Duncan McCann of the New Economics Foundation.
Duncan is trying to start a taxi platform co-op called Faircab, to challenge Über.
He’s trying to start in Brighton, after the licence in London was changed from £2.5k per year to £2.5 million!
1. Regulators are not pro-corporate, or against the co-operative sector. “I get the feeling that they really want to encourage the kinds of things that we’re working on. But they get to talk with corporate representatives much more than they talk with people like us. Give them the right arguments, and I really believe that they do get it, and would like things to be different, but they’re so overworked that we really need to hold their hands. The corporate sector has the money to pay people to hold their hands, so it’s harder for us to find the time and energy to do it.”
2. The giant platforms are very poor global citizens – they avoid tax, shift risk onto drivers and service providers, exploit and extract and kill competition and any concept of a free market. These problems are mitigated or removed entirely by the co-operative model.
3. Fighting the platforms is important, to help level the playing field. For example, Über records all of its income in Luxembourg, so pays no VAT. Any competitors are immediately at a 20% disadvantage.