Local taxi drivers in Sussex have blocked a council’s move to increase fares, claiming the rise was ‘immoral’.
The battle lines have been drawn up after Adur District Council’s licensing committee heard a debate between those who supported the rise and those who opposed it at a meeting last week. The proposal was eventually rejected because of the number of drivers opposed to its implementation.
Chairman Carson Albury said: “It is up to the taxi drivers themselves to determine what fare they think is right. It is the second time we have had to go through this process and it is getting a bit tedious.”
The hackney carriage tariff has not increased in Adur since 2008. A request for a raise in fares in 2011 was also rejected. The district has the 18th dearest taxi fares out of 365 areas across the UK and is the second most expensive location for taxis in Sussex. Those opposed to the increase said that it was specifically ‘designed to unfairly penalise the shorter journey, exactly the opposite of the traditional method of constructing taxi tariffs’.
The bigger picture
This local spat does raise a larger issue – is it time that taxi fares were standardised across the UK, or is it justifiable to allow taxi drivers in different parts of the country to charge wildly different rates for a journey of the same distance in comparable circumstances? The variation in prices per mile across the UK can be considerable and (with the exception of major cities such as London and Manchester) there may not be a genuine reason for that to continue to be the case. The price of fuel – often cited as a major factor in how much taxi drivers charge – is now fairly stable across the country, while other factors such as the price of taxi driver insurance and other running costs are broadly similar throughout the UK.
So why is a taxi customer in a small location in rural Sussex paying more for the same type of journey than over three hundred and fifty other passengers across the UK?
Perhaps it is time that a greater degree of parity was achieved with the cost of taxi journeys, regardless of the location.