• We are asking Canterbury City Council Licensing to temporarily freeze licence fee increases until April 2022.

Recently Canterbury City Council wrote to you, asking & License holders with Canterbury City council for any objections, regarding increasing costs of your License from 1st April 2021.

• As many will know the Taxi and Private Hire industry has been severely affected to an approximate downturn of over 75% in income over the past 10 months.

Which means many are struggling to even meet the payments for their fixed costs and are continuing to operate at a loss every week during the pandemic that we currently are going through.

• Despite this Canterbury City Council have put forward a proposed increase to these licensing costs in line with the council policy.

This would normally have been an acceptable position and reasonable proposal, however it presents a real and present danger to the license holders currently.

• It will further adversely affect hundreds of people and make the ability to provide the standard of service required of license holders even more financially strained.

While the amounts are not huge involved it is poorly timed and should be resisted as an acceptable increase at a time when Support is needed from Local Government not further financial burdens.

We are asking that these license increases are deferred until April 2022 which would be of some support to license holders that are already suffering financially.