HL Deb 03 April 1919 vol 34 cc139-50

THE DUKE OF RUTLAND rose to call the attention of His Majesty's Government to the statements made in the Press as to the conduct of the London taxi-cab drivers in London; and to ask whether His Majesty's Government will consider the advisability of amending and consolidating the various Acts dealing with hackney carriages so as to enable them to deal with modern conditions.

The noble Duke said: My Lords, coming as it does after the important debate to which we have just listened, I feel that I ought almost to apologise to your Lordships for bringing this subject before you; but I do not apologise because, although it may be trivial in comparison to that to which you have been listening, it does affect the convenience and comfort of the citizens of London. I know that it is viewed with considerable interest in another place, and in fact in the House of Commons within the last fortnight two or three Question on this subject have been asked, and I am given to understand that a deputation is to be received by the Home Secretary on the whole subject of taxicab drivers, their methods and manners, and what is to be done to improve this part of the transport of, London. Therefore I do not apologise for bringing the subject forward now.

I have placed on the Paper a Question which can be divided into two parts. First I ask whether the attention of the Government has been called to the statements made in the Press as to the conduct of the taxi-cab drivers in London; then I venture to suggest some amendment in the laws respecting the whole of the taxicab question, and I ask whether they can be consolidated and codified so as to make them more satisfactory to meet the presing necessities of the case. It is now just two or three years ago since I brought the conduct of the taxi-cab drivers before your Lordships, and on that occasion the representative of the Government, Lord Sandhurst, gave the House a comprehensive and very interesting answer upon the whole subject as to the terms upon which and the Acts under which the taxicab drivers of London plied their trade. Since then no improvement has taken place in the manners and customs of the taxi-cab drivers; indeed they have, if anything, got a little worse.

I wish to guard myself, and I especially request the gentlemen in the Press Gallery, if they report anything of what I say, to take note that I entirely draw the line between those soldiers who have recently been demobilised and are driving a certain number of cabs in London now, and the manners and customs of some of the existing older taxi-cab drivers. The former are behaving perfectly well. I have had the privilege of talking to a good many of them on this subject, and I know several of them personally. They are anxious and willing to serve the public properly, and to conform with the Acts of Parliament under which they gained their licence as public carriage drivers. Therefore I have no word to say against them.

But as regards the bulk of the existing taxi-cab drivers of London there is a good deal to be said. They have had, so to speak, an extremely good time during the last two years. They have been fortunate in alighting upon a time when there have been omnibus strikes, tramway strikes, and every kind of locomotive strike in London, and they have benefitted in the most emphatic manner thereby. When cases of bad behaviour have been brought before the Police magistrates of London, I think they are often—I say so with great diffidence—very unduly lenient in their treatment of these men. Indeed, it is getting to be an understood thing; and it is a fact which is becoming rather prominent amongst the London Police magistrates at this moment.

I pass to the main points upon which I take exception to the habits, customs, and manners of some of the London taxicab drivers. First I would say of cabs which now ply for hire in the streets, crawling along the streets, that you are very fortunate if, when you hail one of these men, he comes to you. Very rarely does he; but if he does, and does not like your appearance or is doubtful of your financial position, he very likely says "No." A man plying for hire by crawling along the streets of London is, as I was told two years ago by the noble Viscount, Lord Sandhurst, not supposed to be plying for hire; he is only plying for hire when he is on a public cab-stand in his proper place in front of the shelter, of if he is drawn up by, the pavement. That is a point which I think requires consideration with a view to an alteration of the Hackney Cab Act which governs that branch of the subject. If a man is crawling along the street, obviously looking for what he may regard as a suitable fare, he should go along with his flag up, or if he is not looking for a fare, the flag should be veiled and hidden in some way so that a mistake will not be made by the unfortunate person who wants to become his passenger, and who, seeing his flag raised as indicating that he is in a position to take a fare, very naturally hails him. If the flag is not up the man does not get his fare, but he does not destroy the good feeling which should exist between a possible fare and a driver.

Very few taxi-cabs now dream of coining off a rank when they are hailed or sent for from a house or club or anywhere else, although they are in the position that they are under the laws of the Police, and when they are in front of a cab shelter, this means that they are only on the rank for the purpose of being hired. Yet I have often myself—and I dare say many of your Lordships have had the same experience—been met by a refusal when I have asked one of these men to drive me. "No" he says, "I am going to have my tea." A favourite habit of these men, whether you ask them to come off the rank, or whether you meet them crawling along the street, is to ask, "Where do you want to go?" I will give an illustration of what happens. The other day I was talking in a club to a distinguished General who sent out to get a taxi-cab. It was raining, and he was in a great hurry to get to the station in order to reach his Command. The porter came back and said, "There is a cab, sir, but the man wishes to know where you want to go." The General said. "I want to go to Liverpool-street." The man went down, and on corning back said, "The cab-man says he wants to go to South Kensington; he won't take you." If a man becomes licensed to drive under certain Acts of Parliament I contend that he becomes a public servant, and should not be allowed to dictate to the person who engages him which way he wants to go rather than go the way that the fare wishes to go. When that takes place it is an extreme perversion of the rule which ought to govern such matters, and that is a point which I think should be considered by the Home Secretary when he goes more thoroughly into this subject, as I understand he intends to do.

