English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the government amendments tackling some of the issues around taxi and private hire licensing and enforcement across the country. This is an issue I raised through a series of amendments in Committee, and in discussion with the Minister, and I am grateful for this action.

In Committee, I had suggested granting powers to all licensing authorities to take enforcement action on any private hire or taxi vehicle on their streets, wherever they are licensed. I felt this was a good way to help plug the safeguarding gap which the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, had flagged in her report, but it would also allow the Government time to review and research the other issues, such as cross-border hiring, ahead of any future legislation. We know cross-border hiring is a real issue and that the problem needs addressing, as soon as the Government are able to, but I welcome the Government listening carefully to my concerns and those of other Members across the House, including the noble Lords, Lord Bradley and Lord Hampton, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, who added their names to my amendments.

The Government’s amendments here ensure a duty to report concerns about drivers licensed in other areas, to suspend those licences temporarily in the interest of public safety, and for the responsible licensing authority to respond and take action. These are a solid way forward. We on these Benches fully support these amendments to start to close the safety gaps in the licensing and enforcement of taxis and private hire.

There are a couple of amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, in this area: one to take out the temporary suspension of a licence and one on reporting. We do not support those amendments today.

I urge the Government to move at pace going forward on consultation and research around the issues of the taxi and private hire sector and to bring forward legislation, as soon as they are able, to ensure that passenger safety is consistent across every region. I put firmly on record our thanks to the Minister for his constructive work on this important safety area.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in general, we welcome most of these amendments. To deal first with those repetitive amendments that say “leave out ‘minimum’” all the way through, as I say, in general we are supportive of those. The art here is to get the right balance between having standards which are predictable, from the point of view of the operators of private hire services, and leaving sufficient scope for local variation to adapt to local circumstances. We want to avoid circumstances where we have what might be called only minimum standards nationally and then every local authority having lots of different standards of its own piled on top, which make it very difficult for large operators to manage a fleet. But we do not want to have purely national standards with no local variation, because that would strike the wrong balance and prevent appropriate adaptations where necessary. On the face of it, we think that the Government’s amendments come closer to striking that balance correctly than the Bill as introduced to your Lordships’ House, so we tend to support them.

We would like to know whether the Government are going to be issuing not only standards—of course, the Government will be issuing national standards in due course—but guidance on what is appropriate for local authorities to be issuing their own licence conditions on. Is that an area the Government intend to go into? That would be very interesting to hear, because, as I say, this is a question of balance. It is not necessarily easy to get it right, and we want the Government to be able to get it right. This might be better still, but it is better than what was here before; that is why we are willing to support those amendments.

On the question of the suspension, I think we need to be a little bit more forensic than perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, or even the Minister were. What we are discussing here is three different licences which are necessary for the operation of private hire vehicles. The first is a licence for the driver. This is not a driving licence as we normally understand it but a licence specifically for private hire, which is personal to the driver. The second is a licence for the vehicle: the vehicle has to meet certain standards that its local licensing authority has checked, ideally. But the third is a licence for the operator.

The operator is a very difficult thing to capture, in some ways. On one hand, the operator might be that booth at the end of the railway concourse that organises local minicabs and has done for years, in the way that we are all familiar with. On the other, nowadays it is equally likely to be a very large firm, such as an Uber or an Addison Lee, operating a practically national service. But it could be, as the Minister himself said, simply that the driver is his own operator: he takes the messages, he takes the bookings and he provides the service. So what constitutes an operator is a very wide range of things.

Imagine circumstances where a driver who is perhaps licensed in Birmingham has a passenger to take to Droitwich Spa, which is not in Birmingham, I might say, for those who are uncertain of the fact; it is not, I can assure them. He gets to Droitwich Spa and runs into an enforcement officer who has an objection to the driver. I completely understand why, smelling his breath and deciding that he is drunk, the enforcement officer should immediately suspend his licence temporarily, even though that licence was issued not in Droitwich Spa but in Birmingham. I completely understand that. I am entirely behind that provision of the new clause.

