Golden carrot
By now, you
should all have received my letter
outlining the incentive that has been
put in place for the busy ‘run up’ to
Christmas. I hope most of you will agree
that this incentive is worthwhile and I
also hope that you will give of your
best and cover as much account work as
you possibly can in what will be an
extremely busy period.
Hopefully, the thought of winning a new TXII ‘Gold’ will be
an incentive to you all, but please
remember that you have to be in it to
win it. In addition, for a competition
of this magnitude, the odds are very
good as there really are not that many
of you and the more credit rides you
complete, the more chances you will
have.
This Society is becoming so successful that we have had to
temporarily stop opening new accounts
before Christmas for fear that we will
be over-trading. So please endeavour to
do as much as you can; we lead the field
in MIS reporting and technology, but if
we cannot put a vehicle outside the
customer’s door, then everything else
becomes irrelevant and the enormous
progress your Society has made will have
been to no avail.
Complaints letter
Our Complaints
/ Compliance Officer recently sent out
almost six hundred letters to members
informing them that they were not
completing forty trips per month as per
rule 4(b).
Well, you can imagine that the telephones became ‘red hot’ at
Brunswick House as many of the drivers
concerned then tried to phone the
office. Some members became very irate
and abusive that we had dared to send
them a
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letter stating that
they were breaking the rules!
I can assure everyone that the Board of Management did not just suddenly
decide to see if they could upset a very
sizeable minority of the membership just
for the hell of it! It was done in order
to protect your work and your livelihood
and the future of your Society. We could
have just ignored the situation and
watched your client database gradually
dissolve, but that would have been the
easy decision to take and a real
cop-out, so please help us to help you
by completing more than the minimum
amount of trips.
Emissions
I know a lot
has been written in recent times
concerning the emission testing on
taxis. I have seen much verbiage in the
trade press with graphs etc and quite
honestly, the way in which the whole
topic has been laid out appears to be
very confusing. Consequently, I thought
I would give you some salient points so
that we might all understand the
situation.
The most imminent point and something that should concern us in the
short term, is how many vehicles may or
may not comply with the legislation? It
is proposed that the new legislation
comes into effect as from 1 July 2006.
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Consequently, if the
vehicle is at the PCO for inspection
from 1 July, it must comply, however, if
it goes up for overhaul at any time up
to and including 30 June 2006, it will
not have to comply until the following
overhaul, which in theory could be as
late as 30 June 2007! What is
quite alarming, is that there are 2039
taxis which are Pre-Euro and 8,604 taxis
that are Euro 1 and which will not
comply with the Euro 2 legislation that
is coming into effect. That means that
approximately half the cab fleet -
almost ten and a half thousand vehicles
- will not comply with the legislation
that could come into effect from next
July.
My information is that nothing has currently been resolved
concerning equipment that could be
considered suitable for conversion and
that there are at present twenty taxis
on test with a varied assortment of
hardware in an attempt to discover
exactly what IS suitable.
I have spoken with two of the proprietors who are doing the testing
and everything appears to be ‘up in the
air’ at the moment, yet we are only
eight months away from implementation
time. I think there could be some
slippage on the timeframe, as the only
thing that appears to be fairly stable
is the price of around £3,000.
The reason I’ve written about the above is because I have just
caught sight of a poll that was
published on 30 September 2005 in which
only 10% of drivers interviewed knew
anything about conversion kits etc. Yet
this topic involves nearly half the
fleet in London - is it not time that we
were all more au fait with the
situation?
Brian Rice
Chairman, Dial-a-Cab |
