One common theme in the genre of press articles about ‘taxi’ drivers in particular towns and cities objecting to cross-border working is that the drivers licensed elsewhere aren’t local to the area, and are portrayed as commuting in from elsewhere. For example, a few weeks ago a local piece from the Lake District said:
A Cumbrian taxi company is seeking drivers from more than 100 miles away [Wolverhampton] to get more staff.
More recently, a report in the Lancashire Telegraph quoted drivers as saying:
“A loophole in the industry means a taxi driver can pick up in this town even though we don’t have an Uber operating licence in this town.
“We have seen people coming over from Wolverhampton and then spending a few hours making money which should be going to local cabbies.
In both cases it’s made to sound like these cross-border drivers are just rolling up from Wolverhampton for an hour or two, then hotfooting it back 100 miles to the West Midlands.
Of course, the truth is more prosaic, and it’s more likely that the drivers and vehicles have simply used Wolverhampton City Council for licensing purposes – a sort of Amazon of taxi licensing, and the national epicentre of a phenomenon sometimes referred to as ‘cabs of convenience’, echoing the ‘flags of convenience‘ practice in international shipping of registering vessels in a jurisdiction with easier-to-meet safety standards and with ready access to cheap labour, say.
So last year it was reported:
According to a Freedom of Information request submitted by the Manchester Evening News, 8,952 private hire drivers, licensed by Wolves Council, reside in Greater Manchester.
By the same token, trade publication TaxiPoint recently pointed out that 300 Transport for London-licensed private hire drivers live in the Crawley area, thus undermining the case being made at Gatwick Airport that Uber drivers are working from the airport but aren’t local to the area.
So rather than these Wolverhampton City Council- and Transport for London-licensed drivers commuting from there to work elsewhere, it’s almost certainly a ‘cab of convenience’ phenomenon.*
And which has always happened, at least to an extent, but has been significantly facilitated by things like the Deregulation Act 2015, national brands like Uber and Bolt, and technological advances. The latter, for example, has obviously been instrumental in enabling the pan-national app-booking and despatch platforms, not to mention Wolverhampton Council’s sausage machine approach to licence-processing.
The details of which needn’t be examined here, in the meantime at least. But scenarios often portrayed as drivers regularly commuting from local jurisdictions like Wolverhampton and Sefton, or opportunistically appearing occasionally for big events (say) 100 miles away are more likely to be local drivers working under a national or regional brand, not to mention legacy operators using ‘cabs of convenience’ on a smaller and more local scale.
Of course, there no doubt is substantially more genuine cross-border working in the contemporary environment because of the brands and technology, and it’s always been the case that local authority licensing areas have not always coincided with geographical areas delineated by market forces, hence the need to work cross-border.
But to portray the whole scenario in terms of where vehicles and drivers are licensed compared to where they are actually working is misleading and incorrect. And, indeed, no doubt many in the trade know that, but it suits their purpose to portray cross-border brands and drivers as ‘poaching’, or whatever. But the reality is slightly different to the myth.
* Just like licensed vehicles and licensed drivers are often conflated and confused in press reporting and elsewhere, where a licence holder resides isn’t necessarily conclusive as regards where the vehicle and/or driver are actually operating.
For example, a driver could reside in local authority area A, while driving a vehicle licensed by local authority B, which may be working primarily in local authority C.
However, as regards its portrayal of the cross-border scenario in the Manchester area, MEN’s analysis using residential addresses is likely to be a fair approximation. But, for example, even looking at one paragraph in the MEN article demonstrates the conflation of vehicles and drivers:
According to a Freedom of Information request submitted by the Manchester Evening News, 8,952 private hire drivers, licensed by Wolves Council, reside in Greater Manchester. This makes up 35 per cent of the private hire cabs operating across the city-region.
The private hire drivers are not the same as the private hire cabs, and the residential addresses won’t precisely equate to where they’re operating.