Private car firm has launched aggressive PR campaign as it orders its drivers to defy traffic rules, reports Robert Booth
First one, then two and then a third Addison Lee minicab rolled down the Bayswater Road bus lane in the Tuesday morning drizzle. There was no bugle or battle cry, but to those in the know it meant only one thing: the capital's bitter taxi war was back on.
As the shiny Ford Galaxys slid illegally past the crawling traffic, alarm bells rang among the capital's black cab drivers. Addison Lee's abrasive and ambitious chairman, John Griffin, had mobilised his 3,500 drivers to annex the fastest flowing arteries on London's congested roads and lay claim to a network worth millions of pounds in fares. But far from being a parochial "savvy-versus-sat nav" spat – between black cab drivers who believe their "Knowledge" should grant them privileged access and their private-hire rivals who follow the instructions of increasingly sophisticated on-board computers – the campaign of mass law-breaking has embroiled David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and cabinet ministers.
Here was Addison Lee, a £250,000 donor to the Conservatives with access to Cameron and his ministers, advocating a campaign of civil disobedience on London's roads ahead of the Olympics. Once more, after the scandal of supper for sale with the prime minister, the question of who funds the Conservative party – and why – risked becoming a bear-trap for the government.
By Thursday lunchtime, Griffin's exhortation to his drivers to barge in on the black cabs' territory had resulted in about two dozen Addison Lee drivers being issued with penalty charge notices for using the bus lanes. More drivers got away with it because of a lack of enforcement cameras, the company said.
Transport for London (TfL) officials have hit back hard with threats and legal action. They have called Griffin's move to encourage his drivers to break the law and drive in London's bus lanes "irresponsible". On Thursday night they said that Addison Lee's campaign could ultimately force TfL to reconsider the firm's licence to trade altogether.
If Griffin persists in urging his drivers to use the restricted lanes, the transport body could investigate his "fitness" to hold a private hire operator's licence – a test that is usually aimed at rooting out people with criminal backgrounds. On Monday, TfL will go to the high court to seek an injunction to force Griffin to withdraw his instruction to his drivers, which includes a promise to indemnify them against fines or liability.
Griffin said the threat to his licence was "bullying tactics" and accused TfL of "staggering bias" in favour of the black cab trade, which he claims holds undue power over politicians because its members are strongly unionised.
So far, the extent of the bus lane disobedience has not extended to the "hundreds if not thousands" of minicab drivers the firm had expected, which Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) regarded as "summing up Addison Lee drivers' lack of confidence in John Griffin's plan".
Not true, said Griffin, who believes that many others will join in when they realise that his offer to cover their fines is genuine and that the company's lawyers are primed to fight TfL in the courts. They will argue that the current ruling keeping private hire vehicles out of the bus lanes is anti-competitive and breaches English and European principles of equality before the law.
"I am ready to rock," Griffin told the Guardian on Thursday at Addison Lee's bustling Euston headquarters, where operators pore over banks of screens as if they were air traffic controllers.
"We have been treated so badly for so long and there is no advantage to the public to what is happening here," he said. "The CEO of Goldman Sachs wrote to us saying: 'We can't open an account with you because you can't go in the bus lanes.' That account would have been worth about £3m a year and that is one of many. This is losing us money so it is a multimillion-pound fight."
He has clearly decided that fight should be no-holds barred. Peering through his tinted glasses, the 69-year-old held up a picture of John Worboys, the "black cab rapist" who was convicted of drugging 19 women and assaulting 12, including one rape. Griffin was trying to make the point that none of his drivers had ever been convicted of an offence while on duty. It was the tactic of a man who sees the battle between black cabs and minicabs as "like Northern Ireland".
Most importantly, it is about a lot of money. Around 3.2 million people take taxis and minicabs in London each week, according to a London Chamber of Commerce report: even if each fare averages only £10, that means total annual revenues in excess of £1.6bn, with a windfall to come with the Olympics in a little over three months' time.
Forcing his drivers into the bus lanes or even forcing the black cabs out of them could be worth a small fortune: Addison Lee drivers would either speed up dramatically or black cabs would slow down so much that Griffin would see bookings soar.
Politically, Griffin's spring offensive risks embarrassing the prime minister who in 2009 invited the minicab mogul to a party at his home in west Kensington. After the general election he was invited twice to Downing Street in recognition of Addison Lee's £250,000 donations to the Conservative party since 2008.
Griffin has also enjoyed face-to-face meetings with senior transport ministers, including former secretary of state Philip Hammond, and, just this week, Lib Dem transport minister Norman Baker. Labour's shadow transport secretary, Maria Eagle, who has also met him, has demanded Conservative headquarters explain Griffin's influence on government after minutes of a meeting with Hammond emerged on Monday, showing they had discussed access to the bus lanes as well as the possibility of potentially lucrative government taxi contracts. Conservative HQ has so far declined to comment.
The taxi war also places London mayor Boris Johnson in an awkward position. He chairs TfL, which has gone on the attack against Addison Lee, from which Johnson accepted a £25,000 campaign donation that helped him win office in 2008. The mayor's spokesman said he was unable to comment on the Addison Lee campaign.
