IoL Member Consultation - Welsh Government - Improving Public Transport (taxis and PHVs) (December 2018)

INTRODUCTION

This survey seeks IoL Members' views on the white paper published by the Welsh Government White Paper including proposals to legislate for reforming the planning and delivery of local bus services and licensing of taxis and private hire vehicles.

The proposals set out in the consultation can be viewed online and include:

Option A: The centralisation of the licensing regime.

This would entail the redirection of the existing taxi and PHV licensing regime to the Joint Transport Authority - a single national licensing authority referred to earlier in the consultation in connection with proposals to reform buses. This would be alongside proposals to tackle:

1.      the variation in taxi and PHV standards between the twenty-two local authorities in Wales;

2.      the inability to take enforcement action against vehicles which are operating “out-of-area”; and

3.      Proposal 3: the difficulty in sharing relevant safeguarding information.

Option B: Achieving 1-3 of Option A, but retaining the existing arrangements with responsibility for the licensing function remaining with local authorities.

The consultation has clear implications for Wales and will potentially set the scene for consideration of similar proposals for licensing arrangements in England. We are therefore consulting all IoL members to gather views on the proposals in order to make an informed response to the Welsh Government and also to inform DfT.

Please help us to provide an accurate representation of views by giving us your feedback via this survey.

Responses to the Welsh Government must be submitted by 27 March 2019. To give us time to compose the IoL response, this survey will run until midnight on 10 March 2019.

We will provide reports from this survey as part of our submission to the Welsh Government but will exclude contact information provided by respondents. We cannot take responsibility for information provided within the detail of responses so please be aware of this when giving your answers to the consultation questions.