TAXIS, SOLIHULL (PETROL) (Hansard, 20 March 1957)

§ Mr. Martin Lindsay (Solihull)
One of the proudest traditions of the Commons is that we seek to remedy injustice and anyone is entitled to have his personal difficulties when caused by injustice raised in this House. It is for that reason that I wish tonight to raise the hardship—excessive and unfair in my opinion—caused to a constituent of mine, Mr. A. S. Howes of Solihull, by the rigidity of the petrol rationing scheme.
This gentleman is the owner of three taxis in Solihull and, apart from two individual one-man operators, he does the whole of the taxi business in the town. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Power has already been good enough to discuss this case with me three times and I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for the attention he has given to it. As I explained to him, Mr. Howes' vehicles are not registered as taxis but as hackney carriages, because in Solihull we find there is no need for a taxi to stand all day on the rank, and this proprietor is able to offer exactly the same service from his premises in the centre of the town.
Because Mr. Howes' registration is for hackney carriages and not for taxis, he finds himself gravely prejudiced under the petrol rationing scheme. His cars normally use 1,600 gallons in the four-month period, whereas his allocations, both basic and supplementary, have been 800 gallons only, which is 50 per cent. of his requirements. That makes nonsense both of the conception of a 25 per cent. cut and of Ministers' oft-repeated statements that no self-employed man is to be prejudiced by petrol rationing in earning his living.
Had my constituent's vehicles been registered as taxis instead of as hackney carriages, he would have had all the petrol he requires. For the expenditure of about £80 a vehicle, namely, the cost of the meter and the change in cost of insurance, he could change his class of registration and get all the petrol he needs. I am sure the Parliamentary Secretary will agree that it would be nonsensical to suggest that a man should be put to that expense 514 in order to keep his three vehicles on the road.
I understand from the Parliamentary Secretary that the difficulty in which he finds himself is that the Hackney Carriage Porprietors' Association has stated that the present allocation of petrol is more or less adequate.

Mr. Lindsay
If it is adequate for the majority of hackney proprietors, it certainly cannot be considered adequate for exceptionally hard-working men, such as my constituent, who make greater use of their vehicles.
I am all the more sorry to have to expose this particular injustice, because now that the petrol rationing scheme has got into its stride I have the impression that it is working smoothly. At any rate, I think that this is true of the Midlands, and that the regional petroleum officer and his staff in Birmingham have been as successful as one could hope in easing the difficulties. Indeed, I get the impression that every reasonable application for supplementary petrol is now being met without difficulty.
I therefore ask: why cannot the obvious injustice in this case be put right? Surely, Mr. Speaker, no rationing scheme should be so inflexible as to take no account of special cases, the genuine nature of which is not in dispute. This is not only causing considerable hardship to the man concerned, but also to the many people in Solihull who normally use his services. All I am asking the Parliamentary Secretary to say is that a proprietor who provides the equivalent of a taxi service—when this is proved beyond doubt—should be treated for petrol rationing on the same basis as if his registration were, in fact, taxi. This, I submit, is a very simple administrative decision which would remove quite a hardship, and it is the decision which I am asking my hon. and learned Friend to take.

§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Power (Mr. David Renton)
I must first thank my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Mr. M. Lindsay) 515 for his courtesy in discussing this matter with me at some length, as he has mentioned, before raising it on the Floor of the House. I should also like to thank him for the tribute which he paid to the work of our regional petroleum officer at Birmingham who, like all the other regional petroleum officers, has had a vast amount of work to contend with, and has, we feel, got on top of it very well indeed.
The basic facts of the case which my hon. Friend has put forward are not disputed between us. I should, however, like to elaborate upon them to some extent, in order that I may explain clearly to the House the true position with regard to my hon. Friend's constituent. Hire cars can be licensed either as "private" hire cars or as "hackney" hire cars. Mr. Howes has three cars, and they are all licensed as "hackney" hire cars. Our petrol rationing scheme allows different maxima of supplementary coupons according to the type of the vehicle.
There are three broad categories. The highest category—the one that gets the most petrol—is that of taxis, and the reason they are given most petrol is because, broadly speaking, taking the country as a whole, taxis work on a more intensive scale. Within our taxi scales we make certain divisions. We recognise that some taxis work on a single shift and others on a double shift; and we make a distinction between the metropolitan area and provincial cities.
Next come the hackney hire cars. They get a higher maximum allocation than do the private hire cars because, broadly speaking, they are used for a much greater part of their time in plying for hire than are the private hire cars which are used very often on a most casual basis.
Of course, in each of these groups the maximum allocation depends on the horse power of the car. My hon. Friend's constituent has two cars of 16 h.p. and one car which we assume to be of between 14 and 19 h.p. Throughout the rationing period my hon. Friend's constituent has been allocated the maximum which hackney hire cars of those horse-powers have been allowed. As a result, they received at first, when the supplementary allocations for hire cars 516 were first made, 600 gallons for the four months ending 16th April. That was increased in early February to 804 gallons, again for the period up to 16th April.
The House will recollect that on Monday this week my right hon. Friend the Paymaster-General announced that there would be a more generous basic ration, an increase of 50 per cent. for the next rationing period, and he said also that supplementary allowances would be increased. We have issued instructions to regional petroleum officers to increase the scales of maximum allowances for these various categories of vehicles which I have mentioned. I am pleased to be able to tell my hon. Friend that for the next four monthly period which begins on 17th April his constituent will receive 1,005 gallons for his three cars. That will in fact give him 62½ per cent. of what he estimates to be his normal usage.

