Taxi Driver Online

Campaign claims 45% of Glasgow’s black cabs will be forced off the road by LEZ

https://www.glasgowworld.com/news/campa ... ez-4346391

Glasgow’s LEZ scheme will lead to more than 600 black cabs – around 45 per cent those in service – being forced off the road next summer.

Glasgow City Council announced in late-2022 that extra time would be given to cabbies to meet the LEZ standards, with grants available for retrofitting and a new deadline of 1 June 2024 issued.

However, it has emerged that less than one cab per week is being retrofitted due to a shortage of components and labour.

In details obtained through a Freedom of Information request, it is believed 118 vehicles are awaiting retrofitting – a number that would take more than two years to meet at current rates. Some cab drivers have been forced to send their vehicles to Chester for work to be performed – with a Glasgow-based option for retrofitting yet to be fully up and running.

Around a further 500 of Glasgow’s 1383 hackney cabs also have an exemption which will run out by the end of May. Some of those affected have been unable to access retrofit grant funding, whilst the market for new and used cabs has been ‘dysfunctional’ since the pandemic.

Unite Glasgow (Hackney) Taxi Branch secretary Steven Grant, warned that LEZ was creating an existential crisis for black cabs in the city.

Mr Grant said: “Despite the council granting a one-year exemption for retrofitting cabs, it is clear that the LEZ is still going to force hundreds of cabs off the road by June next year.

“There is grave concern in the trade about the deadline given the lack of components and expertise available to carry out retrofitting. Part of the problem throughout this debacle is that Glasgow City Council has no idea of the actual logistics facing taxi drivers. Throughout this process, the council has been making decisions and issuing deadlines about our livelihoods without accurate information, decimating the sector in the process.

“Even if a taxi driver has been awarded a grant to carry out retrofitting, but has not been able to secure a slot to carry out the work by June 2024, council officials have said they won’t be able to operate. That’s simply wrong.”

Approximately 40 black cab licences have already been handed back to Glasgow City Council since the LEZ began - despite a licence holding a goodwill value of more than £30,000 – with drivers opting to cease trading rather than sell a non-compliant vehicle onto a new owner.

Mr Grant added: “The average age of Glasgow black cab drivers is 57 years old. If retrofitting your vehicle is not an option, it is a choice between sourcing an alternative vehicle or retirement.

“A brand new cab would cost around £75,000 which is not feasible if you are approaching the end of your career in the trade. In terms of used taxis, there are simply none available, with the UK market dysfunctional since the pandemic.

“The Scottish Government issued guidance in May which stated that local authorities should be doing all they can to encourage greater availability of taxis onto our roads – particularly to help disabled passengers for whom cabs are a lifeline. Instead, the biggest council in the country is doing all they can to put a huge swathe of our iconic taxis out of business.”

Those warnings were echoed by Michael Smith, a black cab driver in Glasgow.

Mr Smith said the issues faced by black cab drivers were exacerbating the problem of private hire ‘pirating’ – a practice where private hire vehicles registered outside of Glasgow, with no checks undertaken on drivers by Glasgow City Council, are operating almost exclusively within the city with no recourse by council officials.

Michael added: “Since Covid, pirating has become more of a Glasgow pandemic than the actual virus.

“The problem is coming from out of town with drivers who often cannot pass the checks required in Glasgow but get a licence from a neighbouring authority and sit and work in Glasgow. They are dispatched work from a Glasgow booking office despite that being against the rules. It makes a mockery of a system put in place by former Justice Secretary Kenny McAskill to outlaw criminality in the trade.

“As more black cabs are forced off the road by hair-brained council rules, pirating private hires will attempt to fill the void for people desperate to get home, especially at night. That presents a real risk to safety, especially to vulnerable people and those traveling on their own. Glasgow City Council should be doing more to tackle this real and present danger than continually placing pressure on the city’s black cab drivers.”

