Cambridgeshire council agrees to pay £30k compensation to taxi driver

Compensation of £30,000 will be paid out to a taxi driver by Cambridgeshire County Council.
The council has agreed to pay £30,000 in compensationThe council has agreed to pay £30,000 in compensation
The council has agreed to pay £30,000 in compensation

The payment has been awarded to taxi driver association chairman Dave Humphrey after a long-running campaign.

The association believed taxi drivers and private hire companies were being unfairly disadvantaged in bidding for transport contracts from the council – a view confirmed when the results of the independent report was heard by the council’s Audit and Accounts Committee last July.

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It showed that the council had made mistakes in the way it procured community transport and in its dealings with community transport providers FACT/HACT and ESACT which had disadvantaged other local transport providers.

It also highlighted a number of failings in the way FACT/HACT and ESACT worked and were managed.

The council said it had apologised for its part in this, and directly to Mr Humphrey and the taxi drivers association, “for the time it had taken for their concerns to be properly considered and acted upon”.

It added that it has acted to make immediate changes.

The council said the compensation recognised the amount of time Mr Humphrey had lost from his own business while involved in collecting evidence and preparing and pursuing the case which eventually led to the independent audit.

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A spokesperson said: “If we make mistakes, we apologise, we learn from them and we try to put things right.

“As this work stretches back five years to 2014 the council has now agreed with Mr Humphrey on a final settlement of £30,000 to compensate for his lost earnings over this time, and in recognition of the adverse effects that his work to bring this issue to a conclusion has caused him.”