§ Mr. Albert Roberts (Normanton)
The Minister has spoken of these maxima, saying they are fair and operate fairly, but who has decided that as regards the various kinds of taxi businesses concerned?

§ Mr. Renton
I am sorry, but I did not quite follow the hon. Gentleman's question.

§ Mr. Roberts
The Minister has referred to obtaining the maxima for the particular type of licence. Who has said that the maxima are right or fair in comparison with other businesses?

§ Mr. Renton
That is a very fair question, and, of course, the answer depends upon the information we get from the various sources at our disposal. We consult all the interested organised bodies. We consult official bodies also, such as the Home Office and the police, and we consult the motoring organisations and everybody that we can consult in order to find out whether the maxima, which may not be exceeded by the regional petroleum officers, are in fact fair.
As I think is clear from the tribute which my hon. Friend has paid to the general administration of the scheme, broadly speaking, these maxima have been fair. We grant that this is rough justice, that it is an approximation based on estimated averages, and that estimated averages are not infallible. We do not 517 claim perfection for the system. All we can say is that these maxima are the most accurate we can arrive at on the information which is given to us. I concede that there will be the occasional case of an operator who has been accustomed to using far more than the estimated average, and in such occasional cases there may be some hardship. That one is bound to acknowledge. We have nevertheless to work on general averages, unfortunately; there is no other way of doing it when we have a quickly improvised scheme of this kind, even using the benefit of the experience which was there before.
To go back to the facts of my hon. Friend's case, Mr. Howes will in the next rationing period receive 62½ per cent. of what he estimates to be his normal needs. In the circumstances, I suggest that that is not too bad. It is interesting to compare it with what he would have received in the last four months if his vehicles had been taxis instead of hackney hire cars. In fact, it is almost exactly the same amount. He would have received 1,008 gallons in the last four monthly period if his vehicles had been taxis and he will receive 1,005 gallons in the next four months.
If Mr. Howes or the people of Solihull have suffered inconvenience or hardship, I am indeed sorry; but all I can say is that they have been treated as well as the people in any other town in similar circumstances. They have not been handicapped in any way.
As my hon. Friend pointed out, if Mr. Howes' vehicles had been licensed as taxis he would have received more. We hope that with this increase of 25 per cent. which is what he will get, both Mr. Howes and the people of Solihull will get along much better.
My hon. Friend said that the allocation in the last four monthly period, which is now nearly past history, makes nonsense of our overall cut of 25 per cent.
I should like to argue that point with him. In order to get an average overall cut of 25 per cent. and, at the same time, to give 100 per cent., or nearly 100 per cent., to a number of priority users, such as doctors, nurses, ambulances, fire brigades and others, it is necessary that all other users must take a cut of more than 25 per cent.; otherwise the average would never have been achieved. That is 518 the reason why Mr. Howes, along with a great many other operators in this country, has most unfortunately had to put up with a greater cut than 25 per cent. However, as I have already pointed out, it will not be nearly such a great cut in the future.
It might be helpful if I mention how the regional petroleum officer's consent operates in these cases. In the administration of the petrol rationing scheme the R.P.O.s have virtually two kinds of discretion. The first is what I would call a limited discretion. This enables them to grant allocations for particular categories of user, and we prescribe the maximum which they may allow in exercising their discretion in those cases. They also have a discretion to deal with certain categories of difficult case, but they cannot use their discretion in that way in those cases in which we have already laid down the maximum, as we have done, for example, for hire cars and taxis. That is the rule we have made. Broadly speaking, it has worked well, and I am afraid that we could not alter it in order to meet the difficulty in this case.
If I may summarise on that point, it is true that in certain circumstances the R.P.O.s have a wide discretion to deal with these cases but, in exercising it, they are not allowed to exceed the maximum, and we have prescribed the limits within which the R.P.O. has to operate for particular categories. In this case the R.P.O., in the exercise of his discretion, has throughout the history of the case allocated the maximum that he is allowed to allocate for hackney hire cars of the horsepower of Mr. Howes' cars.
I know that the reply I have given will not give complete satisfaction to my hon. Friend, and I would say only two things in conclusion. The first is that I assure the House that my hon. Friend has really tried hard to get us to see what he considers to be reason, and I have done my best to persuade him why we cannot meet his point of view, for good reasons of our own which I have tried to explain. The second is that however much Mr. Howes and the people of Solihull may have suffered up to the present, they will fare very much better from 17th April onwards.