The mayor of Tower Hamlets has racked up £2,800 of tax-payer funded taxi fares during the last 6 months a Freedom of Information request has revealed. 

The Evening Standard report: 

The controversial Mayor of Tower Hamlets came under fire today for his extraordinary use of taxpayer-funded taxis.

Lutfur Rahman, who leads the council in charge of some of Britain’s most impoverished areas, was criticised for a series of astonishing claims, including one £71 cab journey to travel a distance of 400 metres.

Tower Hamlets first directly-elected mayor caught a taxpayer-funded taxi from the council’s Mulberry Place headquarters near the Blackwall Tunnel to a shop on Chrisp Street – a journey that takes less than five minutes on foot.

You can read the full story here. 

I am a journalist and author. I am a journalist at the UK edition of WIRED magazine. In 2015, my first book Freedom of Information: A Practical Guide for UK Journalists, was published. My second book Reed Hastings: Building Netflix, was published in March 2020. I created FOI Directory in 2012 and have maintained it in my spare time ever since.