Quote:
Qasim Khan, owners of Matrix Private Hire of Higher Barn Street in Blackburn, said: "A meeting of private hire firm owners this afternoon decided to stop operating."
Not sure this is the best move. Can understand why individual operators might want to close their offices if there's little in the way of rental or 'settle' money coming in. They won't want to pay office staff etc if they can't cover their wages.
A better way might be for operators to get together to provide some sort of skeleton service, which would minimise running costs, but would retain a service for the public, and provide some drivers with an income if they wanted to keep working - some might actually do rather well out of it.
Of course, maybe OK in theory, but logistically and in practical terms not so easy to organise. For example, maybe calls could be redirected to a nominated operator who stays open, but doubt if the others would want to do that for fear of losing the custom to the nominated operator in the long run.
And such an arrangement would probably amount to some sort of illegal collusion under competition law, strictly speaking. But for the coming few months all bets are off with regard to that sort of stuff.
Also, I suspect what's in the article above may be a tad exaggerated, and some sort of skeleton service will continue to be provided by PH operators. Just like the HCs, in fact, who are probably just reduced in numbers rather than completely 'off the streets' as claimed in the article. In fact the claim that they're all off is contradicted by the earlier statement in the article that simply "most" HCs have ceased plying for trade. Sounds about right.
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