My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for setting out the case for his amendment. However, I am afraid it still looks to me as if he is trying to fix something that is not broken and in doing so is going in the opposite direction of travel to a Bill for devolution.
Taxi licensing in two-tier areas is operated efficiently and effectively and enables local authorities to meet local needs. It also enables local taxi businesses to call into their local authority and have direct contact with it. The enforcement is also done very effectively. The proposal in the levelling up White Paper to transfer taxi licensing powers might be relevant to mayoral combined authorities, but I cannot see the case to justify it for shire counties. Current arrangements for licensing in shire counties work well and do not need to be disturbed. There are more important issues that would benefit shire counties than taking up time on such a consultation; for example, allowing councils to set licensing and planning fees or reforming funding for regeneration so that bidding is not necessary. I could go on, but it is late so I will not.
Even in London, it is not possible to buy an integrated ticket covering tubes, trains, buses and taxis. There will never be an integration of ticketing for obvious reasons of affordability; the cost of taxis and private hire vehicles make them the most expensive form of transport per mile. The White Paper presents no evidence that decisions on licensing prevent the integration of those transport modes into local transport plans. County councils as highways authorities are competent at providing taxi ranks at transport hubs and other appropriate locations in town centres; they do not need taxi licensing powers to achieve that integration.
District councils are not likely to ban taxis from operating half an hour either side of a train arrival, to try to stop private hire vehicles from picking up at or near bus stops, or to say that taxis cannot run at 2 am
on Saturday or Sunday mornings to pick up people leaving nightclubs. So could we have more clarity on why Whitehall thinks that there is an integration problem?
A government Minister in the other place has talked of the inconsistency between licensing authorities because there are so many of them. Reducing the number of licensing authorities to 80, as that Minister mentioned, shows the fallacy of the suggestion. One could argue that inconsistencies are local authorities meeting the needs of their communities in relation to taxi operation. However, even if there are problems of inconsistency in policy or practice, the way to address them is by legislating for consistency.
In shire counties, it is likely that the review would be unwelcome and unnecessary. It would remove local decision-making that is sensitive to local requirements and policies and based on local knowledge. It is the opposite of devolution; it would not be an improvement to see decisions on licensing being taken remotely, with no guarantee that they will be people elected by the districts concerned or that they would have any knowledge of the district.