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Terry Rogers buys taxi plates worth £ 1m
By Daire O'Brien
WELL-KNOWN Dublin book-maker Terry Rogers has become a significant player in the Dublin taxi business with the purchase, over the last year, of almost £ 1m worth of taxi plates.

He has purchased 12 plates and a fleet of London-style cabs. The idea is to rent out a complete "package" to drivers. More specifically, this involves Rogers, and his son Billy, providing drivers with a licensed vehicle regular maintenance, insurance, road tax and a radio. All the driver has to do is drive. Drive a lot in fact. A package like Rogers ', which typically involves two drivers sharing the car, costs in the region of £ 700 a week. Typically the person on the day shift will pay slightly less than the night driver.

On paper this looks like a good deal for Rogers. For an outlay of £ 75,000, an owner can expect a return of £ 35,000 a year. In reality, however, when the annual cost of leasing, maintenance, radio hire, insurance and road tax is taken into consideration, trade sources say a healthy net return is £ 100- £ 150 per driver a week.

Demand for Dublin taxi plates, boosted by the arrival of Rogers as a cash buyer, remains strong, despite a going rate of around £ 75,000. With just 1,976 official taxis in existence, plates are rare and the entry costs are high. As well as the cost of the plate, an aspiring taxi driver can expect to spend anything up to £ 15,000 on a car, £ 3,000 for insurance, £ 3,000 to the Carriage Office for the transfer of a plate, £ 2,500 a year on maintenance, a further £ 2,500 annually on radio hire and last but not least a couple of tankfuls of diesel weekly.

The perennial danger for owners is that the Government will sanction a new issue of plates. In a market which is extremely sensitive to supply and demand this could cause a sharp fall in the worth of plates.

The last time taxi plates were issued by the carriage office was in 1992 when 100 new plates were distributed after a lottery was held among the 1,400 qualifying applicants. Not surprisingly, those who had invested large sums in the business were not happy. However a compromise arrangement, where the sale of the new plates was prohibited for five years, was reached.

The ever present hackney problem, where there are no expensive barriers to entry, is cited as another difficulty by the trade. Taxi drivers are hopeful that legislation will soon be passed which will check the growth of this threat.

Traditionally, the reason for the spiralling cost of taxi plates has been attributed to the glut of healthy severance payments from the early 1980s. One industry figure points out that owning a taxi is about the only "job that's guaranteed for life" in the age of the multi-skilled employee.
