Pre-Market Engagement for the provision of Combined PatOps and Taxi Brokerage System

Description

Leicester City Council (“the Council”) are commencing a formal process to obtain market intelligence on offerings in the market on both commercial off the shelf solutions as well as any build offerings in the MS Power platform (or alternate) in relation to Passenger Transport & Taxi Brokerage. There is an extensive change programme underway to reduce the reliance on taxis for those who are eligible for SEND Transport. This will result in a radical shift in the required planning for journeys, with Post 16 SEND Transport potentially being withdrawn for over 400 students. The value of the post-16 journeys is over £4m and there is a £3m savings target attached to the implementation of the Home to School and College Travel Policy (leicester.gov.uk) at the start of the 2024/2025 academic year. As part of the change programme opportunities for improvements, efficiencies and greater systems integration has been identified. There are likely to be opportunities for additional spaces to be filled on buses whilst reducing taxi reliance. In addition, children and young people travelling later in the day could mean that the same bus undertakes more than one journey. This could in principle reduce the number of taxis to schools where there is a longstanding history of residential complaints due to the number of taxi’s causing congestion. Passenger Transport (PatOps) currently undertake manual planning of routes for vehicles (predominantly buses) and have heavily paper based systems of operation. Excel spreadsheets are sometimes used by members of staff to record journey information and monitor attendance, although this is not accessible by all staff and many ‘local’ spreadsheets are utilised. This increases risk of data loss. The team currently use four separate systems to manage the process of taxi brokerage. They state that there are significant weaknesses in the efficiency of service delivery, and identification / reporting of need, usage, performance and financial spend. Keywords: Taxi, Transport