We have avoided giving a statement to drivers until now. The reasons behind this are that 247 Cars believe in good governance, reflection and above all avoiding unnecessary overreaction.
You will have received many messages over the last few weeks from dozens of sources including from the government.
Keeping clean is in our opinion, the most important.
Hygiene
- Keep Clean – Wash Your Hands Thoroughly For More Than 30 Secs
- Avoid hand contact with eyes & mouth
- Use Tissues when you sneeze and cough
- Look out for symptoms of flu, cough, shortness of breath, loss of sense of smell/taste and self-isolate and seek medical help if experienced
- Keep a distance of 2M from others
- Clean your handles, steering wheel, etc after every job
Lockdown
The Government appears to be gradually locking the country down.
The thing that has affected our industry the most was the closure of all Leisure facilities. This has seen a sharp decline in work, especially in the evening.
Our work is strong M’A and we are still doing 1000’s of jobs a day as we have always concentrated on building firm private custom and not doing school runs etc at peak time. This means we still have regular work at many times of the day.
For Instance, this Saturday night driver numbers were down by over 50%, but work was down by less than 50%.
Most of our drivers were still getting a job before 30 minutes and many other competitors have reported drivers waiting over 2 hours.
Our advice to Drivers
- You need to get out of your comfort zone and change your patterns
- Early morning bookings (4am onward) are not for leisure and people need to go to work. We are trusted by customers M’A so the work in this timing has hardly been affected
- Early Saturday & Sunday morning also is unaffected as there are fewer drivers than normal. The screenshot below is this morning Sun 22nd March at 07:00 am. As can be seen most drivers were waiting between 1 and 9 minutes for a job. 35 on shift, 14 Clear, 21 On Jobs
- Evening Work is severely affected, however, we believe that there will be an improvement over the coming days I’A
- These are not normal times so be prepared to travel further to pick up a job and keep your wheels rolling.
- Card jobs are the safest work as there are no notes/coins changing hands
- We are still continuing our sales and marketing as usual and are increasing advertising in Birmingham to spread out the work
- Keep your PDA’s on when at home so you can pick up extra income when you normally would be off, especially at peak times where there will still be a surge of work
Forward Plan
We are doing everything possible to keep you and your family with a viable income I’A. The government is only giving minimal help to the self-employed at the moment so we must do all we can to help ourselves.
We will keep you all informed via Driver Blog. It is important every driver reads and understands every Blog.
Driver Rents
- All fixed rents have been suspended
- Every driver has been put onto a 17% commission, which means you only pay for what jobs you do.
- 247 Cars will do whatever it takes to ensure drivers can earn a reasonable income.
- We will reduce the commission payable further in the future if the situation continues to deteriorate.
- 247 Cars are monitoring situation hour by hour.
To keep the base operational for you we need to be able to pay overheads and we aim to strike a fair balance with this.
We pray that Allah SWT keeps us all safe in these most difficult days.