For people crowding back into restaurants, stumbling out of reopened clubs, or heading again to airports, life is getting back to normal. At least that is until they pick up their phone for a taxi, or search a ride-hailing app, in vain. Where have all the cab drivers gone?
“It’s horrendous,” says Steve Farrier, owner of Alpha Cars in Havant, Hampshire. “You can’t get drivers for love or money. You don’t get a break.” He turns the automated booking service off at weekends, “or we couldn’t meet the demand”.
For most of 2020 and 2021, it was customers that were missing, as Covid killed the cab trade. Now firms small and large, from Alpha to Uber, lack drivers at a time when business could boom again.
Many cab drivers who left – for sectors such as retail, which have staff shortages of their own – have little desire to return. Others face long waits for paperwork and tests. And those who stayed can choose the jobs they take, leaving the less lucrative pick-ups stranded.
If a taxi is a luxury for some, it remains a lifeline in rural areas without public transport, for shift workers, those with disabilities, and people out late – particularly women, whose safety has again been put squarely in focus this year.
“In Manchester, which has a good night-time economy, it’s a real problem,” says Derek Brocklehurst, manager of Cresta Cars, one of the city’s largest private hire firms. After more than 40 years in business, he says: “We feel embarrassed, unable to fulfil our customers’ requirements, with people having to wait one or two hours.” Some drivers only want to work days since the pandemic, he says: “They’ve taken on different jobs, their work-life has changed and they are spending more time with their families.”
To apply to be a driver, with record checks and medicals, can cost nearly £600 and take months. Some authorities, such as Manchester, require geographical route tests, which catch many out and, Brocklehurst argues, are unnecessary: “Uber operate from Liverpool, Wolverhampton, rock up with satnavs and there is no issue with that. There’s a big disparity between all the councils.”
Similar frustrations are felt across the industry. Claire Reynolds runs a small chauffeur service, NTD, from Leighton Buzzard, for pre-booked journeys such as airport transfers. Regardless, new drivers have to wait months to take the same Bedfordshire route test as taxis on ranks. “It’s going to be a six-month process to get a new driver, which is incredible,” Reynolds says. “People want to work, but we’re held up by bureaucracy.”
Steve Wright, chair of the Licensed Private Hire Car Association (LPHCA), is scathing: “The barriers to entry are ridiculous.” As well as tardy councils, the DVLA and overstretched health services have been accused of being slow with licences and medicals.
The Department for Transport says licensed vehicle numbers in England decreased 16% in the year to June, and licensed drivers by 6%. But the LPHCA says many more are not working: it estimates only 160,000 of the nearly 300,000 pre-Covid cab drivers are active.
The Local Government Association says councils try to support the taxi trade by “taking a flexible and pragmatic approach, [but] need to ensure that important safeguards that protect the public are maintained”.
Meanwhile, the biggest player in the market, Uber, raised its rates in London last week – base fares up 10%, airport transfers up 25% – to try to lure 20,000 more drivers. Uber admits its users have experienced ever more cancelled trips, as well as surge pricing, when too many passengers chase the few cars available.
Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association, representing black-cab drivers, has long argued Uber’s cheap fares were never sustainable. London taxi driver numbers have also fallen, by about 5%; but a bigger issue is the lack of actual vehicles, he says. Expensive to own and insure, and with older diesels falling foul of clean-air rules, some 5,000 black cabs were handed back, sold or scrapped as the city emptied last year, and only 13,500 remain: “You can’t rent a cab anywhere at the moment.”
He points out that there is no shortage of aspiring Tube drivers – “the worst job in the world, but well paid”. Unions concur. As Nader Awaad, chair of the United Private Hire Drivers branch of the IWGB union, puts it: “There is not a driver shortage. There is a pay shortage.”
The IWGB says drivers for Uber, Bolt and others are refusing jobs because costs have risen, not least fuel, and pay has been cut by fixed fares. Uber says hourly rates can be £20-£30 – but during rides, not in the time spent driving to pick up a customer.
Minicab drivers who switched to fixed employment with supermarkets have seen better, McNamara says: “They get tea breaks, holidays, national insurance, someone supplying the vehicle. And they’re not grovelling to some drunk at three in the morning to get their star rating. Why come back to Uber?”
