Uber is expected to find out today whether Transport for London will give it a licence to continue operating in the capital.
The US car-hailing smartphone app launched in London in 2012 and has signed up millions of customers as well as thousands of drivers, but faced vocal opposition from the taxi trade, reports the Telegraph.
Its licence is currently due to expire next Saturday, September 30. Later today Uber is likely to find out whether that will be extended or not. In May its licence was extended for just four months, instead of the regular five years, raising questions about whether it would be extended further.
The company is the world’s most highly-valued tech startup and has become a fixture in many cities.
However it has faced mounting problems from regulators around the world as well as a string of internal problems. The San Francisco firm has been accused of skirting local regulations as well as mistreating its drivers, whom it categorises as self-employed instead of workers.
Taxi groups have threatened legal action against TfL if it goes ahead and renews the licence.
However, a decision not to renew the licence would be likely to provoke an outcry from its 3.5m users in London and 40,000 drivers. When TfL proposed onerous new private hire rules that would have limited Uber’s operations in 2015, more than 200,000 people signed a petition opposing them and most of the proposals were dropped.
This week it emerged that the transport body had quietly increased the price of licences for the biggest companies to up to £2.9m.