There are certain places in London where cabs need not come to you, although they are standing there for hire. They need only come to you if they feel inclined so to do. Cabs standing at railway stations can do exactly as they like. The Home Secretary stated the other day— The only exception to the rule where a man must, come is where a cab is standing on railway premises, and in that case I am advised that the hiree could not be compelled to accept the hiring. That I think ought to be altered. A man who gets the privilege of standing in a railway station with a certainty of being hired, and probably very quickly, ought not to be allowed to pick and choose whether he will go or not. That part of the law ought to be altered at once, for it is an outrage on the public, and in these days when it is extremely difficult to get any sort of conveyance at railway stations it becomes a still worse offence and one under which the public ought not to have to suffer.

There is another point. Cabs refuse now, when you have hired them, to wait for five minutes at a shop or anywhere else. The cab-man says, "Oh, no, I am going on; I am not going to stop for you." They need not be with you for more than an hour, but for one hour you are entitled to keep them. Your only remedy is not to pay them if they do not wait, but it is extremely inconvenient in bad weather for ladies to hire a cab, by means of which they hope to be able to go from one shop to another and then go home, to find that they are left stranded when they come out of the shop because the cab-man will not stop any longer. His reason is that he could pick up three or four fares in the time that he would have to stay, and would thus be much better off.

I would like to give one example of what happens at the railway station, because it shows how seriously in some cases the wellbeing of persons may be affected. The other day a doctor with a very large practice whom I know very well had to meet a lady who was coming up to Charing Cross, and take her to a private hospital. He had not a car himself, and he went down to the station and waited some time. Before the train came in he told the porter to get a cab to meet him outside in the station yard, so as to be able to take the lady down to the private hospital in South Kensington. The porter tried seven cabs and all refused to go to South Kensington because they all wanted to go somewhere else. The doctor came outside, and with difficulty got a cab out of the street. The driver struck work at Hyde Park Corner, turned them out into the road, and they had to get on in some other way, which they eventually succeeded in doing. That is the sort of thing some of these drivers do. Those are the men I want to get at. They are victimising and blackmailing the public. It is a most disgraceful condition of affairs, and it should not have been allowed to go on so long by the authorities. The laws governing hackney carriages are comparatively obsolete. They date back to 1831, 1843, 1850, and 1853. Taxi-cabs come under the Hackney Carriage Acts, and I trust that before long some general codification and modification of those Acts may be undertaken so that the taxi-cabs of London may be put under a better system of control than they are under at the present time.

Some of the men who have been demobilised tell me that they want to get back to driving cabs in London, but they cannot do so because they cannot get the cabs. When you ask them why, they say that the cabs have been lying aside so long that they are not in good going order (which is quite possible), and that it is impossible to supply any spare parts for them so that they can be put on the street. May I suggest to the Government that they might utilise the depôt at Slough in order to adapt some of the spare parts for these cabs and so enable people to have a better system of conveyance. If that be done, then something most useful and beneficial will have been achieved. I beg to ask the Question standing in my name.

LORD DESBOROUGH

My Lords, I know that a taxi-driver is not a very popular person at the present time, but still I should be very sorry for this debate to end without one word being said on behalf of a fairly large body of them. I happen to be hon. colonel of the Motor Volunteer Transport of the County of London, and on that body we have 175 taxi-cab owners. These men provided their own cabs, and at their own expense used to be up all night and take soldiers on leave from the station to where they were staying, thereby certainly losing the night's work and being obliged to rest the next day; and they called for the men in the morning and saw them off by the train. I think this slight tribute is necessary, because you must remember that when you have a large number of men from the front, with all their steel helmets and other impedimenta, they do not improve your cab, especially if they enter in large numbers. The men certainly ran the risk of having their cabs warned off the street if they were not in a proper state of repair, and we all know how difficult it was to get anything repaired.

EARL RUSSELL

My Lords, the noble Duke's complaints are no doubt very well founded, but I should like to say a word in extenuation to some extent of the taxi-cab driver. I am probably as large a user of cabs as any member of your Lordships' House. I have occasion to take them constantly in all parts of London, and at all hours of the day. And, although these inconveniences which have been stated exist, I think there are a certain number of excuses for them.

