Hansard

I congratulate my Glasgow colleague Pauline McNeill on bringing this important motion to the chamber for debate.

I hope that the minister has heard the words of members around the chamber on the critical issue that is faced by taxi drivers across our city and Scotland more widely. I speak from some experience: my dad is a taxi driver. He is in his 60s and drives a taxi in Glasgow. He does that because he was made redundant from the shipyards and it was a way for him to earn a stable income and have more control over his life after suffering from the impact of deindustrialisation in Glasgow.

That is the story of many taxi drivers in our city, who do the job because it offers flexibility and a stable income. They are, by and large, in their 50s and 60s. They are not the sort of people who are prepared or able to take on tens of thousands of pounds of debt to finance the purchase of new vehicles—nor would they want to, because they are not at the point in their careers where that makes sense.

We therefore have this wicked problem of a crunch. A new technology is coming in and internal combustion engine vehicles are being phased out, the new second-hand market is not established yet and there is not the financial wherewithal or the products available to facilitate that transition meaningfully. To add insult to injury, Glasgow City Council is pig-headedly pressing ahead with the blunt implementation of a low-emission zone and has not paid heed to the valid concerns that taxi drivers have raised.

I know that taxi drivers are not luddites. They are not anti-environmental improvement. They want to go with the grain, but they need to be given a fair deal in the way that bus companies have been given a fair deal to renew their fleets with substantial and generous public subsidies along with their large capital-raising capacity.

Taxi drivers, who are often self-employed, often do not have the means to raise capital and are at a point in their lives where they cannot get that kind of finance, so they need extra support from the Government. If they do not get that, the public good that taxis provide—which colleagues across the chamber have so eloquently described, whether it be the educational aspect, disability access or support for our night-time economy—will suffer. Indeed, we will all suffer, because we all have skin in the game with regard to having a thriving taxi industry.

Given that the transport system in Glasgow is basically non-existent from half past 11 at night until 6 am, taxis are all the more critical. We have heard about the safety implications of their not being available for workers and those who participate as consumers in our night-time economy, and we have also heard about the chilling effect that it is having on our wider economy, which is worth billions of pounds a year. Glasgow’s city centre has a very low residential population, so the city relies disproportionately on, as Mr Simpson described, people travelling from the outer suburbs and from places such as East Kilbride to visit hospitality venues in the city centre. If they are not able to do that, it will change behaviour, which will have an effect on revenue and result in business failure. If we do not address this issue at first hand, it will have a compounding effect.

We have lots of opportunities. I know that we have heard pretty damaging figures such as the number of licences in Glasgow being down by 15 per cent since 2019. In fact, I would argue that, when we add in shift drivers, the actual availability of taxis on the road is twice as big a factor, with a potential loss of up to a third or even a half of the available taxis on the streets of Glasgow at any one time. That number is pretty horrific, and I know from personal experience of coming off the train at Queen Street in the evenings how difficult it is to get a taxi, particularly midweek.

However, although this is a major issue, there are solutions. Greater Manchester’s clean air plan shows that it is possible to take action to improve air quality without harming the taxi trade; its proposal for a Greater Manchester-wide clean air zone has been introduced alongside funding of £21.4 million for the taxi industry to renew its fleet and allow for the transition to more compliant vehicles. We could do the same sort of thing with a major manufacturer such as the Allied Vehicles Group, the UK’s largest taxi manufacturer, which is based in and employs 600 people in Glasgow. That is one example of a joined-up approach that could be taken—that is, working with the industry to develop a product that is practical and which can work better than what has been done previously. The switched-on taxi loan scheme does not work. It does not provide the scale that is needed, and it does not address the issues.

I therefore appeal to the minister to look again at this problem and work with the council and the industry to solve it. There is a willingness to do this—we just need to get the right pieces in place to make it work.