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After four reviews and 12 years of warnings, will ministers finally fix England’s broken taxi and PHV licensing system?
England’s taxi and private hire licensing system does not suffer from a shortage of diagnosis. The Law Commission identified its structural weaknesses in 2014. The Task and Finish Group repeated many of those findings in 2018. Baroness Casey returned to the safeguarding consequences in June 2025. A Department for Transport consultation and a House of Commons Transport Committee inquiry have now arrived at broadly the same conclusion.
The system is fragmented, standards vary and enforcement responsibilities frequently sit in a different place from the vehicles and drivers being regulated. Yet, more than a decade after the Law Commission produced 84 recommendations and its own draft Bill, the legislation governing taxis outside London still rests partly on an Act passed for horse-drawn vehicles in 1847.
Change matters more than ever now because the market has changed beyond recognition through technology and arguably the blurring of lines along the way. Department for Transport figures published in August showed that licensed private hire vehicles outnumber taxis by more than five to one, with almost all recent growth occurring outside London.
Regulation designed around small, local fleets is being applied to an increasingly national market shaped by booking platforms, subcontracting and routine cross-border working.
The proposed transfer of licensing responsibility from 263 authorities to approximately 70 local transport authorities should tighten standards, but that outcome is not automatic and certainly not the silver bullet to sort out the problems faced by cabbies throughout England and Wales. Larger authorities would have fewer borders to police, greater licensing income, more scope to maintain specialist enforcement teams and a better chance of regulating vehicles where they actually work. However, borders will remain and so will the same issues discussed for over a decade unless further action is taken.
The Government says consolidation should improve consistency and reduce the factors encouraging applicants to seek licences elsewhere. In the Liverpool City Region, for example, one authority could regulate more than 13,100 vehicles and 16,200 drivers instead of responsibility being divided among six councils.
However, reducing the number of licensing authorities is an administrative reform, not a safety standard. Seventy authorities can still make 70 different decisions. A larger regulator can be better resourced and more capable, but it can also become a larger source of weak licences if its policies are deficient. Consolidation magnifies the consequences of the rules adopted by each authority, whether those rules are strong or weak.
There is also a danger that harmonisation becomes levelling down. When several existing policies are merged across a larger region, decision-makers may be tempted to adopt the least demanding common requirements to avoid increasing fees, delaying applications or excluding older vehicles.
The Government’s consultation itself acknowledges that differences in cost and vehicle rules encourage out-of-area licensing. Removing those differences by lowering stronger requirements would improve consistency on paper while weakening regulation in practice.
This is why the national standard matters more than the number of authorities. Tests of driver suitability, criminality checks, safeguarding training, medical fitness, overseas records, disability awareness and the treatment of convictions should not change at a council boundary. Nor should there be substantial local variation in the threshold for suspending or revoking a licence when public safety is at risk.
Local discretion still has a legitimate place, but it should begin only after safety-critical matters have been settled nationally. Authorities should remain able to impose stronger requirements where these respond to demonstrable local conditions, including emissions, vehicle appearance, rank management, wheelchair-accessible provision, congestion and the needs of rural or night-time economies. They should not be able to rewrite the basic meaning of passenger safety.
That offers a workable dividing line on how national rules should govern who may enter and remain in the profession, the information authorities must consider, the checks that must be completed and the circumstances requiring immediate action. Local policy should govern how licensed services fit the transport needs and physical conditions of a particular area.
The Commons Transport Committee has warned that minimum standards must not become “low by default”. It recommended minimising the areas in which variation is permitted and setting the national floor at a high level wherever possible. The DfT has itself conceded that local additions could preserve incentives for licence shopping where tougher requirements cost applicants more.
That exposes the central weakness in the phrase “national minimum”. In safety-critical areas, the Government should set requirements so comprehensive that there is little meaningful scope to go lower or higher. Calling them minimum standards should not mean councils negotiate towards the easiest politically acceptable baseline. For vetting, safeguarding and fitness decisions, they should function as national mandatory standards.
The current attempt could differ from the reviews that preceded it because the Government has finally announced a legislative vehicle. The proposed Draft Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Bill would establish a single framework across England, mandate a national database of licensed drivers, vehicles and operators, improve information sharing, strengthen enforcement powers and increase accessibility protections.
There is also a more urgent political origin. Baroness Casey identified inconsistent licensing and out-of-area working as a live safeguarding vulnerability, rather than merely an administrative inconvenience. The Government accepted her recommendation in full and promised to work “as quickly as possible” on national standards, enforcement and cross-border working.
Even so, announcing a draft Bill is not the same as legislating. Draft legislation must undergo pre-legislative scrutiny before a final Bill is introduced, and no fixed date has been published for either that process to conclude or the legislation to receive Royal Assent. The Law Commission also produced a draft Bill. Its work was never taken forward.
The strongest reform would combine three elements: fewer and better-resourced licensing authorities, firm national rules in safety-critical areas and local discretion confined to genuine local transport issues. Remove any one of those elements and arguably the old weaknesses remain.
After four major reviews, the Government no longer needs more evidence that the framework is failing. What would make this attempt different is not another consultation, database proposal or ministerial promise. It is legislation introduced to a published deadline, with safety standards strong enough to survive local interpretation and enforcement powers located where the work takes place.