For example, let us take the case which the noble Duke gave of a man who, on a day when it was raining, was asked to go to Liverpool-street, and said he wanted to go to South Kensington. That desire on the part of the man and that statement were in all probability by no means due to pure vice. Those places are in exactly opposite directions, and they are a considerable distance apart, and the excuse was probably due to the fact that the man had only just got enough petrol to get home. That is a thing which a man who was driving a cab has to consider. Things are changed now, and circumstances are becoming easier, but during the last year or two it has not been possible to obtain a supply of petrol casually on the road, and a man has been limited to that which he went out with, and it was essential that when a man got to the bottom of his tank he should finish near home. Undoubtedly that was often the reason for their attitude. I have often heard these discussions, and generally the driver explains that he is near the end of his petrol. When the noble Duke speaks of taxi-cabs at railway stations they are practically non-existent in these days. When a main line train comes in at a terminus there are probably three cabs in the station all told, and they are all taken up at once.

But when you come to the question of extortion and questions of dodges adopted by cabmen, either by putting their flag down, or pretending to be engaged, or not stopping until they have made some sort of bargain with you, then I think the complaints are on rather firmer ground. I think there has been a considerable tendency on the part of taxi-cab drivers on the whole to extort not only more than their legal fare, but considerably more than their legal fare and the ordinary tip as well. The reason for that is I think quite temporary, and is tending to disappear. It is due to the operation of the law of supply and demand. The demand for cabs has been something like three times the supply, and therefore naturally the person who has the article to sell tries to make the best terms he can. it is perfectly true that in the case of a taxi-cab the attempt to make these terms is illegal and should not be encouraged, but it is not altogether unnatural, and I am bound to say it has been encouraged by a certain class of cab users, the young officer with money to spend, who takes a cab for the evening and gives the man a sovereign or something of the sort. That tends to produce a bad effect on him.

I will give your Lordships an instance. The other day it was particularly important that I should go to two or three places running, and I asked the cab driver to take me two and a-half hours for a sovereign and I would give him an hour off in the middle. He said it would not pay him. I have no doubt it would not pay him; I have no doubt he would make more in the time. You have to consider that when you are dealing with them. In all my experience I have only once come across a cab driver who definitely committed a breach in the law. He began, as they usually do, by asking where I wanted to go. It was Election time, and I wanted to go to Battersea. I need hardly say the cabman instantly refused. On that occasion I desired him to meet me a little later before a magistrate, and then what I thought was a very inadequate fine was imposed. Because he had committed one of the most definite breaches of the regulations, and supported it by a tissue of lies. But the penalty was only a sovereign, which of course to-day is really an inadequate fine, and did not cause him any disturbance.

But I think it would be very difficult to alter the law, as the noble Duke suggests, so as to make it compulsory for a man who is going slowly along the street with his flag up to take a fare. He may be going home, or he may be going along to the rank to get his dinner. It is the case that these men have to wait till very inconvenient hours for their meals. They often do not get their midday meal until three o'clock. I do not think you could do that unless you allowed the driver to have what is a recognised convention, a glove over the flag to show that he is not available. But I think that most of the things of which the noble Duke complains will tend to remedy themselves when there are more cabs on the street, and when there is a larger supply of petrol available.

I must say that so far as concerns cabs picking and choosing—and I have seen a good deal of picking and choosing going on at railway stations and other places—I have on the whole rather observed that they tend to place themselves at the disposal of the person who has luggage to take, or women with children, or people of that sort, rather than at the disposal of those who, they think, can at a pinch get away on their own legs. And I think they have to some extent selected their fares with regard to the public interest and public convenience. I quite admit that they are not entitled to select them, and I think it is quite possible that some Departmental Committee might with advantage look into the present Acts. But, on the whole, except in the matter of occasional extortion, and particularly extortion in fashionable West End quarters and at fashionable West End hotels at night, I honestly do not think the taxi drivers deserve all the complaints that are made against them.

THE EARL OF JERSEY

My Lords, It is, of course, quite true that the hackney carriages in London are governed by a number of Statutes, almost all of which date before the introduction of motor vehicles. The consolidation of these Acts would unquestionably be desirable, and there are a number of points in which they might with advantage be revised. Revision and amendment would, however, be a task of considerable difficulty and complexity, and having regard to the number of different interests involved—those of the general public, the cab proprietor, and the cab driver—it would probably be impossible to undertake the task of revision without first exploring the whole subject by means of a Select Committee or a Departmental Committee which could go into the various questions and take the evidence of interested parties.

