Mr. Hugh Creegan:

There were many items in the list so I will do my best to ensure I deal with them. There was a question regarding the reason behind enforcing regulations rather than putting them in primary legislation. The primary legislation sets up the framework and a recent piece of primary legislation went through this committee last year and was enacted at the end of 2013. The drafters of the legislation had access to existing regulations and took the view that they would put in place an appropriate framework; it would be up to us as the licensing authority to develop details in regulations, which is what we attempted to do. There are 50 or 60 sets of regulations and this is much smaller than the composite that currently exists.

The Deputy mentioned that there is a lack of belief in the taxi advisory committee and it is not working from the taxi driver's perspective. It is a separate statutory body so I will not speak for it. From the National Transport Authority perspective, we have engaged with the advisory committee a great deal and it contains several representatives of the taxi industry in its membership, along with people from other interest groups from other sectors of society. We value the input from the group and we will amend draft regulations based on the feedback from that group. We believe it is working and it is a valuable resource giving direct feedback of industry views and those from other parts of society. In the final regulations that we hope to adopt, we will take on board some of the views given to us.

The Deputy mentioned a concern about smaller wheelchair-accessible vehicles. One of the biggest issues facing the industry is the very limited number of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. In 2008 there were 1,600 wheelchair-accessible vehicles serving the country but the number is now 916, which is almost half of what it was. The 2008 number was not an oversupply because of the number of wheelchair users needing these vehicles. The balance was more or less right at that stage but now we are at half that number. We get much information about people in wheelchairs waiting for long periods to complete a journey so the issue must be addressed.