Will bigger taxi licensing areas really solve England’s WAV shortages or just make the statistics look better?

Government plans to shift taxi and private hire licensing to much larger transport authority areas could dramatically change the map of wheelchair-accessible vehicle provision. But aggregating several neighbouring fleets into one licensing area risks creating an illusion of improved accessibility while the vehicles themselves remain concentrated exactly where they are today.

The Department for Transport’s (DfT) latest figures, published in August 2026, show that 34,500 licensed taxis and private hire vehicles in England were wheelchair accessible as of 1 April. That represented a fall of 4% compared with 2024. Across the country, around 10% of all licensed taxis and private hire vehicles were wheelchair accessible, but the split between the two sectors remains wide. Some 54% of taxis were wheelchair accessible, compared with just 2% of private hire vehicles.

The most revealing part of the data is the variation between individual licensing authorities. Seven English licensing authorities recorded no wheelchair-accessible taxis or private hire vehicles at all, while at the opposite end of the spectrum Worcester had the highest proportion in England, with 71.3% of its licensed vehicle fleet wheelchair accessible. There were also 57 authorities where every licensed taxi was wheelchair accessible.

Those differences matter because England currently has 263 taxi and private hire licensing authorities. The Government has consulted on transferring that responsibility to local transport authorities, of which there are around 70. In many parts of the country, that would mean several existing licensing districts being folded into one much larger area, potentially covering multiple towns, cities and extensive rural territory.

On paper, that could transform the picture of wheelchair-accessible vehicle provision almost overnight. In practice, considerably less may change.

The statistical problem could suddenly look smaller

Imagine three neighbouring licensing districts. One has only five wheelchair-accessible vehicles, the second has 15, and the third, perhaps containing the main city or large town, has 180. Under the current system, those three areas appear separately in Department for Transport statistics, allowing policymakers and passengers to see immediately that one district has exceptionally thin WAV provision.

Merge those authorities together and the new regional licensing authority suddenly has 200 wheelchair-accessible vehicles. The five-WAV authority effectively disappears from the data as a separate entity. Nothing has necessarily happened to the five vehicles operating there. No additional accessible taxi has arrived, no new driver has invested in a wheelchair-accessible vehicle, and no passenger waiting in an outlying village has gained a new local option. The boundary around the numbers has simply changed.

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That is one of the biggest potential unintended consequences of creating larger licensing areas. Accessibility provision could appear more evenly distributed without accessible transport itself becoming more evenly distributed. Low-WAV authorities would effectively inherit the stronger fleets of their neighbours on paper, producing healthier-looking regional totals despite no immediate improvement on the ground.

The Government’s argument for larger licensing authorities is that they could better reflect how people actually travel. Passengers do not generally organise their journeys around district council boundaries. Someone may live in one area, work in another and travel into a third for healthcare, shopping or leisure. In that sense, larger transport authority boundaries can make more sense than the fragmented system that exists today.

But wheelchair-accessible taxi provision is not simply a regional numerical resource. It is a geographically sensitive service, and distance matters. A WAV that exists somewhere within the same enlarged authority may still be 20 or 30 miles away from the passenger who needs it.

A passenger cannot travel in a statistic

For a wheelchair user trying to reach an early hospital appointment, get home after an evening event or travel from a rural village to a railway station, the important question is not how many accessible vehicles are licensed somewhere within a strategic authority. What matters is how many are realistically available nearby, at the right time, and willing to make the journey.

A future licensing authority could stretch across several large towns and hundreds of square miles of countryside. On paper, every passenger inside that boundary could be described as having access to the same pool of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Operationally, however, those vehicles may remain heavily concentrated around one or two urban centres where there is enough work to sustain them.

Taxi markets have historically developed around local demand. Vehicles congregate around railway stations, hospitals, nightlife areas, shopping centres and busy ranks because that is where drivers can find sufficient work. Simply enlarging the licensing boundary does not mean those drivers will suddenly redistribute themselves evenly across the new region.

If an urban centre currently supports 100 wheelchair-accessible taxis and a neighbouring rural district supports five, merging the licensing regimes does not meaningfully give the rural district 105 WAVs. It gives the new licensing authority 105 WAVs. Those are not the same thing.

High-WAV areas could look weaker too

The statistical distortion would also operate in the opposite direction. Areas that currently have exceptionally strong wheelchair-accessible fleets could see that strength diluted once their figures are combined with neighbouring districts where accessible vehicles are much less common.

