Wolverhampton PHV explosion laid bare in fresh DfT taxi stats as council licenses nearly 38,000 vehicles and takes 13% of England market

New Department for Transport (DfT) data has revealed the authorities licensing Britain’s largest private hire vehicle fleets, with Wolverhampton emerging as an extraordinary national outlier outside London as cross-border working continues to reshape where vehicles are registered.

The figures, which represent the position on 1 April 2026, show London remains comfortably the largest licensing area with 93,316 PHVs. Wolverhampton is second with 37,967, followed by Bradford with 6,698, Birmingham with 6,376 and Newcastle upon Tyne with 5,738.

The size of Wolverhampton’s operation means it licenses almost six times as many PHVs as Bradford, the next highest authority outside London. More significantly, the DfT says Wolverhampton alone accounts for 13.1% of every licensed PHV in England.

The figures underline how PHV licensing statistics can no longer be interpreted simply as a measure of local private hire provision. The DfT explicitly warns that vehicles are counted against the authority that licenses them, rather than the area in which they actually work. Under the current system, drivers can obtain licences from authorities outside the areas where they predominantly operate.

That issue becomes particularly apparent when examining the top 25.

Sefton ranks sixth with 5,724 PHVs and neighbouring Knowsley seventh with 4,917. Leeds follows with 4,574, while South Gloucestershire sits ninth nationally with 3,487. Solihull completes the top ten with 3,318.

Manchester is 11th with 3,072, followed by Oldham on 2,800. But perhaps one of the most striking entries after Wolverhampton is East Cambridgeshire.

The largely rural authority ranks 13th in Britain with 2,785 licensed PHVs, putting it ahead of Liverpool, which has 2,736. It also sits above Kirklees, Sheffield, Nottingham and a string of substantially larger urban areas.

South Cambridgeshire provides another unusual entry at number 16 with 2,251 PHVs. Taken together, East Cambridgeshire and South Cambridgeshire license 5,036 PHVs, despite both being classified as predominantly rural authorities in the DfT dataset.

Sheffield ranks 17th with 2,194, Nottingham 18th with 2,156 and Buckinghamshire 19th with 2,126. Rochdale rounds out the top 20 with 2,012.

West Northamptonshire follows with 1,953 PHVs, Stoke-on-Trent has 1,942, Cardiff 1,588, Newport 1,587 and Southampton completes the top 25 with 1,528.

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Wolverhampton is in a category of its own

No authority demonstrates the effect of out-of-area licensing more dramatically than Wolverhampton.

The DfT describes the city as a “notable outlier”, recording 135.4 licensed taxis and PHVs for every 1,000 residents. The next highest authority, Knowsley, has just 31.5 per 1,000 which is still way above the national average.

Wolverhampton has approximately 100 taxis compared with nearly 38,000 PHVs, leaving little doubt about which side of the trade has driven its extraordinary licensing growth.

Its fleet has also expanded rapidly.

City of Wolverhampton Council’s own Taxi Compliance Strategy reported that licensed vehicle numbers more than tripled from 9,937 in May 2021 to 34,517 by 31 December 2024. Driver numbers increased from 16,655 to 49,714 over the same period, while PHV operator numbers more than doubled from 180 to 506.

The latest DfT figure of 37,967 PHVs indicates that expansion continued into 2026.

The DfT has previously linked Wolverhampton’s unusually high numbers with licensing policies and processes and the ability of vehicles to be licensed in one authority while operating primarily elsewhere. In its 2024 statistical analysis, the Department said the large increase in Wolverhampton licences since 2017 was “likely to be as a result of some of these factors”.

The consequence is that the Wolverhampton figure should not be read as representing almost 38,000 PHVs serving passengers within Wolverhampton itself. A substantial cross-border licensing market means vehicles carrying Wolverhampton plates can be encountered across England.

Cross-border working reaches far beyond one council

The rankings also indicate why the debate cannot be solely pointed towards Wolverhampton.

Knowsley, with 4,917 PHVs, is seventh nationally and has the second-highest concentration of licensed taxi and PHV vehicles per head in England, according to the DfT. Sefton, another Merseyside authority, is sixth nationally with 5,724.

South Gloucestershire’s ninth-place position is also significant given its proximity to Bristol and the wider cross-border private hire market in the region.

The working consequences were demonstrated last month when South Gloucestershire licensing officers joined police and licensing teams from Bristol, Wolverhampton, Newport and Tewkesbury for a cross-border compliance operation. Officers stopped 108 vehicles and drivers carrying licences from 26 different licensing authorities.

Two immediate stop notices were issued during that operation, although South Gloucestershire Council said overall compliance was very high. The exercise nevertheless demonstrated the enforcement challenge created when vehicles licensed by authorities across the country converge in the same working area.

For local licensing teams, that creates an increasingly complicated regulatory landscape. The council issuing a driver’s or vehicle’s licence can be hundreds of miles from the streets where the individual regularly works, while the authority dealing with complaints, roadside enforcement and local transport pressures may have had no involvement in issuing that licence.

PHV growth is accelerating outside London

The rankings sit within a much larger structural change in England’s taxi and private hire market.

There were approximately 290,000 licensed PHVs in England on 1 April 2026, up 13% from 2024. By comparison, taxi numbers dropped 7% to approximately 52,300 over the same period.

The most significant PHV growth is now occurring outside London.

There were approximately 196,600 PHVs licensed outside the capital in 2026, representing a 20% increase in only two years. London’s PHV fleet increased by just 1% over the same period to around 93,300.

That means roughly two-thirds of England’s PHVs are now licensed outside London.

Wolverhampton alone accounts for around one in every eight PHVs licensed nationally and approximately one in every five licensed outside London.

That concentration raises a question over what local authority PHV statistics now measure. In traditional terms, a fleet figure might reasonably have been treated as an indication of the scale of a town or city’s local private hire industry. Cross-border working has weakened that relationship considerably.

The DfT has now made that limitation explicit, warning users to exercise caution when comparing licensing rates between authorities because some councils license a “disproportionately large number of vehicles” relative to their resident populations.

The top 25 reinforces that warning. Major population centres such as Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Nottingham predictably appear towards the top, but they sit alongside authorities whose licence numbers appear disproportionately high when measured against their geographical size or rural classification.