Policies to control the age of taxis could be looked at by Pendle councillors, as work continues on improving vehicle safety and standards, and rules for firms and individual drivers.

Pendle Council’s Taxi Licensing Committee has been asked to consider establishing a working group to look at policies used by councils regarding the age of vehicles.

It comes against a backdrop of debate, talks and some significant disagreement about how best to raise standards for taxis, especially private hire vehicles and drivers.

Over the past year or two, Pendle’s taxi committee, drivers and taxi businesses have discussed various topics and changes. Spot-check taxi inspections in 2023 and early 2024 found ‘unacceptably high failure rates’ in cabs, So councillors were advised to back changes including taxi drivers being required to use a mobile phone app for checks and having vehicle maintenance training.

The taxi committee is currently working through an action plan. Items in it include vehicle accessibility for disabled passengers, enforcing taxi licensing rules, training for drivers, possibly fitting CCTV inside taxis and exploring options to allow passengers to share journeys and pay separate fares.

This summer, the taxi committee has also looked at changing a small part of Pendle Council’s taxi licensing policy. This was to add some some flexibility regarding decisions on drivers who re-submit an application for a licence after a previous application has been refused  or revoked.

Under council rules, the decision to suspend or revoke a driver’s licence is delegated to a top officer working with the taxi committee’s chairman. The old policy was that drivers seeking a licence would have to wait 12 months if their application was refused or revoked. But some councillors wanted to slightly change the wording to state that  re-applications will ‘not normally‘ be granted within 12 months.

The move came after a debate at a full council meeting earlier this summer. Some councillors argued that Pendle Council officers may not always make the correct judgement about a driver. So the taxi committee was a good forum to hear from individual drivers and to have some flexibility to grant an application, if councillors felt the driver’s case was justified.

Officers and some councillors said the previous system worked well. But accepted some change was possible. The taxi committee supported the minor change and would feed-back to the full council.