doing OK though
maybe you should all have PAYE drivers (NMW), pay holiday pay, standby when no school run and have new cars every 12 months
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/1 ... -children/ taxi firm boss is making nearly £10m a year from government contracts by taking special needs children to and from school, The Telegraph can reveal.
Andy Mahoney is the chief executive of 24x7 Group, the only major company in England that exclusively provides school transport services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send).
These services are ultimately funded by the taxpayer.
The family-run business has seen revenue soar in recent years, reaching £95.7m in 2024 amid a national Send crisis, with the company recording a gross profit of £20.8m and operating profit of £8.6m last year.
Mr Mahoney owns 24x7 Group alongside Ashley, his son. He also runs a holiday camp for Send pupils in the Algarve in Portugal, and was awarded an MBE for services to special needs children and their families in 2021.
Public social media posts show the taxi mogul lives in a 17th-century manor house on an 18-acre estate, which was bought by 24x7 Group’s investment arm in 2018.24x7 Group wrote off a £373,000 loan it provided to a separate firm run by Mr Mahoney which hosts evening events at the eight-bedroom manor.
Recent events have included a “night of clairvoyance” with a spiritualist medium and an interactive murder mystery dinner.
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing and the company said the revenue increase reflected a steep rise in demand for Send transport in recent years.
The taxi firm’s financial accounts state that its customers are mostly local authorities, who have a statutory duty to pay for Send support for children who need it.
Councils must help children get to school if they are under eight and live more than two miles away from school, or older and live more than three miles away. The obligation applies to all children and typically can mean covering the cost of a bus fare or train ticket.
However, a rise in the number of children with mental health conditions or complex needs has led to a sharp increase in spending on private transport, with some pupils requiring up to two escorts to accompany them to and from school.
Soaring demand for special needs support over the past decade has led to the total taxpayer bill for school Send transport tripling to nearly £2.3bn last year, with the figure expected to climb further.
A Telegraph investigation revealed last month that in one case, a council was spending as much as £950 a day to get a single child to and from school.
Some Send taxi contracts have included round trips of up to 368 miles – roughly equivalent to the distance between Watford and Edinburgh.
Parents have insisted that a lack of support in mainstream schooling means they often have no choice but to seek out specialist help for their Send children even if this is far from home, resulting in lengthy and undesirable journeys to and from school.
Labour has acknowledged that the sector is in crisis and has promised to overhaul the current system in a Send white paper expected later this year, which will seek to plug extra help into mainstream schools.
But rocketing demand for Send support and a shortage of specialist places has proven a lucrative opportunity for taxi firms, many of which have recorded towering revenues in recent years.
Telegraph analysis of council contracts found that most local authorities rely on sprawling networks of as many as 250 local taxi firms to shuttle Send children to school, with just a handful of companies operating country-wide.
Freedom of information (FoI) requests to councils in England showed that 24x7 Group is the biggest of these, with the company’s website also stating that it now operates in 96 local authorities.
The transport company, which was founded in 2001, has rapidly expanded in recent years on the backdrop of increased Send demand, with annual revenue more than quadrupling from £22.5m in 2021 to £95.7m last year.
Operating profit has increased from £5.2m in 2021 to £10.2m in 2023 and £8.6m in 2024.
The company recorded a gross profit margin of 8.9 per cent last year, although it posted a loss after tax of £510,000 in 2024 after its total liabilities increased. 24x7 Group previously recorded profits after tax of as high as £8m in 2022.The company told The Telegraph the increase in operating profit over the past five years was “a reflection of the expansion the group has undertaken from working with seven councils in 2020 to currently 96 councils”.
24x7 Group’s latest financial accounts show it boosted driver numbers by nearly 50 per cent in a single year to reach 5,542 in 2024, helping the firm cater for more than 11,000 Send children.
The firm said the business seized on the Covid pandemic as an opportunity to buy up more vehicles and train new drivers to meet demand.It said: “24x7 Group is the largest provider of Send school transport in England. We are committed to providing the best school transport at the lowest possible cost to the council, this can be evidenced by our average cost per child on school transport.
“As we take many of the country’s most vulnerable children to school, it would be expected that our average cost per child would be higher than the average of Send sector transport costs, we are in fact below the average cost per child across the sector .
“We work closely with Government departments and councils to find ways of reducing the cost to councils at a time when the number of Send children are increasing and Council budgets are stretched. We have responded to the Government’s request for evidence on the Send crisis and advised on ways of achieving a 25 to 30 per cent cost saving on current spending.”
Mr Mahoney said in a recent podcast that he started 24x7 Group after his previous transport business began to secure ad hoc Send taxi contracts, and a local council worker asked for his help meeting increasing demand for school transfer services.
The company now operates a fleet of more than 4,500 vehicles, consisting of cars, people carriers and wheelchair accessible vehicles.
24x7 Group is an outlier as the only dedicated Send school transport company thought to be operating nationwide, with councils forced to seek help wherever they can get elsewhere to plug the gaps.
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