Transport Minister Lilian Greenwood has told MPs she is open to including mandatory CCTV in new national guidelines for taxis.
The government’s review of taxi licensing in England follows Baroness Casey’s report on grooming gangs, which identified taxis being used by offenders across the country and recommended tougher rules.
At the moment, taxi drivers can buy a private hire vehicle licence from one council but work as far away as they like, taking advantage of lower standards, cheaper licences, and a lack of enforcement.
This allows them to get around tough rules aimed at protecting children, such as Rotherham’s gold standard licensing scheme, which includes CCTV in cabs.
Speaking to the Commons Transport Committee, Greenwood said she did not want to “demonise the trade” but MPs could not be “complacent” about the urgent need to strengthen the law.
“We know that a small number of people in the sector played a role in the absolutely awful abuse of girls in our communities,” she said, adding that she would not rule out any measures for minimum standards.
Asked by Labour MP for Burton and Uttoxeter Jacob Collier if she would back CCTV in principle, Greenwood said mandating cameras in taxis was “something we absolutely ought to be open to considering”, although she admitted it could be “controversial”.
“I think there’s an argument that CCTV should be a national requirement because of the potential safety it provides for passengers but also for drivers as well,” she said.
“I met Rotherham [council] very recently and they’re one of the 8% of local authorities that do mandate CCTV.
“I can absolutely see why that’s the case and therefore I think it’s worth us considering as part of national minimum standards.”
The Casey review had singled out Rotherham as a council that had gone “above and beyond” following its own grooming scandal and had “transformed” its approach to taxi licensing “in efforts to ensure taxis cannot be used to commit group-based child sexual exploitation again”.
“However, they are being hindered by a lack of stringency elsewhere in the country, and legal loopholes which mean drivers can apply for a licence anywhere in the country and then operate in another area,” Casey said, recommending the government take action on this “immediately”.
The government will now introduce the power to set minimum standards in the English Devolution Bill, with the aim of reducing the incentive to “shop around” for licences, the committee heard.
A investigation showed the scale of the problem of licence shopping, with one-in-five private hire vehicles in England, such as Ubers and minicabs, buying licences from Wolverhampton City Council, where they are cheaper and rules are less stringent than in other parts of the country.
Fewer than 4% of Wolverhampton’s nearly 50,000 licences were operating within the city that year, with the rest operating as far afield as Newcastle, Somerset, Cardiff and Skegness.
But the scheme was designed so each licensing authority must enforce its own rules, meaning Wolverhampton has officers travelling all over England in order to keep tabs on its licencees.
Laurence Turner, the Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield, said he worried the dominance of one council’s licensing system meant a race to the bottom.
“We heard from Wolverhampton that they do not, as a matter of policy, go beyond the minimum standards currently recommended by the Department [for Transport],” he said.
“There’s some evidence that other authorities have been unwilling to enforce higher discretionary standards because they fear that drivers in future will simply go to Wolverhampton or to other licensing authorities instead.”
Responding, Greenwood said: “I don’t think it’s a good situation that so many drivers are licensing with Wolverhampton… [although] some of the things they do around safeguarding are very good, for example daily checks against national databases.
“I am concerned about the potential for there to be, because of licence shopping, that it can become a race to the bottom and that’s precisely why we want to introduce the national standards.”
She added: “I don’t want people to be shopping around for licences.”
The minister said funding had also been allocated in the spending review for a new database to be built to assist with security checks and cross-border enforcement.
