One year to become a pilot, but four years to become a taxi driver
It takes one year to become a commercial pilot, but four years to become a taxi driver - unless this problem is addressed the trade will wither on the vine.
London is a wonderful place for business and for its quality of life. It can be argued that London is now the world’s top city. Our restaurants are better than ever, our entertainment venues and theatres are unsurpassed but most importantly our business network and financial institutions are unequalled.
London is as good as its gets.
"No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford," said writer Samuel Johnson. He was not wrong.
Naturally we complain about our transport infrastructure and about the traffic, we’re British, it’s our role in life. Even so have you been to Paris recently, have you seen how bad the traffic is there? Needless to say Paris has the famous Metro, but the Tube is regularly praised too, especially by visitors to London, so it may not be quite as ’bad’ as we think and it is improving along with the buses. New York is also a great city but the traffic; well it’s as bad or possibly even worse.
Benchmark
One feature that makes London so ’liveable’, everyone would agree is that in London we have the very best taxis and the very best taxi drivers in the world. Getting into a London cab is accepted to be the next best thing to having arrived at your destination. That you will, without a doubt, get there safe and sound. That you will rarely, if ever, have to suffer the stress of needing to tell the driver what to do or where to go as you would often be required to do in New York.
Around the world the international taxi associations with which I have had the privilege of being involved look at London’s taxi industry as being the ’Rolls Royce’ of the business, the benchmark, the silver service, the very best - and yes we should be proud.
What a bombshell it would be to uncover the possibility that yet another of the UK PLC’s symbolic industries was in real danger of drifting into oblivion; surely that couldn’t be so?
At the risk of becoming the messenger who gets shot, I’m afraid that is a clear prospect. Worse, the alarming possibility which looms large is that when the Olympics Games come to town in 2012 our taxi industry could be too feeble and marginalised to play any serious part in the spectrum of London’s transport infrastructure. So how can that be, how could it have happened?
Over the last few years London’s famous taxi trade has diminished in size. In fact TfL statistics show that we have an ageing population of taxi drivers. There are more drivers over the age of 75 years than there are under 25 years. There are more drivers over 70, than there are under 30. So what is happening, why and what could be done about it, if anything?
Most Londoners will have heard of the famous ’Knowledge of London’, this is the long-drawn-out series of tests which trainee taxi drivers have to complete satisfactorily (along with criminal record checks and of course a bespoke driving assessment) before they can ply for hire in one of the famous, iconic vehicles.
If we look back a little more than 30 years ago, candidates for the knowledge, who decided to throw themselves into studying to become a taxi driver, took something like an average of 11 months. This was to complete the syllabus of routes, landmarks and buildings and be tested to the satisfaction of the Public Carriage Office (PCO) examiners, who were tasked with the job of examining London’s budding cabbies.
It was never easy, it took hard work going out on a moped learning all those routes and points and committing them entirely to memory. Indeed the majority of candidates always dropped out in the first three months. Despite this the taxi trade grew by a few per cent every year not quite meeting the growth in demand caused by greater personal affluence in the capital. It could also be argued that this was why the Mini Cab became so popular, demand inevitably becomes fulfilled.
The PCO examiners were mainly expolicemen and over a period of years it became ever more difficult to recruit these examiners.
As a consequence of the lack of examiners by the 1980’s there was a log jam of candidates so the testing methodology was changed. Rather than asking candidates to return regularly for tests, they were asked to go away, to do the whole syllabus and then apply for testing after two years.
Only no-one told the examiners (or so it would seem). They carried on testing in the old approach and consequently the time it took to pass through the whole system grew and grew to the point in 2004 where it was taking an average of 52 months for a candidate to get through the system.
By this time all of the examiners were now taxi drivers themselves and spurred on by the drivers association whose policy is one of open protectionism, the examiners felt it to be their solemn duty to make the landmarks and points so hard and so obscure so as to slow up the progress of new entrants to the industry.
It takes an average of four years or more to become a taxi driver, who on earth would subject themselves to that? It takes less than a year to become a commercial pilot. Well it would seem predictably, that many less people than we would want are applying to become taxi drivers, in fact the numbers of those applying is all but collapsing.
The knock on effect is that older drivers naturally work less and don’t want to work unsocial hours, thus a key criterion of the service is diminished and of course the numbers of taxis and drivers is beginning to drop.
To be fair to the PCO they have begun to identify the problem (after many years of lobbying by some of us) and have come up with a pilot program, fiddling at the edges, to modernise the testing methodology. Where they have done so, as you would have thought, candidates have passed out more quickly. But the wheels of change move very slowly and the pilot scheme only includes a small sample.
Let us be clear, the existing standard is superb and must not be diluted, but delivery of that standard does not have to take four and a half years. It can be done by a committed candidate in one year, which would attract potential new high grade candidates back to the industry. A modernisation of the testing bureaucracy (rather than a change in the excellent syllabus) or better yet a complete outsourcing of the examination process to academia would be the appropriate route.
The PCO is a regulator; it should not be the regulator's responsibility for delivery of the examination service, its role should merely be to scrutinize and ensure the maintenance of standards, which is what we all want.
TfL, who are responsible now for the PCO, are aware of the solutions, they are just moving very slowly. They are also somewhat fearful of a vociferous drivers association and of the political fall out, because many taxi drivers now erroneously believe, as a consequence of the protectionist strap line which is that a change would ’flood London with Taxi drivers’ - a statement which is patently untrue.
London needs a steady growth and regeneration of an intrinsically first class industry. Every trade needs new young blood to prevent it from withering on the vine otherwise it will end up with just what the protectionists don’t want - the complete abandonment of the trades’ high standards. Otherwise the new norm would be much like New York’s taxi drivers who are also famous, but for quite a different reason.
Geoffrey Riesel is chairman of Radio Taxis Group Limited; international vice resident of the US-based Taxicab Limousine and Paratransit Association and chairman of the European Radio Taxi Association. He
is also a member of the board of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Published in the July 2006 edition of London Business Matters and reproduced with the kind permission of The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry.