Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is a very difficult time to be a small business operator, a sole trader. The cost of doing business is high and the amount of cash available for people to spend is getting smaller and smaller. These are bad conditions for the operation of a business, and in such times people who are self-employed need support and help. That is not to say we should subsidise or prop up unviable businesses, but we must support people to allow them to make a living and stay in work. Keeping people in work is a vital role for the Government to play in an economic crisis such as the one we have been experiencing for approximately the past four years. Government Members will probably agree with that statement, but certainly in the case of taxi drivers the Government is doing the exact opposite.

Certain issues make the taxi industry somewhat unique, but taxi drivers are business people and workers. Their place of business - their car, which in nearly all cases they never fully own - is their office. While they do not have to contend with upward-only rent reviews, the Government is intent on making it hard for them to do business in the already difficult climate. There is no denying business is bad for taxi drivers, and something needs to change. However, the Bill offers little. In the time it took to complete the Indecon report, which was carried out as part of the taxi industry review, a thousand vehicles left the industry. However, there is still an oversupply of taxis on the streets. There are many reasons for that. When it was established that the previous regulatory system was not legal the then Government, of which Fianna Fáil was the major party, decided it was preferable to have a free-for-all rather than introducing a new regulatory system. That was Progressive-Democrats-driven ideology based on the belief that the market could manage all regulation. It was the same ideology that allowed Seanie FitzPatrick and Michael Fingleton to carry on unabated.

Deregulation became a problem when the economic circumstances of the State improved to a considerable extent and people saw money in taxis that they never saw previously. There were soon 27,000 taxis on the roads, with a large proportion of them in Dublin and other urban centres. At the time there was business to be done, although, just as the housing boom thundered on, no questions were asked about sustainability. In 2008, when the downturn had already begun, an estimated 100 million trips were being taken in taxis each year. In 2012 the number of taxi trips was estimated to be approximately 70 million. That does not represent utter collapse, but when the number of taxis is high it means a lot of people are fighting for the same business. Ranks that had previously moved quickly ground to a halt and taxis were left circling while waiting for a space. What were once tiring days of constant work for drivers became tiring days of desperately seeking business and counting again and again how much had been made in a week and how much in arrears on his or her mortgage a driver would be.

Taxi drivers are struggling hard. In recent years, far too many have decided they had nothing to live for and took their own lives. No one can be certain why those people chose that option for themselves, but it is likely the dire economic circumstances faced by most of them was a contributory factor. Their colleagues who survive them certainly believe that is the case. It is believed that 25 taxi drivers took their lives between 2008 and 2010. With those awful problems in mind, we must look to find a way forward. We must examine the Bill and appraise how it seeks to deal with the problems in the industry.

I take issue with the problems that have been identified and the priority given to them. The report of the taxi review group highlighted the massive oversupply of taxis and the large downturn in demand. However, that was not the major issue the Government chose to address. It did not decide that if the plan is to regulate the industry further, it must ensure its sustainability. Instead, the Minister has decided to go for the red herring of tackling criminality. That is not to say criminality should not be stamped out of the industry; of course it should. All decent, honest drivers - that is, the vast majority of drivers - agree with that. We already have laws against the criminal behaviour that goes on in the industry but the Garda is unable to enforce them due to underfunding. The work has also been hampered by the massive swell in the number of taxis due to deregulation. Policing the taxi industry is a serious job and cannot be done without resources.

The reality is that the vast majority of taxi drivers have no conviction for an offence and drive their taxis within the law, and issues do not arise in regard to them. The Minister asserts there are 6,000 drivers with criminal convictions. One could ask how many offences relate to non-payment of fines. A large proportion of people in Mountjoy Prison are there because they did not pay their TV licence fees. A total of 377 complaints were made about taxis in 2012. Given the 70 million trips that most likely took place that year, that is a very small number of complaints. People are happy with the taxi service and, by and large, they feel safe - as much as one could expect. In fact, taxi drivers are more likely to be victims of violence or crime than their customers.

It goes without saying that people with convictions for murder, rape or sexual assault should not be allowed to hire themselves out to drive people around in their cars. However, people who were convicted of a minor offence 20 years ago but have had no problems since then, who have been operating a taxi for ten years or more, should not be in fear of their employment. A suspension for even a short period would put their business in jeopardy. The correct approach would be to limit the schedules included and put in place a comprehensive vetting procedure at the point of entry, with a standard threshold which must be met.

