Portsmouth licenses 1,211 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 205 hackney carriages and 1,006 private hire vehicles.
Private hire clearly leads the licensed fleet, so most work arrives pre-booked through a phone line, an app or a web form before any driver moves.
A fleet in this range is past the point where one controller sees everything at once, but not yet big enough to absorb a bad half-hour without customers noticing.
1,497 driver licences are in force against those 1,211 vehicles, or 1.24 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
Portsmouth licenses 5.81 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 121 per cent above the national midpoint.
Licensed supply sits far above the national midpoint. In a market this saturated the winning operator is rarely the one with the most cars; it is the one whose quoted arrival time is the time that actually happens.
Against its own region the fleet is denser than typical: the South East median is 2.22 per 1,000 residents.
Town and city demand of this kind is steady rather than spiky, and much of the dependable income comes from contract work: school runs, hospital appointments, account journeys.
Portsmouth requires a licensed private hire operator to record 12 of the 12 booking details the DfT surveys: passenger name, time the booking was made, date the booking was made, pick-up time, pick-up date, pick-up point, main destination, driver name, driver licence number, vehicle registration, name of the booker and dispatcher name.
This is close to the strictest record-keeping regime in the survey — very nearly every booking field the DfT asks about is mandatory here.
On vehicles, hackney carriages are held to a maximum vehicle age and private hire vehicles to a maximum vehicle age.
Portsmouth caps the number of hackney carriage licences it issues, so plate availability rather than demand sets the ceiling on that half of the fleet. Capped areas tend to see plates hold value and change hands, with growth pushed towards private hire, where numbers are not restricted.
Daily roadworthiness checks are a condition in Portsmouth, so there is a per-vehicle, per-day record to produce on request.
Before a new driver in Portsmouth can be sent a job, background screening is enhanced dbs and barred list checks, drivers must meet a minimum spoken and written English standard and safeguarding training covering child sexual exploitation and county lines is required.
Portsmouth also requires a DBS check for the people taking and dispatching bookings, not only for drivers, so office staff sit inside the compliance perimeter too.
7.3 per cent of the licensed fleet in Portsmouth is wheelchair accessible — 55 hackney carriages and 33 private hire vehicles.
That is a thin accessible share, so accessible bookings need planning rather than absorbing, and one vehicle off the road materially cuts capacity.
Portsmouth departs from the majority answer on 9 of the surveyed licensing policies.
Caps hackney carriage licence numbers: "Yes" here, against "No" for 74 per cent of authorities.
Hackney CCTV policy: "Yes" here, against "Allow" for 92 per cent of authorities.
PHV CCTV policy: "Yes" here, against "Allow" for 92 per cent of authorities.
Requires daily PHV roadworthiness checks: "Yes" here, against "No" for 50 per cent of authorities.
Hackney topographical assessment: "No" here, against "Topological" for 65 per cent of authorities.
PHV topographical assessment: "No" here, against "Topological" for 52 per cent of authorities.
