Speeches by Greenwood.

“Yes.”

“It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Dowd; I know you have a deep personal commitment to road safety. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon) on securing this debate and thank him for raising the vital issue of road safety and vulnerable users, specifically horse riders. It is clear that t…”

“As a Government we already set standards for vehicle emissions to protect everyone who uses our roads. With vehicle age there is obviously an issue around vehicle safety, so we require all vehicles on our roads to undergo an MOT. It would not be unreasonable to think that for taxis and PHVs, which are obviously doing a…”

“No, absolutely.”

“There are two reasons. Obviously, fees are determined by local authorities in order to be self-funding. I recognise that the cost of operating in a local authority service is not uniform across the country. There will be variations, for example, in wage rates in different places; local authorities will not have exactly…”

“I am open to considering that. The concerns that we have are as Liz and I have set out, but we are certainly not averse to looking at those sorts of ideas.”

“The other thing to say, of course, is that the more requirements we put in, the more cost we put into the system. That has consequences, does it not? We know that a lot of people rely on taxis and private hire vehicles, particularly people who perhaps cannot afford a car of their own, or disabled people who would not b…”

“That is a really important question. There are some areas that I do not think we would actually allow for any variation from. When it comes to safeguarding, safety and accessibility, we want to set standards that it would be hard to improve on. For example, when it comes to safeguarding, we want every local authority t…”

“We certainly want to draw on it. I would be very clear that there is a need for fundamental change to the regulations to put them all in a sensible place. We have the Town Police Clauses Act 1847, the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976), and then we just have a series of sticking plasters really to tr…”

“I am absolutely aware of the issues and it is not a good situation. I do not want people to shop around for licences. The idea of introducing national minimum standards is partly because we wanted to act quickly, particularly in response to Baroness Casey’s recommendations, and there was an opportune way to do that. We…”

“Thanks, Chair, I am really glad to be here having this discussion. I want to see the sector better regulated, and the public to have a range of services that they can be confident are safe, accessible, available and affordable, whether that is in a taxi or a private hire vehicle. It is absolutely clear to everyone that…”

“That is not something that I have had a discussion about.”

“As we develop our proposals in the future, we absolutely want to draw on the work that the Law Commission and the task and finish group did. Although it is now a little while ago—I think it was 12 years ago—many of the issues that they identified and put forward suggestions around have not changed markedly. We would ab…”

“National minimum standards is what we are introducing in this current legislation to make a very valuable first step in tackling the issues that Baroness Casey identified. Certainly, in our discussions with her, she has been incredibly supportive both of national minimum standards and of us changing the licensing level…”

“Probably early April, yes.”

“That is really interesting because obviously my experience of using taxis and PHVs is that a lot of them are modern hybrid vehicles. Actually, on certain apps, when you get your choice of vehicle you get the option to take an electric vehicle rather than not, and it might come at a bit of a price point. The public are …”

“This is something that we are absolutely focused on doing. Obviously, there is always competition for what goes into our legislative programme because this Government are ambitious about the things that we want to do. You will have seen in our own Department that we have had an early focus on the rail system and on bus…”

“I am the Minister for Local Transport.”

“As we have heard, some people are licensing with authorities away from where they intend to work because they can get licensed more quickly and cheaply and start earning money to support their family. By making all local transport authorities responsible for licensing and having national minimum standards, it will redu…”

“Obviously, there are lots of different options around tackling out-of-area working: for example, that you could only pick up a fare in your area and take it somewhere else, and do another one from wherever you were back into the area. As Liz said earlier, there are some disadvantages of making those sorts of restrictio…”