Edinburgh Sucks! | Cosy council relationship… again!

City Council

Cosy council relationship… again!

By The Basa ⋅ February 17, 2006 ⋅

Edinburgh taxi drivers are asking interesting questions about a cosy relationship with the City of Edinburgh council have with Cabtivate, the company who provide a screen based advertising system in taxis (TVs to you and I).

Members of the taxi trade on multiple occasions raised questions about the propriety of the process which granted approval for the Cabtivate system, when no Health and Safety enquiries were conducted prior to the system’s installation and the Council was “gifted” an unspecified, unquantified benefit of free advertising space. The are also worried about a discrepancy in the advertising policy in respect of the Cabtivate advertising system when all other types of advertising have to go through stringent checks.

Back on 9th October 2002 the Council decided to approve “in principle” the request to install the systems in taxis and that there would be a fee of £5 and it now seems that this ‘cosy’ relationship means that the £5s are nowhere to be seen.
We note that a fee of £5 was established in respect of the Cabtivate system. Given that this fee does not appear in the Council’s table of fees, and Licensing Officer - Peter Lang appeared to be unaware of it, has this fee actually ever been levied? How is it collected? How much has been paid by Cabtivate Media Group and/or the users of its system through the fee levied?

There are many more questions to be asked and I am sure that others can add comments to this post so that the discussion can be in the public eye.

Donald Anderson has received two letters on the matter recently. It will be interesting to see how this is played out. We believe some taxi drivers are worried about their heads frying when the screen is a few inches from their heads.