Equally, we are completely behind the second provision in the clause, which covers the situation where the vehicle is not in a fit state and it is necessary for public safety that it should be taken off the road immediately—the bald tyre mentioned by the Minister, but it might be something else. We are completely behind the idea that the local enforcement officer in Droitwich should have this new power to take the vehicle off the road and suspend the licence. I do not know that he can actually seize the vehicle, but he can suspend the vehicle licence immediately, so that the continued use of that vehicle for private hire purposes would become an offence. We are completely behind that.

But then we come to the question of suspending the operator, and here I have genuine difficulties in understanding what the Government envisage. At an extreme, one could envisage circumstances in which the officer in Droitwich Spa, looking at his checklist of powers, which has three powers, ends up inadvertently suspending Uber in Birmingham overnight, just like that, at the drop of a hat. Every driver operating for Uber in Birmingham is now technically illegal, in the whole city, as a result of the misapplication of this power.

What circumstances, I ask—and I did ask the Minister informally just before we started this debate—can one envisage in which one would want such a power, given that the local officer has the power, and we support this, to close down the driver and the vehicle? Why should he want to be able to take out the operator, which might be a very large operator in a large city close by? The Minister, to my disappointment, did not address that question as fully in his opening remarks; it is fair to say that he did not address that question at all, despite having a certain amount of notice of it. It is not for me to supply the circumstances in which he might do so, but even if I were willing to supply them, I have great difficulty in struggling to find the answer. Therefore, I have an amendment in this group, Amendment 280A, which seeks to remove the power to immediately suspend the operator licence on a temporary basis. Those are the factors: immediately and on a temporary basis.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

It is very kind of the noble Lord to give way. I appreciate it is late, but there are not many speakers in this debate so perhaps I can take a little time. The noble Lord said that context is important, and he is absolutely right. The context is that, if the driver is drunk, he is drunk in front of you now. The bald tyre, for example, is there present in front of you and you can see it. However, any evidence that the operator is operating by, for example, using other drivers can only ever be partial at a particular moment for a single law enforcement officer at 7 pm in Droitwich Spa. If it is true that the operator is operating in that way, then the evidence should be and would be given to its licensing authority—in my case in Birmingham—for the licensing authority to investigate. No doubt, if the case stacks up, they will remove the operating licence, but they should not do so on the basis of partial evidence at 7 pm in Droitwich Spa.

The other difficulty that the Minister has is that the test for these three immediate sanctions is the same test, which relates to a threat to public safety. The officer sitting there might say, “I have identified a threat to public safety. Now why shouldn’t I put all three of these into operation at the same time?” There is nothing in the statute that says that the one for the operator is to be used only in really difficult, dangerous or odd circumstances. So, why would you not use all three? The truth is the Minister is in a real difficulty over this. No doubt he might want to force it through on votes, but what he has put together makes no sense at all. I think he knows it, and he should be a little bit more generous in responding to this so that we might reach some agreement, because in terms of trying to protect public safety we are entirely on the same page.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My response to the noble Lord is this: let us use his example of an enforcement officer at 7 pm in Droitwich Spa—though it might equally be 2 am in some dark and unfriendly place with a vulnerable passenger. If an enforcement officer were to come across real evidence that the vehicle and driver were unlicensed and had been used deliberately by an operator, the context in which these amendments are framed is that suspension of the operator’s licence is, I think, warranted in that case. A big operator ought to take enormous care to make sure that it does not behave in such a manner, as it would be a threat to a big operator. But if it were found to be true of an enormously large operator, then it is a matter that ought to be immediately addressed. The public would expect it to be immediately addressed. The public would not say, “Oh, they’re big enough that the licensing authority can take a leisurely look at this”. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me that, in a similar case in the bus industry, the DVSA can discover the most flagrant breaches and it takes months to get those people in front of somebody who can deprive them of their operator’s licence.

