Project
Designing and Testing a Local Authority Licensing Scheme for Hand Car Washes across the United Kingdom
Unit(s) of assessment: Business and Management Studies; Social Work and Social Policy
Research theme: Safety and Security of Citizens and Society
School: Nottingham Business School; School of Social Sciences
Project Purpose
Whilst the problematic nature of hand car washes is well understood, there is less agreement on the best way of tackling these. One approach is to introduce a licensing scheme to regulate the hand car wash sector. Our project will develop a fully costed proposed model for a national mandatory licensing scheme to regulate the UK hand car wash sector. The license is intended to be enforced by local authorities to tackle non-compliant hand car wash businesses in different UK locality contexts with the ultimate aim of raising business and working standards across the sector. We will engage with key stakeholders and collaboratively design potential license models to present to a selection of local authority area to further the licensing debate. The project aims to run from August 2023 to June 2024.
Problematising Hand Car Washes
Our task is to formulate an instrument to empower local authorities to tackle poor business and working practices in the hand car wash sector. In our existing research, we have mapped the spatial locations and devised a set of 36-factors with which we risk-rated all car washes in over a third of UK neighbourhoods covering almost 2000 hand car wash sites (to date) across a third of the UKs local authorities. Our findings identified widespread business and labour-market non-compliance with sites falling short of planning permission, insurance, health and safety, and environmental safety. The sector is also listed as high-risk for worker exploitation by the ODLME risk model in the Annual Strategy 2023.
Why the Research is Needed
We have evaluated both voluntary licensing and a code of practice across a range of local authorities in the UK with the Home Office Modern Slavery fund and the Responsible Car Wash Scheme. Learning from these projects suggests to us that a mandatory scheme would be more effective at targeting non-compliant businesses. We consistently recommend this in our research reports and the ODLME cited this among the policy action points in the annual ODLME strategy. In advanced discussions with the ODLME, GLAA, HMRC National Minimum Wage team and others have expressed support for the idea to explore and test a costed, feasible license model with the aim of tackling labour abuse and poor businesses practices in the hand car wash sector.
Addressing the Challenge
Labour-market enforcement is fragmented across different agencies and regulators, and face constraints on capacity, capability, and remit, and this leaves the hand car wash sector largely unregulated and workers vulnerable to exploitation. We have the expertise to take on this challenge to design a licence scheme together with our research partners at the GLAA, HMRC, NCA and the former RCWS to design a data-driven inspection and enforcement regime.
Project Plan
We will identify key stakeholders and conduct desk-based research on current licensing schemes from three existing local authority level licensing models such as alcohol, private hire vehicles and private renting accommodation. The next stage of the project will be to undertake a licensing scheme feasibility study drawing on research, expertise and experience from key stakeholders and local authorities. We will then share our license model simulations to explore and test proposed license models and costs different local authority contexts which we will then analyse. At the end of the project, we will host a stakeholder workshop to present a series of robustly costed license model examples in different local authority contexts and to seek their support and advocacy for the proposed licensing scheme where we will release a project report to be disseminated amongst key stakeholders in government and relevant agencies.
Impact
The project aims to achieve better understanding of how a local licensing scheme could operate, how much it would cost and the potential that a license scheme has to tackle labour market non-compliance in relation to tax, planning environmental, consumer rights, insurance and health and safety. It will demonstrate to local authorities, stakeholders and Government the possibility of licensing as an alternative to current approaches to labour market enforcement. This knowledge exchange project exemplifies the strengths of multiagency work and we hope to drive further support for the development of a Single Enforcement Body for labour market enforcement.
We intend to provide a template for a functioning and effective national licensing scheme for hand car washes that tackles labour market exploitation and modern slavery. It is our intention to design a license model which has transferable potential to other sectors where non-compliance is identified such as nail bars, small-batch garment manufacturing, vape shops, and ethnically styled barbershop sectors. Through the feasibility study, the local authorities we engage with will learn about the risks specific to their locality and the license model may be replicated or adapted to other cities seeking to improve business standards for workers, consumers and residents.
People
The project is run by Professor Ian Clark, Rich Pickford, Dr James Hunter, Professor Alan Collins, Nidhi Sharma and Visiting Fellow Darryl Dixon (formerly Gangmaster Labour Abuse Authority).