William Paton, a campaigner who is leading the LEZ Fight Back campaign, said: “This is further evidence that Glasgow City Council just does not listen. We have seen the headlines about the terrible issues faced by those trying to get home from the city centre at night and now we’re sent to lose almost half the black cabs currently on the road – that’s without mentioning the devastating impact it will have on the livelihoods of the cabbies themselves. It is beyond parody what the council is doing.”

A council spokeswoman said: “Glasgow’s LEZ is a crucial public health measure that aims to tackle the harmful air pollution that has blighted the city centre for decades - creating and exacerbating people's health conditions and the city's health inequalities, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable.

“Plans to extend a LEZ to all vehicle types was democratically agreed in 2018 and since then the council has undertaken an extensive programme of communications and engagement to raise awareness of the scheme, its timescale for introduction and the availability of funding to ease compliance.

“The LEZ retrofit fund has been available to eligible taxi operators since 2019. In the same year we amended licensing conditions to allow for a new license or change of vehicle to be applied to taxis more than five years old. This was a direct intervention ahead of the LEZ coming into force to increase the options available to operators of vehicles unsuitable by reason of age for retrofit.”

A Transport Scotland spokesman said: “Our LEZ Support Fund has been providing grant funding for taxi retrofits since 2019. Since it opened, over 300 taxis have taken up funding for retrofitting. The retrofit funding here in Scotland offers significantly more funding per vehicle than equivalent grant funds available elsewhere in the UK.

“Over £10 million has previously been provided through the LEZ Support Fund and a further £5m has been allocated to the LEZ Support Fund for 2023/24.”

Goodwill, eh? That's certainly one way of putting it

But I somehow doubt £30k is the current HC plate value in Glasgow. I'd heard it was £zero, but even if it's not, I'd guess it's just a fraction of £30k

Not what we'd normally understand by 'pirating', and I suspect he's conflating the cross-border issue with illegal plying for hire, although the latter isn't properly explained in the article.

No doubt both are issues, but only the cross-border element is outlined properly in the article.


Of course, as has been stated on here on numerous occasions, cross-border working England-style isn't possible in Scotland, because cars can't routinely work in other local authority areas, except for specific jobs going across council boundaries.

Not sure to what extent the complaints here are credible, but Greater Glasgow is a huge urban area with the city council surrounded by numerous local authorities, so would hardly be a surprise if there are significant breaches of the cross-border rules.

This story is in quite a few online news outlets, so Unite Glasgow have done a good job of getting the message out.

And no doubt about who the Telegraph are blaming for it all with their headline



SNP’s Lez will force ‘nearly half of Glasgow’s black cabs off the road’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/0 ... -off-road/

Transport union attacks 'floundering' green scheme and says city council ‘has no idea of the expense’ facing more than 600 taxi drivers

I wonder if most of the 500 just applied for the exemption but never intended to actual retrofit their HC?

As I said a few months ago, to get the extra year's exemption you had to show some intention to retrofit before the new deadline in mid-2024. So I'd guess some might have applied for the exemption to get an extra year out of the cab, but with no intention of ever actually going ahead with the retrofit. Of course, that wasn't what the council will have intended by offering the extra year, but it's not clear how stringently they applied the criteria for granting an extension.

I very much doubt that is the case.

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IDFIMH

Well in all fairness the Glasgow HC trade are saying they can't meet the requirements of the council, so it's a bit rich moaning about others that also can't.

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IDFIMH

Not sure if this was a HC, but if it was it's one less to be converted.

https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/sco ... ble-scene/

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IDFIMH

Sussex, I'd guess the £30k plate value is historical, rather than reflecting the current market.

Another news source doesn't use the word 'goodwill', but it's largely another rehash of the stuff above, but also makes it sound like it's a current value. I'd bet my plate that it doesn't reflect current valuations


https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/ ... e-31005309

I know that 5 years ago it would cost me in excess of £50,000 for a B&H saloon HC plate.

Now I could buy one for about £15,000. Even less for a WAV plate that needs replacing soon.

