Taxi Driver Online

Well it has at last happened. We have our first full time PAYE driver started this morning. We have part time drivers on PAYE but this is the first full time driver we have on PAYE.

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Grandad,
old fart with no heart

tried it years ago and couldn't make it pay as driver refused to go on rank at quiet times

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Taxis Are Public Transport too

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We will be private hire in a few weeks. She is already driving PH car so no rank work.

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Grandad,
old fart with no heart

Hope you have a private hire operators license now or could be embarrassing for someone in your position.

Surely if you're paying them you tell them where to go and what to do ?

believe you me we tried in the end had to sack him due to complaints

he then got a job with a shop in town got sacked from there but kept turning up for work and refusing to leave in the end the manageress had to get bods down from head office to forcibly remove him from premises and make it clear to him he no longer had a job

basically the bloke was workshy and expected to be paid to sit on his arse all day reading his paper. he's been living on benefits ever since and for much of his life before so he's happy now. It was just the job centre forcing him to apply for jobs

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Of course we have a private hire operators license. We got our operators license in March last year when we bought our Mercedes E class and our Toyota Avensis to run as Private hire. We changed our Prius over to PH at the beginning of this month and the rest will follow over the coming weeks.

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Grandad,
old fart with no heart

What benefit do you gain from moving existing HCs over to PH rather than just running a mixed fleet?

One benefit I see is if you have a bit of rural work, you can include the dead mileage there in the quote for the job. As a hack you're limited to the meter price.

That's why there's no taxis on the Romney Marsh where I used to work. every job entailed 5-6 dead miles to get to the pick-up and very little chance of a return fare from the area.

As posted by Roy, At the moment, apart from our private hire vehicles, everyone is using hackney. we have a very large district that is mostly rural. People simply can't get taxis from village to village and the Council are reluctant to put pick up charges on the table of fares. So by going all PH it means we can offer this service. As for mixed fleet, we thought about this but decided because we are a small company that it could cause problems with drivers not wanting to use one or other of the cars. It also means that we can run on fixed fares and not have to go through the Council procedure for an increase which recently has been a debacle as documented on other posts. Unlike a lot of private hire operators that I read about on here, our prices will actually be higher than the current metered fares.

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Grandad,
old fart with no heart

PH bookings such as this are something I do wonder about. Both of the big PH ops around here use mixed fleets and use their own fare table if you book via the office rather than flagging down a HC (which for 8 seater work can be higher than the HC fare).

I suspect that licencing know what's going on, but just turn a blind eye because if the passenger has agreed a price for a pre-booked fare then they're really unlikely to complain if it would have been cheaper in a HC (that they wouldn't have been able to find)

Not impressed with that, licensing have a duty to enforce all laws, the acts we have to abide by are not a 'pic and mix' set.

The issue can be addressed by having a booking fee.

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IDFIMH

Just to clarify, are you saying the pre-booked HCs are charging higher than the council HC tariff, or do you mean just the PHs on the fleet are charging more than the council HC tariff?

I think h means that hackneys are running at private hire rates that may be higher than the meter.

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Grandad,
old fart with no heart

Exactly this. The minibus rate used by the PH companies is higher than Meter + £3.00 for carrying 8 people. Most of the HC drivers treat themselves as PH when doing work through the PH company, they don't put the meter on. Some of the work starts or ends outside of the district but not all of it.

As an aside what is the situation where the PH operator subcontracts work to a HC? In theory the booking is with the PH operator and it is to them that the passenger owes the fare, the driver is collecting that money and settling their own affairs with the operator after the fact.