Now the members’ reaction, you must remember the meeting took place at 8 o’clock at night. He had already issued a press release to put an embargo on it, until a certain time the next day. So, the members going to bed that night all felt they had £100,000 licence in the driveway. Only to wake up and find it is worth £6,000.
The reaction (of members) on the day of the announcement when they got up it was on every news bulletin that was there and it was in every newspaper. So, the drivers themselves started to assemble at taxi ranks and discuss the situation and we as a committee, knew we needed a very, very large venue because we knew everyone would turn up to a meeting.
We went looking for a room for a meeting – not a room I should say but a venue which ended up being the O2 which is a huge arena. While we were out looking at venues, we heard a news bulletin that taxi drivers had blocked the main road to Belfast. They had blocked the main road to Dublin Airport which would be the same road, they blocked up Canon Street in Dublin and they were blocking all different locations.
I would have been with them to be perfectly honest with you because we had all lost a considerable amount of money. We did not like losing it and we didn’t like the way we lost it. But anyway we got the O2 for a meeting and it was the best attended meeting we ever had and at the meeting the taxi drivers decided to withdraw the service with immediate affect. So therefore we had a withdrawal, we don’t call it a strike because we are all self-employed, but we had a withdrawal of the taxi service and forced to apply for the new licences which started to be issued but the taxi drivers who had sold licences for £80,000, they were forced in to get them and they were followed by soldiers, firemen, teachers, etc, and some professional people even bought licences to use the bus lanes and I think one high profile man owns an airline and still as far as I know has the licence today.
While we were on strike, taxi new licences were being issued and they were going out to work, even though we were out on strike they went out to work. We continued to protest for about six weeks. After that time there was a huge amount of taxi licences had been issued and you must remember there was no standards introduced it was just deregulation. So you could go and buy a car for £500, put a plate on it and go to work. We had no standards, it was not necessary to have a wheelchair they licensed anything and everything. The meter fitters could not handle it, they had to get meter fitters down from Northern Ireland, they were turning out licences that quick.
So, after six weeks we had a meeting and the drivers decided, a lot of them, as I say, had mortgaged homes to buy the licences, so they would have to go back to work and let us continue to negotiate to see what we could get.
We were still negotiating but with very little affect. After about three years, we finally got the Minister to agree to pay us some money. What he did was he decided that if we could prove we suffered as a result of deregulation, suffering meant that if your income tax would show that you had a drop income since the time of deregulation, he would accept that you have lost money. So what he did was he set up a hardship panel as he called it. He would not call it compensation, he called it a hardship payment and they would recommend who should get paid and how much they should get.
So, he set up this panel and they met in several locations and they kept telling us that there was very little money around. But, anyway they agreed the recommendation was that each taxi driver who was aged over 50 years of age at the time of deregulation should receive a hardship payment of €13,000 each. Now, what that meant in effect was if you are over 50 you are getting 13,000 whether you are two years in the business or 20 years in the business, you are getting 13,000. But what it didn’t do to the drivers. So we had drivers who were under 50, driving a taxi for 20 years getting nothing and we had men in the business who were only in it 2 years getting 13,000. Very unfair but we decided we would take the 13,000 for the over 50’s which we did and when everybody had received their 13,000 we then went to the Equality Tribunal and we claimed that our members had been discriminated against on age. It took a lot of time to get into the Equality Tribunal and when the first of the cases went in I was asked by taxi drivers to represent them.
I went into arbitration with the Minister’s team and the discrimination body and I won the case. The Minister then appealed that to a full hearing of the Equality Tribunal and again, I won the case and the Minister then appealed it to the Circuit Court and again, I did not represent it, not that that would have made a difference. We had a legal team in the Circuit Court and lost the case. So it meant that the drivers under 50 did not get the 13,000 although we all got it because we were over 50. Completely unfair.
We then spoke to a firm of solicitors, who had then put a high profile case where the soldiers in the army had sued the government for deafness because they hadn’t got earmuffs when they were on the practice range and they won the case.
So, this was about 2003/2004 this firm of solicitors came on board and they said they would do it on a no win no fee basis. They would take on the Minister and look for compensation for us.
Now, they did look for €300 off every taxi driver to pay the barristers involved, because we are looking at a case that is going to cost in excess of one million here. But that case has not been heard and it is not something that I can discuss because, there is a lot of confidential stuff in there, but it is due to be heard in June of next year, June 2013 where we will have the government in court for compensation as a result of deregulation.
Now, it has taken us that long to get to court because we have got no co-operation anywhere along the way. As I said to you, every local authority had been a licensing authority and when our legal team went to them for information, they would not release it. We had to keep going to court to get them to release the information and the judges had to order them to release it.
So, it has taken us this long, but believe you me we will give them a fight in court in June of next year so that case is ongoing and will be heard, the date is set the legal teams are picked and we are ready to do battle come June.
Now, the next thing the Minister did was he kicked it into touch and he introduced us to a taxi regulator. He said he was going to introduce a Taxi Regulator which means we would be dealing with the taxi regulator in future and not with the Minister.
