Mr. Hugh Creegan:

One of the key themes in the introduction of a rural area hackney licence was to keep the costs low. My perception is that if a service were commercially viable in the area, it would already be offered. Our assumption is that a person who uses his or her own vehicle operates on a part-time basis and provides the service locally. In the absence of any other service in the area, that seems the right thing. If we were to demand that the licence holder must have a wheelchair accessible vehicle, which is much more expensive, that might create a difficulty. The service may evolve in the future but we would not want to do this at the start.

On the question of servicing wheelchair needs in rural areas, we will consider whether we need to be very targeted when we decide our grant scheme for wheelchair vehicles. When one looks at the provision of wheelchair accessible vehicles on a county basis, there are certain areas of the country which have fewer wheelchair accessible vehicles than other areas and I think we need to be clever about how we target this to try to get appropriate solutions.