Uber in London: the end of the road?

There would be “all hell to pay” if a Tory mayor announced, in the middle of a general election campaign, that he was sacking 45,000 low-paid, predominantly immigrant workers and scrapping a popular transport service used regularly by 3.5 million people, said Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. But that’s “precisely” what Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s Transport for London (TfL) did this week by revoking Uber’s licence to operate in the capital. TfL said it had uncovered a “pattern of failures” at the ride-hailing firm – including a weakness in its app that allowed more than 14,000 trips to be carried out fraudulently by unauthorised drivers who uploaded their photos to another driver’s account. Uber replied that TfL’s decision was “extraordinary and wrong”. It had closed the photo loophole, it said, and would “operate as normal” in London pending an appeal.

TfL claimed to be acting out of concern for the safety of customers, said The Times. But many who “shudder” at the memory of life before Uber – when long waits in the dark for black cabs or night buses were the norm – will simply view this move as “anti-innovation, anticompetition and anti-consumer”. Indeed, it is “hard not to see in TfL’s absurdly heavy-handed decision the latest instalment of a long-running campaign to drive Uber off London’s streets”: in 2015, Boris Johnson, as mayor, took the US firm to court, accusing it of “systematically breaking the law”; in 2017, TfL revoked its licence for the first time, for failing to carry out sufficiently thorough checks on drivers – a judgment overturned by the courts. These and other similarly “ill-judged efforts” were designed apparently to “shield black cab drivers from competition from ride-sharing apps”. But you have only to recall the bad old days – when London cabbies enjoyed a virtual monopoly and fares were among the highest in the world – to see folly in such “pandering to vested interests”.

In the past, Uber has pulled out of cities where regulators “had the gall to imagine it was answerable to them”, said Jonn Elledge in the New Statesman. It happened in Austin, Texas, in 2016, and in Barcelona last January. But London is one of the few places where the firm may actually be profitable – so it won’t happen here. Instead, TfL is using its muscle to tell Uber to raise its game: if the courts agree, it will have no choice but to “grumble and do what it’s told” – and that’s exactly how regulation should work. An operator isn’t safe enough, so the regulator has revoked its licence. If it improves, great: it can keep its licence. If not, we’re better off without it. Either way, the consumer wins. That’s not anti-business; it’s “anti- bad business”.