Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Safeguarding and Road Safety) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-10
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Mark Clarkson (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici), and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) as well as the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) who brought this Bill’s spiritual predecessor to the House. I share his frustration this occasion did not happen sooner. I am a former member of the licensing authority on Salford City Council, and we often benefited from the voluntary sharing of information. I particularly pay tribute to the council chair, a great Labour councillor called John Warmisham, with whom, despite our varied politics, I usually found myself in full agreement—that picks up on the point made earlier, that this issue should be supported across the House At its heart, this Bill is about confidence. It is about enabling people to feel confident when getting into a private hire cab, and about them knowing that the person who has that licence is a fit and proper person and has not somehow gamed the system. I alluded earlier to the fact that just over the border into Rossendale a slightly different standard was applied to the distribution of taxi licences, and someone would be more likely to find a Rossendale-licensed cab in my Rochdale-based constituency than they would one from our own licensing authority. The Bill is also about confidence for taxi drivers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington pointed out Currently, the bad acts of one driver can impact on others—I think of a particularly cogent example in Rochdale. We are all aware of the heart-breaking events of the Rochdale grooming scandal, and many of the people involved in that were taxi drivers. We then had a situation where certain taxi providers in Rochdale were offering white drivers to people as a matter of confidence. That is a shameful situation in which to find ourselves. It besmirches the reputation of honest ethnic minority drivers—obviously it is a very diverse community—and it led to difficulties in an already tense situation in a very diverse town. It also created a situation where people did not feel comfortable using their local provider, which is bad for the local economy We know from the pandemic that taxi drivers have been an essential part of keeping this country going. They have been key workers in a very real sense. I do not drive my own private car because I live in the city centre and it is not practical for me to do so, and I often rely on taxis to get me from A to B. I like to get into a taxi knowing that the driver is a decent person, and I am grateful for the extra effort put into keeping me safe from covid, in addition to all the other things that those drivers have done, sometimes at their own expense. Many are now multi-apping and working across different platforms, to try to keep the wolf from the door. I want them to understand that by introducing this Bill we are trying to make their lives easier. This is not about casting aspersions on the quality of taxi drivers; this is about ensuring that the few who choose to game the system and bend the rules are not allowed to carry on. I fully commend the Bill. I am extremely glad that it is going through the House, and I hope we will press forward with it today. It has my absolute support.