Griffin, pictured below, a former minicab driver, has spent his career fighting against black cabs. He has in the past lambasted his rivals for "losing the plot", once complaining that a black cab driver refused to help him with his bags and "had flip-flops on", which he deemed a crime against professionalism.
He has complained that the way black cab fares are calculated is deliberately opaque and says they even incentivise drivers to sit in slow traffic rather than get to their destination in the quickest way possible, something the LTDA strongly denies.
Addison Lee was launched with a single car in 1975. Griffin's idea was to create a homogenous minicab company with a professional sheen. Each car would look the same, the drivers would wear uniforms and corporate customers would get a priority service – which today means that within 10 minutes of booking, Addison Lee customers can expect to be sitting in the back of a clean people carrier no more than two and a half years old. It was intended to be as far away as possible from the stereotype of a rickety minicab company with a flashing light outside a kebab shop. Now you can order a car in less than 60 seconds on the firm's iPhone app, which was responsible for £23m in fares alone last year.
By 1997 it was turning over nearly £8m a year and a decade later, as mini-cab licensing was introduced and more corporate clients signed up, income had soared to £70m. It leapt again to £105m in 2010 and to £128m last year, with the five directors sharing payments of £12.5m.
Half of the parent company is owned by Griffin and his sons Liam and Kieran and the other half is owned by Daryl Foster, whose father helped finance the company's start-up. They all live in Hertfordshire. Griffin, a lover of fine restaurants and good wine, likes to sprinkle the operation with a sense of what he sees as glamour, "sexing up the business a bit". He boasts that "occasional celebrities, like Glenn Hoddle, waft through the office". There is a cockney sporting theme: others who have popped into the call centre and operations hub include snooker player Ronnie O'Sullivan, football manager Terry Venables and "the Arsenal mafia", he said. The firm once hired The Stig, Top Gear's in-house racing driver, as a training ambassador for its drivers.
Despite the powerful Addison Lee corporate identity, the drivers are self-employed and hire the car and other equipment from Addison Lee companies. The LTDA thinks that the drivers should be directly employed and that this is a "tax dodge". Addison Lee denies that, saying: "The drivers who provide their services to Addison Lee are all self-employed and as a result are individually responsible for their own tax and national insurance arrangements. Addison Lee has no tax avoidance arrangements."
Tom Lanigan, 60, who drove for Addison Lee until last autumn and is now driving a black cab, said that car hire, rent of an onboard computer, cleaning and insurance, all from Addison Lee companies, costs drivers up to £350 a week. A points-based incentive system means the more jobs drivers take, the less they have to pay the company, he said.
"You are looking at a good 12-hour day, six days a week to make a decent living," he said. "You earn £150 to £200 a shift but out of that you need to pay Addison Lee expenses, which used to average £60 to £80 a week, and fuel which can be £200 a week."
He said Addison Lee's strengths included the high standard of their vehicles and its easy-to-use door-to-door service, but he said complaints about drivers' reliance on sat navs were sometimes fair. "No one tests your driving skills and you are being let loose on the British public," he said. "A lot of the drivers rely solely on sat nav and if they go wrong, they go wrong."
"They haven't got the Knowledge, they operate using sat navs and many of the drivers don't speak proper English," added Jim Thomas, the ranks and highways officer for the drivers' association United Cabbies.
Addison Lee said it will suggest drivers who have bad English go to language school and it asks applicants to do a written test of their street knowledge.
As the company grew it became increasingly engaged in politics. Donations to the Conservatives have so far secured Griffin an invitation for drinks "at home" with the Camerons before he became prime minister ("I had an orange juice and left"), a party with 100 other business people in the Downing Street garden, and another inside the building ("It's not Radlett [his own home] but it is No 10 and it is historic").
In the last year Griffin has seen at least 17 politicians involved in transport at the House of Commons, the House of Lords and at City Hall, including Philip Hammond when he was secretary of state for transport and Louise Ellman, the Labour chairman of the transport select committee. "I try to get them to come and have lunch at Addison Lee – show them the acceptable face," he said. "They are a bit of a pain, but I let them come along".
Griffin's lobbying tactics are not always precise. Last month, his lobbyist lined up shadow transport minister John Woodcock to meet him at Addison Lee's office. "I thought he was a new bloke and I was just showing him round," said Griffin. "I didn't have a clue who he was."
He says he does not expect immediate results from his lobbying but considers it a way of developing support for the fights to come.
"The bus lane is a big battle and we want to sow the seed so that there are a lot of people out there [in politics] who see Addison Lee are right," he said.
But there was evidence this week that mounting a campaign of civil disobedience does not curry favour with the ruling class when it comes to changing policies. The long-planned meeting on Tuesday with Baker only just went ahead because of the bus lane tactics, and when it did it was a frosty affair.
"His opening line was 'I was going to cancel the meeting', which wasn't great," said Griffin. "He wasn't happy to be seeing me when we were in the headlines that morning. I pretty much spoke for 30 minutes and it was a little bit, 'I've seen you, it's over'. They all get nervous around taxis."