Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and our guests in the Gallery. I thank the Minister of State for the manner in which he always receives representations made in the Seanad. He sets the record, certainly in my time, in that he has commenced in this House two Bills in very rapid succession.

In the regulation of the sector, quantity licensing must be avoided at all costs. The Minister of State is trying to achieve quality licensing. The two must never overlap. The quantity licensing system led to a vast shortage of taxis, particularly in Dublin. At least four court judges said taxi licences should not command a scarcity value. The value of a taxi plate was over ¤100,000 in Dublin, and values were also very high in Ennis and Killarney. People were earning super-normal profits based on a piece of paper whose sole value was based on the fact that the Government would not issue any more pieces of paper.

There is a mixture of systems in the United Kingdom. Some do not ban new entrants as a point of principle while others do. The British Government is strongly encouraging all local authorities that still maintain quantity restrictions to remove them as soon as possible. Quantity restrictions represent the wrong way to run the industry and the courts overturned the decision thereon. The authors of the Goodbody report considered the system of restricting licences pertaining to quotas that were 20 years out of date and found that, in the country as a whole, the value of time savings, accounting for the value of time savings the Department of Transport uses to evaluate investments, was ¤780 million. Some ¤300 million of this pertained to Dublin.

Research was also conducted on the public. Some 96% believed the increase in numbers was good, while approximately 3% disagreed. Under 1% strongly disagreed. In a sense, I am echoing the words of Senator Labhrás Ó Murchú, a fellow Tipperaryman, who said yesterday in the House that there should be more optimism. The review group is far too pessimistic and I will deal with some of the criticism. What occurred was a great success. An industry worth ¤1.5 billion was built up in a short time and it employed 36,000 people, three quarters of whom would not have been employed in the industry had the sector not been deregulated. If the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Richard Bruton, had 25,000 extra jobs, his PR department would be in ecstasy and float off into the stratosphere. What occurred was a success and provided a service that consumers wanted and valued. An industry worth ¤1.5 billion is much more important than certain others. The receipts of Dublin Bus in 2008 amounted to ¤200 million and those from the railways amounted to ¤190 million. The receipts of Bus Éireann were worth ¤67 million. There was growth of 82% in Dublin when the taxi market was opened up.

I am not sure about the Minister of State's statement that we moved from a laissez-faire position. I heard a speech by Kathleen Doyle, the taxi regulator, at a transport conference in Lisbon in 2010. She was regulating the sector between 2003 and the present time, and she gave examples to illustrate her points. On the next Stage, I will bring forward some of the evidence.

It is too pessimistic to neglect the Goodbody report and all the success to which it pointed. Has the Department of Transport forgotten the report? It seems to have amnesia in regard to good news. I support Senator Ó Murchú in trying to get some good news into the House on this issue. Deregulation was a success in that 4,000 taxis became 21,000. This provided jobs and services, and ¤750 million in time savings.

There were faults, however. I looked up the Garda report but could not find any information on faults, as it has no special section on taxis. I looked up the documentation of the Department of Social Protection, which has investigated the sector. In its report on achieving compliance, the section on taxis states that one taxi vehicle out of 36,000 was impounded as it was driven by an individual with fake taxi driver documentation and two fake driving licences. This is according to the Department of Social Protection's fraud initiative. Let us not get carried away, however, with what the "Prime Time" programme indicated while ignoring the positive evidence in the Goodbody report and the findings of the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Burton. There are no other quantified statements of crimes or social welfare fraud committed by taxi drivers other than what I have indicated. The industry has an image that would suggest there is such fraud, but it is not evident in the reports.

Sometimes the incumbents in an industry that has traditionally been protected try to bad-mouth the new entrants. That is what has been happening in this State. They wanted to keep the industry shut so they could sell a licence for ¤130,000, or more. In New York, a medallion sells for $1 million. This indicates the amount of super-normal profits taxi drivers earn from keeping new entrants out. Thus, the incumbents will bad-mouth new entrants, although I do not know if there is any evidence as to what they do to the new entrants. What I have described is a tradition in heavily regulated industries and we must avoid it here.

There were 377 complaints in the year to December 2012. I looked up the Ombudsman's report and there were 3,700 complaints about public servants. Our constituents are ten times more likely to complain to the Ombudsman about abuse by a public servant than they are about a taxi person, so let us get that into perspective. There were 377 complaints for 75 million journeys. It is not that great. A good service is being provided which is appreciated and used by the public. I wonder if some of the decline in the business is as a result of uninformed comment that this business is unsatisfactory, merits a high level of consumer dissatisfaction, which is not shown in the figures of only 377 complaints, and is carried on by fraudsters, which was not shown up in the Minister for Social Protection's analysis of the industry.

The courts opened this up from the traditional licensing system for very good reasons but I worry about the attempts to shut it down again in SI 250 of 2010 in which new entrants are forbidden unless they operate wheelchair accessible vehicles. We have had a recession, and we all regret that. Taxi numbers are falling, and that is documented. We cannot say that Aldi and Lidl cannot open here or that we do not want any new industries to open up here because there has been a recession in the economy. People who are self-employed will experience recessions, and taxi drivers are self-employed. The assumption that the Parliament and the Minister of State have some duty to protect them unfairly against new entrants and against competition underpins some of this legislation, and I will table amendments to it on Committee Stage. The quantity aspects should not have been reintroduced by that statutory instrument. I note the Minister of State is repealing the 2003 Act, and I agree with him and will support the amendment in the Bill. I think he is having second thoughts on section 13, and I agree with him on that. However, we cannot have the wish of the House to improve quality become a backdoor method to reintroduce quantity licences which gave us an appalling industry in the past. It might be better for the regulator and for everybody connected to this to point out that the numbers illustrate a very small level of abuse, complaint and social welfare fraud.

Another point arises and it would be interesting if constitutional lawyers, like Senator Bacik, had a view. The Minister of State mentioned on radio this morning that there were 6,000 criminals in the industry.