Daylight snobbery! Fury over car hire ban on drivers from ‘wrong’ postcodes
TRENDY car-sharing firm Zipcar has been accused of snobbery after secretly banning young people who live in poor neighbourhoods from renting its vehicles.
The multi-million-pound company, which has more than 5,000 cars across the country that can be hired by the hour, has admitted customers under 25 living in impoverished areas are not welcome. But those aged as young as 21 who live in smart districts are allowed to join.
A whistleblower told The Mail on Sunday there is a blanket ban on people under 25 from certain postcodes around London and that call handlers are told to lie and tell them the reason for the rejection is due to insurance issues.
The blacklisted areas include part of Barking, East London. Local Labour MP Margaret Hodge said: ‘I’m truly taken aback by Zipcar’s bigoted snobbery. It is an ignorant and lazy assessment of Barking.’
Zipcar membership costs £59.50 a year, and cars cost £6 an hour to rent. Customers can usually find a vehicle within a ten-minute walk, meaning a 21-year-old from an expensive area can easily access a car anywhere in the capital, but a 24-year-old from a banned postcode cannot. The whistleblower revealed that the ban has been in place for at least three years.
After a customer signs up to the service online they receive a call from the Zipcar team to confirm their details. But what the customer does not realise is that if they are under the age of 25 and live in the IG11 postcode area of Barking and Dagenham, TW3 in Hounslow, HA2 in Harrow, HA0 in Brent, or E1 in Tower Hamlets they are refused membership.
The whistleblower added: ‘We were given a sheet with postcodes on it and told that if anyone under the age of 25 wanted to sign up from these areas then they were banned.
‘We were told to tell them that they had been declined because of our insurers.’
A spokesman for the anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: ‘It’s unfair that people should be denied the access to the same services as other people simply because of where they live or their household income.’
Zipcar said: ‘Within those postcodes, we have had to increase the age of eligibility to 25 due to a range of factors, including insurance. We have worked hard to allow membership to as young an age group as possible.
‘We do this on an objective and lawful basis – the economic circumstance of an area is absolutely not a factor.’
Zipcar also operates in Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Maidstone, but customers in those areas are unaffected.