A private hire taxi firm from Maryport has moved a step closer to bringing London-style taxi cabs to west Cumbria after Allerdale council’s licensing panel voted to change their policy.

Father and son William Patterson Senior and Junior, who run Rosie’s Travel, want to bring the wheelchair-accessible cabs to the area but found under current licensing policies it was too expensive.

The current age policy is that all vehicles must be licensed before four years of age but councillors voted at the meeting to extend this to 10 years for London taxis.

Mr Patterson Sr said London taxis are known to have a very long life span and therefore are still very expensive at four years old.

He wrote to the council to ask them to extend the age policy for London taxis.

Mr Patterson Snr said: “Recently due to a bereavement we had to restructure our business, we effectively started again.

“We wanted to buy a purpose built London taxi which was more than four years old but looked as good as new.

“Because council rules would not allow it we had to buy an almost new car and convert it into a taxi.

“This cost us approximately £8,000 more than it would have cost to buy the London taxi which had a higher health and safety standard and looked better.”

Gillian Collinson, senior licensing officer, told the panel that concerns had been raise from a number of proprietors who wanted to purchase these wheel chair accessible vehicles but found them too expensive

hes won contracts but hasnt got the vehicles?

we could all do that...........


why doesnt he just poach some cars off other bases?

It Takes a special kind of stupid to win contracts by bidding a price so low that it cannot be honoured...It also takes a special kind of stupid on behalf of the Purchaser that they are blinded by a ridiculously low bid in the first place

With our County Council it has been the way for a while now with school buses. They do a reverse auction whereby the prices start at say £300 a day and operators bid lower until the auction time runs out. Several operators have gone bust since this system was introduced. They are now starting to do this with the taxis. This weekend is a training weekend for taxi firms to practice on the system before they have some real auctions sometime in August.

Odd how they want to pay ever lower prices but expect ever higher levels of safety, vehicle quality and driver standards....are we supposed to pay for all these extra things out of the ether?

i had to a dsa test and pay for my CRB whats the big deal