I accept that we must protect the public, but we cannot play with people's livelihoods in this manner in order to act tough on crime when the crimes we are talking about are irrelevant to the job being done. The Minister will try to paint this in such a way as to say that I want to allow rapists to drive taxis, as he has attempted on previous occasions when the issue was raised, but that is nonsense. It is bluff and distraction. In so far as I can see there are legal problems with impugning someone's right to earn a living based on something that is totally irrelevant to his or her ability to do the job. The real danger to the public is from tired taxi drivers operating vehicles on public roads with passengers. The Minister must take steps to discourage people who work 39 hours a week in another job from driving around the cities and towns of Ireland in taxis at night and on weekends.

A public safety issue is being ignored here. An independent appeals process is also missing from this Bill, as well as measures to ensure accountability on taxi policy from the NTA and the advisory committee, which do not have the confidence of taxi drivers, in my experience. These bodies should at least be directly accountable to a Dáil committee on a twice-yearly basis.

Policy measures to deal with oversupply are also missing from this Bill. Such measures are being implemented on the basis of the Taxi Regulation Act 2003. The basic policy is to make things harder for as many taxi drivers as possible until enough of them are run out of the business. Cost after cost has been heaped upon drivers over the last year. Drivers have been asked to fork out for pointless branding signs, licence fees have gone up, NCT costs have risen, fuel prices have risen, and cars must be newer and must meet more stringent guidelines. I met a father and son who operated a taxi together, as their only source of income, for many years. The taxi was licensed to the father. Just as he was about to retire, a rule was put in place that cars being licensed to new people must be three years old or less. He could not afford to replace the car and as transferability was ending, his son is now out of the only business he knows. I have met drivers who bought new cars and found during the process of licensing them that the regulations had changed and that they could not be licensed without significant changes, costing thousands of euro. Of course we must have regulation, and I support the ending of the system whereby taxi licences were sold on the open market, but we must regulate in a way that works for the industry and ensures that people do not lose their business and are not put out of business wrongly. These people were not criminals. They were simply trying to make a living, but the Government's regulations have forced them out of the industry.

Recently I raised the issue of the introduction of new age limits on cars, with specific reference to wheelchair-accessible vehicles, WAVs. Such vehicles are very expensive, but it is Government policy to expand the fleet of WAVs. The requirement that vehicles must be three years old or less on entering service and must leave the industry at 14 years makes it much more difficult for drivers to make a living with WAVs. Of course there should be age limits on vehicles, but all of these vehicles undergo NCTs. If they are on the road and faulty, then we really need to look at the NCT system and not draw arbitrary lines in the sand. I accept that such lines make it easier to ensure quality, but in the specific case of WAVs, it makes them less economically viable in all circumstances. The Minister of State refused to explain how he plans to offset this difficulty. He fobbed me off with a standard response from the NTA explaining age limits. I ask that he address this issue today.

The problem with many of the measures to tackle oversupply is they are completely indiscriminate and, in that respect, they end up hitting full-time, ordinary single-licence taxi drivers the hardest. These drivers are the ones with the least disposable cash to absorb the rise in costs. They are the ones who have been hit hardest by the oversupply caused by weekend taxi drivers who have full-time jobs elsewhere or people who bought up large numbers of licences and rented them out. The full-time single-licence drivers are the backbone of the industry. They are not there just on a Saturday night to bring one home from the pub but also on a Monday at dawn when one is in a rush to the airport. They are being hit the hardest. Some of the people who see no better way than to end their lives in this post-Celtic-tiger collapse are coming from their ranks.

I wish to raise an issue that is very important to me and that I have raised with the Minister of State on many occasions in the past. I also mentioned it in my speech on the Good Friday Agreement last night. The enactment of the Bill will mean that people who were convicted of offences as part of the conflict in the North, who were recognised by the Agreement and its terms, will be asked to appeal to keep their licences or will be barred from entering the industry. This is wrong. The Good Friday Agreement, which this State signed up to and has a duty to uphold, is clear in opposing barriers to employment for former political prisoners. The people of this country overwhelmingly backed the Agreement, but the Minister of State and the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Varadkar, have shown little regard for it. Last night the Minister of State indicated that he supported the Good Friday Agreement and I am now asking him to put his money where his mouth is.

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