War on wheels: an Uber driver and a black-cab driver debate London’s taxi trade

This week, 8,000 London taxi drivers brought central London to a standstill in protest at the rise of Uber, the industry-disrupting ride-hailing app, and the light-touch regulation they say allows it to threaten their livelihoods. There are around 100,000 private hire or minicab drivers in London (with around 10,000 new drivers licensed every year), and at least 25,000 of them drive for Uber. It has become an increasingly bitter dispute. Seamus Balfe, who has been a black-cab driver for 16 years, and James Farrar, an Uber driver who is also co-founder of United Private Hire Drivers, which represents minicab drivers, navigate the issues.

Seamus Balfe: Someone mentioned the name Uber to me a couple of years ago and I was dismissive. I thought: this will never take off, these people don’t know where they’re going, the passengers will get irate and never use the service again. I didn’t think it would survive. Then suddenly it was everywhere. There was a cab driver protest against them in June 2014, and I think the effect was to give them a lot of publicity. I’ve noticed the fall-off the most after 10pm. What used to happen was that people would spill out of theatres and pubs on to the streets, and for about an hour and a half, there would be people wanting cabs. Now Uber has flooded the West End with cabs at night – people come out of the theatre and hit the button [on the app]. Driving around central London, I notice people standing on the street who, instead of looking around for a cab, are looking at their phones. Why did you get into it?

James Farrar: I’ve been doing it for about a year. I came out of a long corporate career and I didn’t want to jump back into that. I’m setting up an investigative NGO called Networked Rights and I can’t afford not to have an income. I come from the software industry and it quickly became interesting to me how the Uber model works.

SB: You’ve infiltrated Uber.

JF: I think that’s too strong a word, but I’m 100% in solidarity with my fellow drivers. There are a lot of drivers doing it for all sorts of reasons. The industry absolutely depends on the exploitation of vulnerable people – some guys may have no other option than to do this. Others have been driving professionally for a long time and it’s what they know, it’s a chosen career.

SB: Did lots of them used to work for minicab firms?

JF: Yes, and many of them are prepared to accept less money at Uber to get away from the level of discrimination and exploitation they were receiving from corrupt minicab controllers. At minicab firms, they depend on a human controller who decides whose family gets to eat next week. There are favourite drivers who get the work. Many of the minicab firms operate on a rental basis, so you’re paying rent every week and you may not get the work. So they’ve come over to Uber. It’s more professional, they don’t have to deal with a human controller, it’s been replaced by an algorithm. But the model is just as exploitative, if not more so.

SB: Have you come across this insurance thing? I’ve heard about Uber drivers who produce a hire and reward insurance certificate [specialist professional insurance] but they’ve got a two-week cooling off period, so once Uber approve it, they cancel it.

JF: That’s the charge that’s made, but it’s not my experience of drivers I know.

SB: Would they tell you?

JF: Well, no. But I don’t believe that Transport for London (TfL), or even the police, have unearthed any serious problem there, where drivers have been stopped or got into accidents. But the same is true of the black taxis. How do we know they are insured?

SB: Because we have to display it.

JF: What we have seen evidence of is that Uber was not fully capable of checking insurance documents.

SB: That’s a fundamental flaw in the system. If someone knows they can get away with that, you could get a flood of people doing it. You have to make Uber comply with the same rules we do. To give just one example, we are accessible to people who use wheelchairs, but private hire cars aren’t.

JF: On the question of same standards, I’d bring up the issue of driver identification. We wear photo IDs, you guys don’t. TfL has been pressured by the taxi trade to propose that we should be providing biometric data, like fingerprinting. The problem is operators like Uber have not been able to protect the privacy of drivers. Customers have been trolling drivers on the internet …

SB: It’s the other way around as well. There was that threatening voicemail an Uber driver left on a woman’s phone.

JF: We don’t have a passenger’s contact number. The central Uber switchboard patches you through to the customer. That driver didn’t have her personal number. The taxi trade is looking for stronger identification from us. After [the London black-cab driver] John Worboys was convicted [of multiple rapes] in 2009, London TravelWatch [the transport watchdog] recommended that taxi drivers’ photo ID were displayed facing the passenger, and Tfl agreed to do that. It hasn’t happened. Yet we’re wearing photo ID and they want even more stringent identification. Why is there a double standard?

SB: Worboys was the only cab driver in I don’t know how many years to be convicted …

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JF: And David Perry [another black-cab driver who was convicted of sexual assault in 2015].

SB: OK, two. There are numerous examples of assaults and threatening behaviour [by Uber drivers]. An Uber driver’s CRB check goes back six months, ours goes back three years.

JF: That’s not true. Ours is exactly the same. That’s the trouble with the taxi community. It’s so insular that these stories get going and they get amplified. It’s the same issue with those stories of drivers being accused of defecating in people’s front gardens around Heathrow. How do we know it’s an Uber driver? The Stop Heathrow Expansion Campaign offered to send me samples [laughs].

