Elizabeth Fish

The City of Lincoln Council has approved a new code of conduct for hackney carriage and private hire drivers, such as taxis, aimed to protect both passengers and drivers.

The new document comes after the recent independent inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham in 1997-2013 by Alexis Jay OBE.

Within the document, there are guidelines on behaviour expected of private hires, and covers safeguarding and customer and driver care and protection.

The council held a review to ensure it can learn and implement some lessons, so the Licensing Committee approved the new code on December 2.

The council’s safeguarding representative and legal services, Lincoln operators, hackney carriage driver representatives, the Private Hire and Taxi Association and a frequent private hire users were consulted.

Kevin Barron, Licensing Manager, said: “As a licensing authority we have a duty of care to ensure private hire drivers are fit and proper to hold a licence.

“We already have a robust system in place to ensure, as far as possible, that persons not fit to be drivers are not permitted to enter the system and measures are in place to remove drivers that subsequently fail to meet the test.

“The code of conduct will benefit both the public and drivers working in the city.

“It gives drivers information on how to report safeguarding issues and will be included in the documents given when a licence is issued, irrespective of whether it is a driver or a vehicle licence, and will help them know what is and what isn’t acceptable behaviour should they be complained about.”

Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln has been awarded a £406,500 grant to help improve the educational impact of museums and heritage sites across the East Midlands.

BG is administering part of the Sandford Learning Cascade Project, a four-year scheme which will encourage up to 14 Sandford Award winning sites in the region to support staff training at less developed heritage sites.

BG looks over the The Sandford Award, established in 1978 by Lord Sandford and the Heritage Education Trust.

The award rewards excellence in heritage education, with winners such as Gainsborough Old Hall and Belton House.

The grant, which covers 75% of the total project funding, was passed on to the project from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Sandford Learning Cascade has three parts:

• Sandford Scholarships: Staff from less developed heritage sites visit Sandford Award-winning sites and collect a digital record of best practice there. They can then use what they found to develop new education programmes and enhance existing ones.
• Sandford Cloud: Heritage professionals and volunteers in the region get access to the expertise of Sandford Award judges around the UK online.
• Sandford Our Take: An award scheme to recognise high quality informal and family learning in the region.

Jean MacIntyre, Head of Innovation at BGU, said: “The HLF gave us a grant for the development phase which went extremely well and involved a number of local museums and heritage centres.

“The sites told us the project had changed their whole way of thinking about heritage education and we expect the next phase to be even more influential.

“The HLF has been very generous and imaginative in recognising the needs of people working in the heritage sector as opportunities for training have diminished, so this is an ideal opportunity to increase the knowledge, skills and understanding of people working at a range of heritage sites.

“The Sandford Learning Cascade project will be a significant contribution to meeting BGU’s knowledge transfer and public engagement aims across the region as well as establishing the Sandford Awards as a dynamic, positive force for education training in the UK.”

Project Co-ordinator Adam Clarke added: “BGU and the Sandford Award will be working with museums, heritage sites and a range of other partners across the East Midlands to develop high-quality educational resources for the benefit of children, schools and families throughout our region.”