Here, I think we are doing the right thing, and we are doing the right thing for the right reasons, which is that there is a genuine concern about public safety in taxi and private hire vehicles. Although it is an interim move, because the whole legislation is, frankly, outdated and needs to be fixed, this is an example of something which would be proportionate. If the action taken was not proportionate, it could be quickly reversed by the processes that are embodied in this amendment. So I reject the noble Lord’s proposition. I have thought it through, and I am not the least bit embarrassed in promoting it. I think I am rather more on the side of public safety than the noble Lord is. To accept his amendment would leave a gap in public protection and would perpetuate the inconsistencies in licensing and enforcement.

Quickly on the noble Lord’s Amendment 287A, the noble Lord heard me say that the Government have every intention of monitoring these arrangements very carefully. We will use all our powers to ensure that we collect the right data, that local authorities collect the right data and that, as a result, we understand what the effects of these amendments are when they pass into law, and we are willing to alter the way in which the arrangements operate in the light of the evidence that we get. I hope that I have said enough, without using all the words that I have been given, to persuade the noble Lord not to press Amendment 287A, because the Government have every intention, short of putting it on the face of the Bill, to collect exactly this for the most obvious reasons, which is that we need to know how it works and individual licensing authorities need to know how this will work in order that they can monitor and, if necessary, change their own behaviour.

Given those assurances, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able not to press either of his amendments.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, we completely understand the thinking behind these amendments and the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, around minimum taxi requirements and the Equality Act. We sense his frustration, and that of other Members of this House, at how long these changes are taking.

Let us be very clear that “taxis” in this amendment refers to hackney carriages—known more commonly, certainly to those of us in London, as black cabs. They are less than one in five of the whole taxi and private hire network. In cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester, they is already 100% accessibility, but, as we have heard, the picture elsewhere is less uniform and in many parts of the country the network is completely provided by private hire vehicles. So this amendment, as we have heard, would not address the wider network that serves most of the country and areas outside of big cities, which is a real issue.

It is important that every region has the right balance of vehicles available to meet local needs and demands, and that will of course change over time. We welcome plans to ensure that each licensing area will bring forward an inclusive service plan. We welcome the new national standards, which are important, and, we hope, in the not too distant future, as we talked about earlier, new legislation covering taxis and private hire too. Once we start getting that together, this issue will be tackled in a far more comprehensive way than is set out in this amendment.

We absolutely believe that we need an accessible taxi and private hire service, available to you wherever you live, so that you can get out and enjoy your life, and live your life fully. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, will consider this carefully and work with the Minister to find a way forward that works for disabled passengers across the country, not just in those areas where black taxis exist and are available. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Borwick for his amendment. In preparation for this Bill, the amendment has taken up a lot of time and involved a lot of meetings with representatives of different bodies, including taxi drivers and private hire vehicles. The one that most struck me, which stays with me, and the only one I will refer to, involved a not-young gentleman who clearly had a taxi background and had risen to have some responsibility in an organisation. He had been in the business all his life, and I thought he was going to be very dismissive of this and would not be interested in this sort of thing going through because it would only disrupt the trade. He said to me, “Well, of course we’ve got to do something about this. These people deserve a service”. That is it. That is the case. They deserve a service. There is no need to make any further case. In my view, there is no answer to that case. They deserve a service.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

280A: Leave out subsection (3)
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment removes the power in Government Amendment 280 for an enforcement officer to temporarily suspend a regulated private hire vehicle operator licence.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, an emergency power of suspension to be exercised in the middle of the night is perfectly appropriate when dealing with a drunk driver. It is perfectly appropriate when dealing with a bald tyre or a defective vehicle. To put an entire operation out of action and make that operation illegal immediately—overnight, in another city—is a completely disproportionate use of the power of enforcement. I believe my amendment to Amendment 280 is appropriate and I wish to test the opinion of the House.