He then set up an Advisory Council who would advise the Minister until such time as the Regulator was appointed and then the same committee would advise the Taxi Regulator and again, he asked me would I sit on the Advisory Council. Which I did and sat on it for three years. What he did was he said that the Taxi Regulator, when making decisions, would have to consult with the Council, but would not have to take our advice which did not make sense to me. It would be like saying to you I am going to buy a shirt, what size do you take? And you say I take a 16, I think I should go and get you a size 20.
It just did not make sense that you would have to take the advice, you had to seek it, but you did not have to take it.
And this fine group of people who got together as the Taxi Advisory Council the majority of them knew nothing about the taxi business and the brief was to make recommendations on how to improve the service to the public and how to make things better for the taxi driver. And some of the decisions, the first decision they made which horrified me was, we were exempt from seatbelts and they recommended that we should have to wear seatbelts. I could not see who was going to benefit from that decision. Then they went onto recommend removing the Airport pick up charge which we had, removing luggage charge, and it just got after three years I could take no more and I had to walk away.
Our regulations as a result of that Committee, we have to have pen and paper, we have to have a torah we have to have first aid kit. They introduced all these things and of course the Minister and the Regulator were happy to take onboard anything that suited them and what did not suit them, they did not do.
Most of the changes were met with protest with taxi drivers.
In 2010 the system changed again. We had in Dublin and probably all over Ireland but, certainly in Dublin, an oversupply of taxis.
You could go into Dublin on any night of the week and you would think there was a taxi strike or a taxi protest. We all have a standard roof sign and all you could see was roof signs everywhere, the whole of Dublin city was lit up like neon lights with taxi signs. There was illegal ranks everywhere you could look. On one street which has about a half dozen night clubs, it was completely blocked on regular locations and the police had to divert traffic away from the street, there were too many taxis in it.
You could come out of a pub, any pub in suburban Dublin, and find taxis sitting outside. Any restaurant, and if you stood on the street long enough, someone would pull up and ask you did you want a taxi. It just became very, very difficult for the drivers to meet their financial commitments. The business really became very, very bad.
So, what they did in June 2010 was they decided to stop issuing licences, but it was too late. They said they would continue to issue wheelchair accessible licences but there is no demand for them, because the business is not there. You could not possibly spend 60,000 on a car and expect to make money plus, because of deregulation the banks are reluctant to lend to taxi men, they are reluctant to give you mortgages, loans for cars etc. Things are at an all time low in our business over there.
Again we were still selling our taxi licences and still are today, and the way we sell them is through newspaper advertisements and, in some cases they have gone for €800, these were licences that were worth €100,000. I asked the Minister, on the last occasion that I met him, would he buy back licences seeing as he now agrees there are too many licences. Will he buy them back and let people leave the business with dignity instead of trying to sell them in newspapers.
He said that he was listening to what I was saying and he would think about it. He thought about it alright and from the 1st of January next year, you can’t sell you licence, but he is not buying it back you can put it in the bin. If you get out you are gone and you get nothing and you can’t sell it.
So, that leaves the likes of me who has 50 years in the business I can just open the bin and put my licence there. That comes in on the 1st of January next year. And again we are going to a situation, I know some parts of England already have it, he is introducing a system that we can’t have cars over 9 years of age from January of next year. He has also introduced branding for taxis from June next year.
We have standards in place. Since 2010 anybody buying a licence from that day to date would have had to have a car less then 3 year old to buy the licence and we have a driver theory, we have a driver test for a PSV which is done like “who just wants to be a millionaire”, you are asked four questions and you get the answers right and that has something like a 70% failure rate. So, standards have come far too late into the business, they should have been there in the first place they have been introduced and I think it is a firm in Manchester who have got the contract if I am not mistaken, Prometric, they also do the driver theory test in Ireland.
Now, I have spoken to politicians who think that deregulation worked and when you sit down and you talk to them for a little while they realise that it didn’t and that makes you believe that they don’t really care, nobody cares. What they did was the Government on the day deregulated our business, made a mess of it and walked away and today every taxi driver in Ireland is paying the price for their inefficiency.
I had a Minister of Transport who said in a speech he made in Dail that the taxi business is a jungle-like atmosphere that existed in the taxi business. What he did not say was that he and his colleagues created that atmosphere but I was very quick to tell him, through the media, exactly whose fault that was.
Now, one thing this business needs, no matter whether you be in Ireland or whether you be in England. To take your business, and it would apply to most businesses, to bring your business in a forward direction, you need investment. To get investment you need stability. Deregulation creates instability and nothing else, only instability and when I talk to politicians and people who tell me that deregulation worked in Ireland, I say go up and explain that to the families of the taxi drivers who took their own life as a result of deregulation. Tell their families it worked because it didn’t work and if I was asked to describe deregulation in one word, the word I would use would be disaster.
We all have one thing in common and that is that we all drive taxis whether you be in Ireland whether you be in England, and I honestly hope that we don’t get two things in common, I hope we don’t end up with deregulation over here and that you don’t end up with deregulation. Because if we do end up with two things in common, I think down the road we would end up with three things in common. We would all be pulling rickshaws because we won’t be able to afford cars and that is just a fact of life.
I wish you well in your fight and I hope deregulation doesn’t happen here and thank you for listening to me and that is about the size of what has happened to us in Ireland.
[Applause]
_________________
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin
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