Pony courier van job becomes pig in a poke
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• Owner-driver Mark Adams had been unemployed for nine months when he bought an ageing Ford Escort van on a £500 overdraft in the hope of finding courier work.
He borrowed money to restore the van, and thought he had struck lucky when he was offered well-paid work with the Medway depot of Securicor subsidiary Pony Express.
Six weeks later, he is now out of business and heavily in debt. The £75 daily rate he had been told to expect for his 380km route turned out to be just 242.50.
The company told him that the first verbal quote he had been given was wrong, and that nothing could be done. Adams was furious: "I did not expect a
firm such as this to treat anybody in such a manner.'
Medway depot co-ordinator Liz Woodyer says that she was on sick leave at the time Adams was hired, and does not know what conditions were agreed. The person who first spoke to Adams was a self-employed stand-in controller.
Pony Express's national project co-ordinator Norman Bearcroft says that a rate of £75 per day for what amounts to an afternoon's driving would be "crazy". He says Adams could have had a written agreement if he had asked for it, but is not enthusiastic about such agreements with all the company's owner-drivers. "We get 75,000 jobs a week, that would be a hell of a lot of paperwork."