An open letter to Bill Freeman of the Community Transport Association (CTA).
I'm absolutely astonished at your response and reply to Jesse Norman MP, with regard to the letter sent out by the Department for Transport and the DVSA findings against a CT operator.
You are trying to disguise your association’s activity as all charitable.
Yes, we have vulnerable people that need care, we have members of the public that require transport because it's not commercially viable for O-Licence holders to perform this work on a commercial basis in rural areas, but what you, your predecessors and a large part of your membership have been doing over the past two decades is eroding away at the O-Licence holders’ clients and markets.
You have stepped over the line of 'not for profit and hire and reward' under the guise of a charity that is helping the vulnerable parts of our society.
It is a pity that you still want to hide behind your argument that you should be allowed to carry on putting operators out of business. You talk about all the people it will affect in the CTA industry, but you give no thought to what you have been doing to the PSV operators’ businesses.
There is a definite line in what work the CTA should be doing and what the O-Licence holders should be doing, but you are muddying the water with your rhetoric about charity, vulnerable people and exclusion.
I said it for years that your operations were illegal. Yes, there are some CT operators that are trying to act legally, and you are tarnishing them with the same brush. There are some that have seen that the correct route was to apply for an O-Licence for some of their operations and to separate them from the 'not for profit' and 'not for hire and reward' side of the operations.
You still want the DVSA and DfT to turn a blind eye to the laws that are being broken while you put your house in order. Very nice if we could all get the law to be flexible each time we break it, to allow us time to comply.
I could understand this if these were new laws, but nothing has changed. You have had long enough.
You refer to the small minority of O-Licence holders that have made this come about. Well you can understand how much work this has involved to right these wrongs.
All that was wanted was for all CT operators to conduct themselves in a professional manner, instead of the way that the sector has been developing over the last 20 years.
Tony Hill
London
