This is a commercial agreement that is to run for 5 years, and there is a non-disclosure clause written into the contract. This means that HALTS cannot reveal any information to those who sign up to Heathrow Taxis, even though they are supposed to be "members" of this private company.
HALTS recently had its inaugural AGM where a committee was elected and it is interesting to take a look at the members of this newly formed committee.
HALTS has five directors, Colin Evans, Howard Kaye, Chris Harrison, Henry (Harry) O'Leary and Dave Eshun. Of these five directors three have been elected onto the committee; Colin Evans and Chris Harrison for three years and Dave Eshun for two years. The remaining four committee members are, Barry Pellor for two years, Kevin Nutley for one year, Waine Stapley for one year and John Styles for one year.
At next year's AGM there will be another committee election, and neither Colin Evans, Chris Harrison, Dave Eshun nor Barry Pellor will have to stand for re-election, but Kevin Nutley, Waine Stapley and John Styles will. When these elections take place the remaining directors of HALTS will be able to stand, and it is more than likely that both Howard Kaye and Henry O'Leary will both be elected.
This will mean that all five directors of HALTS will also be committee members! Barry Pellor has been very supportive of Howard Kaye for some time, so I don't think he is likely to offer any resistance to any decisions the director members of the committee make. So we will have a committee that will be able to discuss HALTS matters behind closed doors as directors and then be assured of a majority vote for any proposals they may put forward for deliberation as committee members. Democracy for the drivers? I think this is unlikely, to say the least, as the directors will always have a majority even if they have the maximum number of committee members allowed by the rules of the company, i.e. nine.
Both Howard Kaye and Colin Evans are the sole directors of Heathrow Taxis Solutions, the company that they formed to handle all credit card bookings that are created through the taxi desks. This company is a properly incorporated private company limited by shares, and the one share issue is held by HALTS, but what if the directors of Heathrow Taxis Solutions and the weighted HALTS committee decide to transfer this share to another place, or split it into a number of parts and take the benefits of any profits made by the credit card operation elsewhere? There are far too many questions over the level of control or benefit that drivers at Heathrow can expect to see with this set up.
As I've stated on many occassions, I am very concerned with the way this is going and I don't think our best interests are the true motivation behind the formation of either HALTS or Heathrow Taxis Solutions.
Colin Evans, Howard Kaye, Chris Harrison, Dave Eshun and Henry O'Leary are all acting committee members of the drivers' mutual society HALT (Heathrow Airport Licenced Taxis) along with Alfred Winn, who is the only dissenting voice. HALT still exists, and its members are being hoodwinked into believing that HALT has been demutualised and is now HALTS. This is not the case, HALT still exists as the drivers' own mutual society and has been all but abandoned by its own executive committee to serve their own purposes.
What I would like to ask the HALT acting committee members is this, why didn't they take up the offer of fixing the problems that HALT has had from day one regarding the 50% quorum level when a workable solution to the problem was put forward? A cynical person might conclude that they never really wanted the democracy for drivers that they always claimed they did want.
If the HALT unreachable quorum question had been addressed and an elected committee had been formed, it might have been possible to vote in favour of demutualisation instead of the fake change that has taken place. Any committee member that claims that the way this has been handled is either moral or legal does not deserve to hold that office and should admit that what they have done is an injustice to the drivers and the whole idea of a mutual society.
The RMT London Taxi Branch is fully committed to ridding Heathrow Airport of this injustice and will never accept the primacy that HALTS has gained with the conivance of BAA.
The Day of Judgement is at hand!
ReplyDelete