Watched a wee bit of the other panel as well late the other night, and could spend hours and hours wittering on about the maybe 20 minutes in total I watched. As I'm sure all of us could
But some other thoughts that have popped into my head maybe 24+ hours later, so maybe they're the more important bits - or, at least, important to me
The Uber rep was certainly under the cosh over drivers' earnings, and deservedly so, and could spend ages going through all of that. And imagine if we were able to ask them questions like the committee members...
As I said last night, good questioning from Dr Scott Arthur in that regard, but he fell down a bit on the WAV stuff, when there was effectively no differentiation between HCs and PHVs in the discussion. And if they were gunning for getting a certain %age PH as WAVs, then that begged the usual (unasked) question, who runs the WAVs, and who gets to run the Skoda Scalas?
(And although I know him primarily as the former Edinburgh Council transport chair (or convener up here), I didn't know he'd also been on the licensing committee
So to the extent that he's all cycle lanes, public transport and 20mph limits along wide-open, deserted roads at 3am, and was also a licensing councillor, I doubt if the Edinburgh trade are a particular fan of his.
And one bit that stood out from the Medway op was when (I'm sure) he stated that income was hugely down locally because of *unlicensed* cars? I suspect he actually means cars not licensed locally, and should have been pulled up on that.
And although I only watched snippets of the last meeting, and only snippets of this one, at a rough guess I'd say the committee members are a bit better informed than last time round, and the questioning more astute.
Was very impressed when one of the MPs (Alex Mayer, who's a woman
) asked something about 'app based private hire', or something like that, so a much more accurate description than the 'ride-hailing giant' pish used on TaxiPoint et al
(And also instructive in that regard that the Veezu bod stated the split they have between app and telephone bookings - was it 30% telephone, or the other way round? Anyway, whatever the numbers, that illustrates that it's more of a spectrum between phone-only ops (only very small ones now, I'd guess), the now vast majority using phones and apps, and the app-only platforms (aka 'ride-hailers').)
And also a tad surprising that the discussion questioned the whole councillor/licensing committee thing, and whether there was an alternative. Surprised Mr Button or others didn't use the term quasi-judicial (although maybe it was used at other times), which is obviously quite a technical term, but surely not too technical for a committee of the legislature, aka Parliament
)
But, of course, all the participants were basically promoting a sectional interest, for good or bad. The Oldham councillor, for example, certainly sounded impressive enough in a superficial sense at least. But you'd also think the same of the Wolverhampton bod the other week, although since we all know what's gone on at Wolverhampton then we all know he's basically BSing.
The Vokes op, for example, obviously wanted a return to the scenario pertaining 15 years ago, or whatever, because that dimension of capture promoted his vested interest.
Or James Button representing the IoL didn't want certain aspects of local control decided nationally, because obviously that would undermine the interests of IoL members
And the Suzy Lamplugh rep was impressive enough, but slightly predictable because we all have a fair idea what the Trust is all about.
The other passenger rep was also fairly predictable, and that ghost-like figure via the screen was a tad unnerving
And after all that I'm glad I only watched a wee bit
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