Take an authority where 70% of licensed vehicles are wheelchair accessible and merge it with several neighbouring areas where WAVs represent only a small proportion of the fleet. The resulting regional percentage could fall sharply, even though no wheelchair-accessible vehicle has left the original area and passengers there continue to enjoy exactly the same level of local provision.

The effect would be a form of statistical smoothing. Areas with very low WAV numbers would appear to improve, while those with high concentrations would appear less exceptional. The extreme highs would come down, the extreme lows would rise and the map would look more balanced.

But the actual distribution of vehicles could remain almost unchanged.

That matters because policymakers could wrongly conclude that accessibility gaps had narrowed when all that had really happened was a change in the size of the unit being measured. A district that currently looks poorly served could vanish inside a larger authority with a respectable regional total, even though passengers in that locality experience no practical improvement at all.

Worcester illustrates the issue

Worcester provides a useful example because the 2026 DfT statistics identify it as having the highest proportion of wheelchair-accessible licensed vehicles in England, at 71.3%. Under a larger licensing model, a city such as Worcester may no longer be assessed as a standalone licensing market if responsibility is transferred to a broader transport authority.

Its accessible fleet could instead be absorbed into a much larger regional total. That could benefit neighbouring areas if vehicles genuinely begin working more freely across the wider geography and if passengers gain real access to them. But that should not be assumed simply because they now sit within the same licensing boundary.

A wheelchair-accessible taxi based in Worcester does not automatically become a practical transport option for somebody living on the far side of a rural neighbouring district. Distance remains, journey economics remain, driver working patterns remain and local demand remains. A driver still has to travel to the passenger, and the cost of that positioning journey still has to be absorbed by somebody.

This is why the difference between theoretical access and operational availability needs to be at the centre of any assessment of the proposed reforms.

Bigger authorities could still bring benefits

None of this means larger licensing areas are incapable of improving wheelchair-accessible provision. There are genuine potential advantages, particularly if licensing reform is accompanied by stronger regional planning rather than simply larger administrative boundaries.

A single regional licensing body could reduce the current situation where neighbouring councils adopt radically different vehicle policies. One authority may require a heavily wheelchair-accessible taxi fleet while the council next door permits a predominantly saloon-based fleet. A larger authority could adopt one accessibility strategy across the whole region and potentially create more consistent vehicle standards.

Over time, that could influence fleet composition. A larger authority could also consider taxi and PHV accessibility alongside buses, demand-responsive transport, rail stations, healthcare transport and other supported services, rather than treating licensing as an isolated regulatory function.

There is also an argument that larger zones could make genuine cross-border working easier. A WAV sitting close to the boundary of two existing councils may already be well placed to serve passengers in both areas. Bringing both places under the same licensing authority could remove unnecessary administrative friction and make that movement simpler.

But those benefits depend on actual policy choices and driver behaviour. They do not materialise automatically when two datasets are merged.

Private hire remains a major weakness

The private hire figures underline why the problem cannot be solved through boundary changes alone. Of roughly 290,000 licensed PHVs in England in 2026, only around 6,400 were wheelchair accessible, equating to roughly 2% of the fleet. By comparison, around 28,000 of England’s 52,300 taxis were wheelchair accessible.

That means many areas are already heavily dependent on the taxi fleet for wheelchair-accessible provision. Merging several licensing authorities together may produce a larger-looking WAV total, but it does not alter the underlying fact that accessible PHV provision remains extremely thin in much of the country.

In some regions, the new licensing authority could simply inherit the same imbalance at a larger scale. One city may provide the bulk of accessible taxis, while surrounding districts continue to rely on a very small number of vehicles or none at all. The headline regional figure could look respectable while local provision remains highly uneven.

The Government will need more detailed data, not less

This raises a major question about how the Department for Transport should report wheelchair-accessible vehicle provision if licensing authorities are merged.

The current system, for all its flaws, exposes sharp local differences because the geographical units are relatively small. If 263 licensing bodies are eventually replaced by around 70 larger authorities, publishing WAV figures only at that new level could hide local shortages that are visible today.

A region might be recorded as having hundreds of wheelchair-accessible vehicles, but that figure would say little about where those vehicles are actually based, where they predominantly work, what hours they operate or how quickly they can reach passengers in different parts of the authority.

Future data therefore needs to become more granular, not less.

The Department should continue publishing information below the new licensing-authority level where possible, perhaps by former district, operating area or smaller geographic unit. It should also move beyond simple licence counts and look at where vehicles are actually available, how many hours they operate, passenger waiting times, refused bookings and the number of wheelchair-accessible vehicles available at different times of day.

Without that detail, larger licensing areas could produce a misleadingly positive picture.