£1m taxi budget pays to transport criminals in city

TAXPAYERS have paid for taxis for sex offenders and criminals on community service duty as part of a soaring social work transport bill.

Figures obtained by the Evening News show the council's health and social care department racked up a £1 million taxi bill in 2007/08, and this is set to rise to £1.2m for the year to April.

Included was £23.20 spent on ferrying sex offenders to appointments with criminal justice advisers. A further £139.50 was claimed for transporting criminals carrying out community service orders in north-west and south-east Edinburgh in 2007/08.

Taxis are used by the health and social care department for a number of reasons, including escorting vulnerable children around the city, moving old people between homes and transporting staff.

Nearly a quarter of the spend went on contract taxis to get people with learning disabilities to and from schools and day centres.

Council chiefs today said one of the community service journeys was for a wheelchair user who could not use council transport because it had no wheelchair lift.

They said community service and sex offender taxi trips accounted for just 0.006 per cent of the entire taxi spend over the past two years. But opposition politicians hit out at the costs and asked why taxpayers were picking up the bill.

Councillor Kate Mackenzie, the city's Tory health and social care spokeswoman, said: "There is a high chance that the sex offenders and people doing their community service were not working, so you think they would have had the time to use public transport. I think they need to look again at ways of cutting taxi use, but without endangering the vulnerable people they are serving."

Just over a third of the taxi journeys involved council staff escorting their clients.

Councillor Lesley Hinds, the city's Labour health and social care spokeswoman, said: "This is a problem, it is a large sum of money and I think there needs to be more imaginative thinking when it comes to transporting vulnerable people around the city.

A council spokeswoman said: "The needs and safety of our clients is always our first priority, and wherever possible we use council transport. However, there are times when council transport is not appropriate either due to the logistics, the time of day or the needs of the client. Our spending on criminal justice clients is, as you would expect, very small.

"There are rare occasions, such as when the client has a disability, when taxis are used if there is no alternative available."