SB: You’re not Gillian McKeith.

JF: Private hire drivers provide something like 78% of TfL’s Public Carriage Office budget and get no facilities at all, nowhere to stop.

SB: That’s the privilege of a black-cab driver.

JF: I don’t think it’s a privilege to use a toilet.

SB: Not a privilege, but it’s set up as a domain for black-cab drivers. It’s to discourage private hire drivers. You’re supposed to go in and straight out again as a private hire driver [at the Heathrow airport stop]. If you want to use the bus lanes, do the Knowledge.

JF: The point is, we provide 78% of the budget and we get zero. There are 100,000 private hire drivers trying to do their job and we are vilified by the press and by the regulator. Going back to photo IDs, do you accept that taxi drivers should display photo IDs in the cab? So the passenger has a right to know who you are?

SB: I don’t think it’s necessary, because of the physical separation between the driver and passenger, whereas the average minicab driver could easily reach across or reach back and touch their passenger. They can lock all the doors and the passenger can’t get out – that can’t happen in a black cab. We’ve done the training, TfL know us. We have a vested interest, we’re professional – it’s taken me three years to get into that driver’s seat, I’m not going to ruin it. Thousands are screened out of the Knowledge process. I had 17 appearances in front of a guy, quite often a police officer, who tried to wind me up, distract me, and if you snap or you show any kind of …

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JF: How does that identify a potential sex attacker?

SB: It doesn’t, but it can identify character flaws. [If you fail the tests] they will keep pushing you back. The Knowledge is a three-year process, and if you crack, or you get into any trouble, you won’t get through it.

JF: I don’t think the Knowledge can screen for it. It reminds me of Michael Liebreich, who is a TfL board member, who went out on Operation Neon [with the Met Police to crack down on taxi touts] and tweeted about the enforcement team “dealing with” touts and potential sex attackers. How do you know what a potential sex attacker looks like? It’s a highly inflammatory and discriminatory statement that tars 100,000 private hire drivers. Touts are a problem, but one of the advantages that Uber has brought to the market is there is less temptation or need to tout – you’re going to get a job fairly immediately from the app if you’re a genuine private hire driver.

SB: But as a tout you can charge someone three times the price and not have to give 20% to Uber. So there is an incentive to tout.

JF: I don’t know one driver that would take that risk.

SB: Let’s say in the next two years the number of private hire drivers becomes 150,000, then there will be minicabs [waiting on every corner]. I already see a lot of private hire drivers setting up their own ranks.

JF: I do hate to see the pressure your trade is put under. It’s supposedly a free market system, but it’s not fair and it’s not free. I’m an Uber driver, but I think it is a socially dangerous business model. Uber insists it’s a technology company, an internet network, but the reality is it’s a physical network of assets and labour paid for by other people. Uber is insulated from those costs and the risks.

SB: In two or three years’ time, when they have saturated the market, will they suddenly increase the prices?

JF: It could raise prices in the end, but it could also use that network to find other business opportunities. It has a potential audience of several million Londoners, and could do all sorts of things with that data. Look at Uber’s situation – it pays little corporation tax, and pays its drivers so poorly that a lot of our members are reliant on working tax credits, which is effectively a subsidy to Uber. It’s not fair that drivers should be exploited at that level, and it’s not fair that you have to compete against what is effectively the equivalent of a £1 T-shirt at Primark. It’s cheaper to take an Uber than get on the Tube. That is a complete abandonment of responsibility for public transport policy by TfL. You’re taking that revenue out of the public transportation system and putting it in the pockets of private investors.

SB: I’d say to Uber drivers: if you want to be a professional driver in London, do the Knowledge. I’ve worked for companies who want to skin you for everything you’ve got, and I didn’t want to do that. Become independent, become self-employed, have a trade and something you can be proud of. London taxis will survive. There are people who don’t want the cheapest option. They want somebody who, when they get in, will take them exactly where they want to go. Boris Johnson wants to portray us as Luddites, but lots of cab drivers take credit cards and are on apps like Hailo. That’s not Luddite behaviour.

JF: The taxi trade and the private hire trade should set aside their differences and work together towards the things we can agree on. There must be a cap on the number of private hire licences because the way we are going is causing congestion, and undermining the taxi trade and the public transport network. And an end to the discrimination and prejudicial assumptions against private hire drivers. Start understanding that in London in 2016, without word of exaggeration, [we are witnessing with companies such as Uber] mobile sweatshops. And the regulator knows about it. Consumers must educate themselves about what is happening. These low fares have to be paid by somebody. If consumers don’t recognise it, and we accept this type of business model in our economy – well, guess what, one day your job is going to go the same way.