Over the last year, we’ve seen a biased agenda of harassment aimed squarely at the Taxi trade, allegedly coming from the Blackfriars area.
Drivers renewals taking unreasonable amounts of time, medicals, allegedly lost in the post and worst of all, Taxi drivers being harassed by undercover Cab Enforcement Unit Officers using surveillance equipment to try and catch out drivers touching mobile phones while sitting stationary on Taxi ranks, mainly at Kings Cross and Waterloo.
While Private Hire drivers openly wait to be hired and even tout customers at the Pancras Road set down for St Pancras, it appears that PCOs and CEUOs spend most of the day trying to catch out only Taxi drivers.
We saw a case earlier this year when a driver was supposedly video’d touching his phone by a female undercover Cab Enforcement Unit officer.
The case was about to be heard in court when the defence team pointed out to the prosecution, that the video offered in evidence, showed a completely different driver and the case was immediately dropped.
More recently, a young lady driver was accused of having a defective tyre and was asked to attend TfL bringing her badge and bill....But as she’d taken the vehicle to a garage who found that the tyre was in fact legal, which she refused.
The case was presented to the CPS.
But the young lady, a member of the United Cabbies Group, received expert help from a legal team supplied by the UCG, who’s expert witness tore into the CEU and the case has again been dropped.
This was the statement put out by the United Cabbies Group, yesterday:
Our female member who was berated by a rude and irate CEU Officer, and accused of having an illegal tyre, has had her court case dropped.
Excellent work by our solicitor Darren Rogers of Chiltern Law, who submitted an expert witness statement to CPS...ends.
The agenda against the trade continues as it’s become apparent that the TfLTPH twitter account has stopped taking complaints about PHVs parking on Taxi ranks, driving down one way streets the wrong way, combined with the removal of night time PCOs checking ranks for contravention.
One female CO told a driver and his customer that he couldn’t use a hand held iZettle Credit Card machine and that the passenger had to use the machine fitted in the back of the cab (not true). This is really unacceptable behaviour from these TfL employees.
We’ve heard from a reliable source that most of the extra COs Sadiq Khan talks about at the GLA transport committee, have been seconded to Bus and tube revenue protection duties (checking tickets).
TfL have also made it impossible to report offences of this nature, using their online website, as you cannot complete a complaint form against a PHV, unless you have the name of the company and details of a journey undertaken.
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