I pass to some of the specific points to which attention has been called. The provision that a driver cannot be compelled to go for a longer distance than six miles is statutory and will be found in section 7 of the Hackney Carriage Act, 1853. It is, of course, true that the distance is much smaller in proportion for a taxi-cab than it was for a horse cab, but there are certain difficulties in the way of an amendment of this provision which have to be considered. Some little time ago a suggestion that the limit should be raised to ten miles was before the Secretary of State, and the drivers then pointed out that if they were required to go this distance there was considerable risk of their fare taking them to some outlying place where they would not easily get a return fare back to any populous part of the district, and in this case there would be so much dead mileage covered in returning to a place where fresh hiring was reasonably likely that the longer journey would often be unprofitable for them.

There is a good deal of force in this argument, especially with regard to the more outlying parts of the Metropolitan Police district; for example, a driver might be required to drive from Shepherd's Bush to Uxbridge, with practically no chance of getting a fare back. In this case he might have to cover twenty miles of ground for a legal fare of 6s. 8d. or 7s. 2d. (with the additional 6d. for each hiring) which would be by no means a profitable transaction for him. With the present six mile limit a man is not likely to be taken very far from a populous district where return fares are to be had; and under the old system of horse-cabs the difficulty did not arise in practice, because the outer suburbs were mostly served by cabs belonging to their own neighbourhood which rarely went far from that neighbourhood and did not go into the centre of London in the same way as taxis habitually do. Any question of extending the distance which a driver can be required to go would therefore have to be reconsidered in conjunction with the further question of increasing the fares, at any rate for the longer journeys; otherwise it would be faced with hostility and a good deal of passive resistance from the drivers.

I come now to the point on which the noble Duke laid special emphasis. It is true that a taxi-cab going slowly along the streets would not technically be plying for hire, and is therefore not obliged to take any fare unless he chooses; it is also true that, recently in particular, a good many abuses have resulted from this state of affairs. It is, however, by no means easy to remedy this by any direct provision on the subject. It is impossible to lay down that a man must always take a fare when he is moving along the streets with his flag in the hiring position. A driver must, of course, finish his work and go home at some time, and if he is to be subject to requisition whenever he is passing through a street he would never be done. Further, a man may be under an engagement for a future time or summoned by telephone from a rank, and he must pass through the streets to fulfil his order. In order to try and remedy the abuses which have arisen the Commissioner has suggested that when a driver is passing through a street and is not prepared to take a fare he should cover over his meter-flag. He is not, however permitted to stop and bargain while his flag is covered. The matter could not be adequately dealt with without a drastic revision of the existing law on the subject, which might be a matter of some difficulty.

The Secretary of State cannot admit that the Police Regulations are a dead letter; on the contrary, the drivers have recently complained that the Police are enforcing them unreasonably, and they have gone so far as to refuse to use certain ranks where a number of drivers have been prosecuted for breaches of the Regulation. There is a special difficulty in respect to those ranks at which a shelter is provided, arising from the fact that the interests of the shelter attendants and those of the general public do not coincide. The former wish to keep the cabmen on the rank as long as possible because the cabmen are their customers; the latter, of course, wish to get the cabs off the rank. It is possible that some amendment of this state of affairs might be brought about by a change in the law giving the Police power to control shelters and shelter attendants.

There are, further, two general considerations which give rise to difficulty in all these specific cases mentioned above. One is the fact that owing to the present abnormal conditions the demand for cabs greatly exceeds the supply, as the noble Earl, Lord Russell, has pointed out; it is to be hoped that this will gradually disappear as things become more normal. The other is the reluctance of many persons who have difficulties with cabmen to complain to the Police and follow up their complaint by giving evidence when necessary, although the noble Earl has told us that he was a happy exception to this general rule. This greatly handicaps the Police in dealing with breaches of the Hackney Carriage Acts and the regulations, since in very many cases any effective action depends upon the co-operation of the person immediately injured.

We all know that there are black sheep in every fold, and this is no doubt as true of taxi-drivers as of any other section of the community. Most people would agree that the least favourable elements have been unduly in evidence lately, and certain men have got their fellow-drivers a bad name which many do not deserve. We are glad to note that civility is still found amongst taxi-cab drivers, and I was pleased to hear the tribute paid by Lord Desborough to those who well deserved it. We have kindly recollections of the old horse-cab drivers, and there is no reason why their successors, who are more liberally rewarded, should not maintain those traditions. It is to be hoped that when there is more competition those who have acquired the idea that they can behave as they like will speedily find their proper level. If not, it may be. necessary to expedite some such action as that outlined by the noble Duke.