Taxi regulator has surplus of €20m

THE COMMISSION for Taxi Regulation is running a surplus of approximately €20 million in income from licensing and applying penalties to the taxi industry, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

The Taxi Regulation Act allows the commission to keep the fees from vehicle, driver and dispatch operator licensing, as well as the charges from penalties paid by drivers prosecuted for offences, to fund its activities.

Regulator Kathleen Doyle yesterday told the Oireachtas committee on economic regulatory affairs that the current surplus was about €20 million.

She said she had applied to the Minister for Transport and the Minister for Finance in 2007 to use the surplus to subsidise drivers upgrading their vehicles to make them wheelchair accessible. She had yet to receive a response, she told the committee.

However, she said the number of licensed taxis and drivers on the roads is "actively decreasing" and had reached an "equilibrium".

Numbers of small public service vehicles (taxis, hackneys and limousines) had dropped from a peak of 27,429 in 2008 to a current figure of 25,811. The number of licensed drivers had also dropped from a peak of 47,529 in May 2009 to 44,228.

Labour TD Seán Sherlock asked how numbers could be said to have reached an equilibrium when there appeared to be a massive oversupply of taxis in most areas.

"I don't think anybody who has a licence is making an income, a living income, from that licence," he said.

Ms Doyle said it was never within her remit to control numbers through a moratorium, but an increase in required standards meant that numbers had found their own natural level and equilibrium.