All down, IMO, to Uber.

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IDFIMH

Interesting, and perhaps instructive as regards plate values, is the long term decline in HC *badge* numbers in Glasgow.

Spent [far too long] collating the figures last night. I also done a graph

Couldn't quite get the graph to show properly (it's one of these automatic ones using a spreadsheet) but will have another go later tonight, but will post it tomorrow anyway, because it's more a case of crossing the Is and dotting the Ts rather than the graph being fundamentally wrong

It's fascinating

It'll be more interesting to see how you are going to embed a spreadsheet graph into a forum post

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

Indeed, Edders. One option is to host the spreadsheet on Google drive, or whatever, and just include a link to it on here.

However, my intention was always just to make a screengrab of the graph, upload it to Imgur, and show it as a graphic on here

It's quite a straightforward graph, so showing it as an image is the most obvious option. Anyway, it's done and dusted, so will do the necessary later tonight sometime. Or more probably sometime in the morning...

Graph could maybe be a bit bigger, but got fed up fannying about with what's quite a straightforward chart

It was mainly to show the long term decline in black cab badge numbers, which it shows well enough. But which was maybe meant to demonstrate that plates won't be worth £30k at the current time, or at least it's maybe some evidence in that regard.

Anyway, the graph shows that, because of the HC cap, plate numbers have been static since 2008, or at least numbers have generally been around the 1,420 mark, until 2022 at least, and even then the drop in numbers isn't significant, and hardly shows on a graph of this scale.

(Numbers were also pretty static for years before the figures shown, but could only find concrete figures for the years since 2008, and of course the very latest figures aren't available, and presumably there will be a significant decline in 2023, and 2024 in particular once LEZ is properly implemented.)

The numbers are from the Scottish Transport Statistics, and not sure how accurate they are, or precisely when they relate to (they're just labelled for the whole year, rather than presumably at a specific point during the year). So, in particular, the lockdown drop in badges may be difficult to pin down in terms of time specifics because of any lag with dormant badges etc, which might be shown as active in the figures, while not actually being used. Badges and plates in Glasgow seem to be three-year only as well, so obviously even if they're dormant and unused because of lockdown, they'd take a couple of years to drop out of the official figures, which is maybe why the stats seem to lag lockdown by a year or two.

But the figures are probably adequately accurate to show the long-term trends, and so the trend in HC badges from a peak of 3,139 in 2009 to 2,100 or so just as lockdown bites is shown well enough.

And the 2022 figure of 1,743 represents a huge decline in HC badges from the 2009 peak, but obviously this includes lockdown, but whether there's been a significant recovery in numbers or not isn't clear, and clearly LEZ will be a factor in that.

Obviously the other significant trend shown by the graph is the long-term increase in PH plates and badges, and presumably the substantial upward trend from 2015 or so is maybe because of Uber in particular, and also due to apps more generally

The lockdown collapse in PH badge numbers is well shown by the graph. Can't be bothered working out the actual percentages, but what's also maybe evident from the graph is that PH *plate* numbers didn't collapse to the same extent as PH *badges*.

That may be because of the cap in PH plate numbers which was introduced just before lockdown in early 2020, thus maybe fleets and the like decided to keep the cars on the road even if they couldn't get drivers because of lockdown, in anticipation that no new PH plates would be issued in future, while PH badge numbers would recover (presumably they have, but that won't show through until the 2023 figures and later. Of course, LEZ won't have the same impact on the PH side because the cars were generally a lot newer, and not nearly as expensive to upgrade to become LEZ-compliant).

For what it's worth, these are the raw numbers. When HC badge numbers peaked in 2009, there were 2.2 drivers per HC. By 2022 that had reduced to 1.2 drivers per HC

Of course, the latter number will be lockdown-influenced, but it's not clear to what extent they've recovered, and the impending LEZ will no doubt be influential in that regard.

But even by 2020, drivers per HC had reduced from 2.2 per car to 1.6