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We’ve all seen
them and wondered how they get away with it - advertisements
selling the wares of private hire / minicab companies, while
describing themselves as taxis. The company in the ad with this
article - using the online-minicabs website - happens to be
Liberty Cars whose base is not far from that of
Dial-a-Cab – however, that is where the similarity ends. Liberty Cars may well be a respectable private hire company and their ads proudly proclaim that they are licensed by the PCO / TfL, but they are NOT a taxi company and we should say next that they never will be. However, those last few words do not seem to be cast in stone as much as they once would have been, just as Liberty Cars are by no means the only guilty company. For years and years, telephone directories such as Thompsons have done whatever they liked, just as private hire companies like Addison Lee have too. If Thompsons want to refer to minicabs as taxis, who is there to stop them? If AL’s John or Liam Griffin want to use the M4 bus lane, who is there to stop them? When they put signs across the rear windscreens of their minicabs, but felt the wiper blades spoiled the look, they didn’t remove the signs, they removed the wiper blades! What if Call Sign hadn’t gone out and |
Call Sign Comment... Eddie goes after minicab ads! |
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 photographed numerous Addison Lee cars without the wiper blades, would the PCO have ever acted? What if the T&G cab section hadn’t photographed AL cars breaking the rules by using the M4 bus lane, would anyone have taken any notice? We have to assume that either the PCO don’t have the time, or they are too busy making sure we don’t have unauthorised signs on our taxis. The only sign of hope we can see is the new Director of Taxis and Private Hire, John Mason. It is quite some considerable time since we can say someone has impressed us, but some of John Mason’s utterings have shown something previously not expounded from Penton Street – common sense. And unlike some |
at the PCO who think that an
appearance at private hire’s annual soirée - but certainly never
at the Taxi Driver of the Year dinner - means you are doing your
job; Call Sign believes that John Mason is showing
signs of wanting to be fair. So this magazine hopes he will pick
up the cudgels of the piece below and try to act on it. Because
as the ad says, if he can’t, we bet he knows a man who can!
Now Dial-a-Cab driver and Chair of the RMT Taxi section, Eddie Lambert (V27), has sent one of Thompsons Phone Directory minicab ads from under the ‘Taxi’ banner to John Mason at the PCO and also to Islington Trading Standards, as Liberty Cars are in their borough. According to Eddie, the RMT "...would like to see all phone companies list Taxis and Private Hire under their own headings and not together, thereby removing the misrepresentation that listing together inevitably brings about." Eddie also added that companies outside the Met areas, who run mixed fleets, should have two separate entries given by directories providing the private hire entry does not use the words taxi or cab in the company name. Call Sign Comment couldn’t agree more... |
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