Fading away?

Despite good intentions

This is a true story.

I was coming back from a meeting, well drinks really, with a couple of financial journalists last week in the evening. Not exactly on a tube route so I jumped in a black taxi to get home.

An iconic London black taxi, a Hackney Carriage.

We pretty soon got stuck in some stationary traffic due to the massive amount of roadworks going on in London to create miles and miles of cycle lanes at the instigation of the current London Mayor, Boris Johnson.

The driver was a chatty type and after giving the new cycle lanes his seal of disapproval, not because they weren’t a good idea he stated, but over the fact that cyclists wouldn’t be compelled to use them but could still use the main road. I don’t know if this is true but I guess it has that certain ring of British eccentricity about it.

Happy to sit and listen rather than really engage I let him move on to the taxi trade. Anyone who has ever been in a black cab knows that most London cabbies will happily chatter on whether you are really listening or not but despite not really contributing I was interested enough in what he had to say not to interrupt.

At no time did I tell him that I was a wealth manager, an independent financial adviser or IFA.

He talked about the new style competitors on the roads. Uber was uppermost but also minicabs, private hire like the well established London giant Addison Lee and others.

I thought he was going to go the route, pun intended, of bitter complaining about unfair competition, of unlicensed drivers, of poor criminal checks and ‘unmetered’ fares which were really metered which is a charge often levelled at Uber globally.

He took a different approach. He stated that black cab drivers were not against progress, had happily competed against minicabs and private hire for decades and, he said, tended to attract different types of customers in any case.

His complaint was around his regulator, Transport for London (TfL), previously the Public Carriage Office (PCO) and its lack of support and understanding of what a black cab was and how proud the drivers were of them and the services they provided to the public.

Fiercely independent and customer centric, he felt that they were being regulated out of existence. After years of study and learning their craft via The Knowledge, a very tough test which involves learning all the street and routes in London he claimed TfL was never content but still kept bringing in ever more stringent standards not applied to other participants in the taxi trade.

Emissions, medical health checks, new style cabs, cleanliness and damage checks, criminal record checks, the list was endless he said and ever growing.

He went on, despite he said having served the public for decades, with the lowest complaints and the highest satisfaction ratings from their customers he was absolutely convinced that the costs of compliance and his perception of it being so much easier for the regulator to censure independent operators than it was to go for big businesses with powerful lobbying capabilities and ties to government meant they were a soft target.

Whilst he said that he would be the last to claim that the London cab driver was perfect or that they had not made mistakes along the way he was convinced that the vast majority of them had always sought to do the best they could by their customers and continued to do so despite massive and ongoing disruption from their regulator which appeared to constantly favour big business or new technology based alternatives.

He said they were probably doing it all with good intentions and without any real malice and had a real notion that it was for the public good. He just wanted the standards and ideals to be applied equally and fairly.

As we pulled up outside my home he concluded by saying that most black cabbies were looking to retire, that most were in their fifties in any case and that the sheer cost and burden of being regulated as the gold standard on the one hand but with impossibly high standards expected with ever more to come but with virtually no support dividend in return for their efforts meant they weren’t very able to attract new entrants in to become drivers any more.

That the iconic London black cab would probably just fade away over the next few years.

As I got out and paid at the window I wished him well as he had painted a rather bleak outlook for the independent, professional black cab driver.

Could be worse he said, “I could be an IFA. They get treated even worse than we do by their regulator. It won’t be until them and us have gone that they will realise what they had and then it will all be too late.”

It’s not often I’m left speechless, I’m not even saying I agree, in fact I said nothing after paying but I did go indoors with quite a lot to think about.

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