CS081 - Transport for Children's Services

The spend within children's services for transport is significant and whilst work has been ongoing within Children's Service to reduce the use of taxi's, there is still a demand some of which are court directed. Currently local Providers are being used but prices are escalating year on year which is unsustainable. Therefore, discussions have taken place with Uber who are currently expanding to provide a service to Local Authorities. Uber have reviewed some of our current journeys along with costs and advised that they could bring a potential saving of 20%. Uber provide an online dashboard which details the number of journeys, spend, heatmap of journeys and data can also be exported. There is no cost for the dashboard, this will also be used for the bookings which will be limited to the safeguarding central admin team. This will ensure we have a robust process in place for bookings and ensure approval is in place. We will initially start with 10 journeys and build this up slowly to ensure this is working well. They offer an increased level of checks for teen journey's which is something we don't currently have in place with the current Providers. There will be no commitment made to Uber it will be a contract for as and when required.