WORKING A RURAL TAXI FIRM: Taxi driver discusses the arrival of Uber and how cross-border is impacting local trade

TaxiPoint spoke with Sarah Ibbetson, a rural taxi operator based in the Lake District, following her submission of written evidence to the Transport Select Committee as part of its inquiry into taxi and private hire vehicle licensing.

Ibbetson sets out how the arrival of Uber in Cumbria has affected local operators, outlining the commercial, operational and social consequences for a seasonal rural trade that relies heavily on summer income to remain viable year-round.

In your recent evidence supplied to the Taxi and Private Hire Licensing Inquiry, you describe Uber’s arrival in Cumbria as “almost cataclysmic”. What did that actually look like on the ground for you and other local drivers?

Last summer Uber arrived in Windermere. Dozens of out-of-area cars appeared for the summer months, offering bargain prices and undercutting our rates.

They weren’t locals who had got their licences elsewhere. These were strangers, licensed in Wolverhampton and coming from Blackburn and Preston. Lines of them parked on local roads overnight with seats tipped back and the drivers wrapped in sleeping bags.

They had come for the quick profits of the summer trade.

This is a major tourist destination, and summer income is high. Thousands of people visit, and many use taxis. We are kept very busy, as these drivers

obviously knew.

However, we need those seasonal profits in order to keep our businesses operating over the quiet winter months. There are not huge numbers of local people, but they still need taxis, even when the tourists are gone. Hotels are open and their staff need to get about. The elderly need transport. Children need to get to school.

The influx of summer cash enables us to carry on providing a service throughout the winter.

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Uber, of course, does not bother hanging about to provide a small-scale service for a handful of locals. One or two turn up at weekends, to profit from any remaining tourists, but they have mostly gone now and taken the summer profits with them.

The effect on us as a trade has been devastating. Turnover this year has dropped by more than 30%. There is a lot of winter still to go, and we are looking at an exceedingly bleak few months. The damage is not just financial, it is social and emotional. Drivers are working longer and longer hours in an attempt to make ends meet, and competition is becoming fierce for extremely scarce work.

If we can’t survive then there will be no taxis here in winter. Taxis will become a summertime facility for tourists. Nobody wants that.

Local taxi drivers like yourself are vetted, tested on local knowledge, and monitored by the council. How does it feel competing against drivers who may never even have visited the area before turning up for the tourist season?

Taxi drivers here are a valuable resource of local knowledge. Many visitors are complete newcomers, and we know our area well. We can recommend activities for families. We know where disabled people can find appropriate walks. We are familiar with local conditions. I might warn a customer that a particular walk is likely to be very muddy, or that stock have been moved into a field and to take care with their dog. I can tell stories about buildings and people, know history and can suggest good places to eat.

We deal with customers who have been drinking, especially at nights. Several times a week I pick up customers who can’t remember what their hotel is called and have to work it out from the information they can remember. We always get people home. If we go out of business then that resource will be lost.

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You raise serious concerns about enforcement being effectively impossible when vehicles are licensed hundreds of miles away. What do you think should be done?

Ban out-of-area working. Enforcement is impossible.

Out-of-area cars are hacking outside nightclubs and from any taxi ranks they find empty. There are no licensing officers around at two in the morning in Windermere, and six police officers cover all of South Cumbria. The system has worked because we are basically law-abiding and trustworthy. The cars that are flooding our area do not seem to care about the rules. When they think the police might turn up, they take off the plates and melt away.

All we can do is email Wolverhampton, who might respond a week later, if at all. That doesn’t get the hacking driver off our ranks or give his illegally

earned money to a local driver. It is lost forever.

Even if our council is given powers of enforcement to use on them, who will pay for it? Our council has the income from three hundred drivers, why should they spend it on policing another hundred from Preston?

For many urban cabbies, mobile apps and card payment devices are used throughout the day. How does that differ where you work?

There is not enough mobile signal in many parts of the Lake District for drivers to rely on mobile apps and card payment devices. We use them, and we are developing our own ride-hailing app, but they can’t form a realistic basis for a business here. It is not unusual for mobile phone masts to fail, sometimes for days at a time. When it happened last summer, Uber fell apart. Passengers were left stranded. Journeys had to be halted because the driver couldn’t find his destination. Uber drivers were flagging us, asking for directions.

Local knowledge is crucial here. Reliance on the internet is ridiculously over-optimistic.

Will a ‘one-size-fits-all’ National Standards system actively help rural taxi drivers?

Not really, because one size doesn’t fit all, and I suspect that if we have a national minimum standard, suddenly every authority will only enforce that, and it will be a race to the bottom.

Drivers must have local knowledge, which a national system is unlikely to enforce. They must not only not be criminals, they must be trustworthy.

Passengers are utterly dependent on us. Much of the Lake District is remote and isolated, and many customers are already anxious, going to destinations where there are neither streetlights nor mobile phone signal. Proposals for minimum standards seem to me to be inadequate.

At the moment, we have a first-class taxi service here, with knowledgeable, reliable, scrupulous operators, but it is coming under threat.

I hope very much that the Government acts to preserve it.