Taxi Driver Online

This isn't online, so article in graphical form only, but it's high-res enough to be easily readable.

And it's about the Scottish LEZ stuff more generally, although the taxi trade gets a couple of prominent mentions in the article.

But it's about the comms/PR stuff that I keep on banging on about, but for a change it's not Uber or Veezu et al, but about the Transport Scotland quango paying three quarters of a million pounds to a PR agency to promote the LEZ stuff, and despite already having an in-house 'comms' team which costs £400k per annum

And the same PR agency has also been hired by a business organisation to argue against the LEZs

(Click on the link below the image for a readable, high-res version.)


Image: Twitter/Scottish Mail on Sunday

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh_s30PWAAA ... name=large

How on earth can they represent both sides of the argument?

Got to be a massive conflict of interests.

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IDFIMH

Not sure what the professional ethics are in this regard. But they're paid shills, so everyone knows it's bovine excrement anyway

More seriously, I doubt if there's such an obvious conflict of interest as, for example, in a local government context where decisions can more directly affect people and business, or in a banking environment, say, where different financial interests can come into conflict*.

Or, more obviously, in a legal environment, where a firm of lawyers could be acting for two different sides in a litigation suit. Which seems to be allowed, as long as, say, confidential information isn't shared, and the same people aren't involved in representing both sides

But I suspect that in the PR environment, they've probably got different teams dealing with the pro-LEZ and the anti-LEZ stuff, and to that extent as long as they don't collude then there's probably no professional ethics issues.

(*What used to be called 'Chinese walls' in a financial environment - if there's a conflict of interest then obviously the people dealing with one interest wouldn't be allowed to swap notes with the people dealing with a competing interest. Although I think the term 'Chinese walls' is now considered racist, surprise, surprise

The Wikipedia entry on Chinese Walls suggests alternative terms like 'ethical walls' or 'firewall'. )

a few years ago our council employed some traffic consultants from Nottingham having appointed two of them to a local committee and low and behold we suddenly had a scheme appear for a one way system with the consultancy firm having pocketed 50K for drawing a few lines on a local map. When they presented it to said committee they'd even spelt the names of some of the streets wrong

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector