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United Kingdom - 08/02/08
SGS UK London Black Cab Inspection Programme
Following an international tender process in 2003 SGS United Kingdom Limited (SGS) was awarded the contract with Transport for London’s (TfL) Public Carriage Office (PCO) for the inspection and licensing of London's 40,000 Private Hire Vehicles (PHV). This contract with SGS had an option built in for TfL to include the Black Cab operations at a future date. TfL decided to exercise this option to outsource the inspection and licensing of London's Black Cabs to SGS and the programme became operational in April 2007.
The scope of the Black Cab contract was to inspect and license London’s Black Cabs incorporating a full mechanical inspection, a mid-year safety inspection, an inspection to assess the suitability for use as a public service vehicle, a vehicle identification process and a licence issuance process. The booking and call centre operations were to mirror the PHV process using the call centre located in SGS Ireland.
A total of 22,000 initial full mechanical inspections, 11,000 retests of initial inspections coupled with the 22,000 mid-year inspections and circa 8,000 retests of mid-year inspections, necessitated the development of an operation capable of dealing with up to 65,000 vehicle appearances per annum.
SGS set up 3 new inspection facilities in the London Area with a lane layout and design similar to the SGS test centre facilities in Ireland.
The start up programme had to successfully deal with a number of difficult areas including Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employees (TUPE), HR considerations, a difficult local planning process, changes to UK building regulations, a large fire close to one of the new inspection facilities, a complex extension to the Vehicle Inspection Management (VIMs) IT program and a MAHA equipment instillation program.
A total of 14 inspectors were recruited for the initial start up phase, a number of these being TUPEd across from the highly experienced PCO inspection team. The eventual number of staff involved in the operations is 30, including management, administration and inspection teams.
The operations went live on 2nd of April 2007 with some initial complications caused by an unscheduled, unforeseen backlog of 2,000 inspections left over from the previous PCO in-house inspection process. Adjustments to the staffing levels, scheduling and call centre operations were made to incorporate these additional volumes. SGS call centre and inspection teams had to put in an excellent performance to successfully deal with the very busy start up period and significantly after the first four months of operations were running ahead of schedule with same-day full and retest timeslots available where necessary. The director of the PCO wrote to SGS to congratulate teams for the manner in which the service was introduced.
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