Rotherham licenses 1,042 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 53 hackney carriages and 989 private hire vehicles.
Almost the entire licensed fleet is private hire, which may not be hailed or wait on a rank. Every journey has to be pre-booked, so the booking channel and the dispatch system are the business rather than a support function.
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.
1,194 driver licences are in force against those 1,042 vehicles, or 1.15 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
Rotherham licenses 3.88 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 48 per cent above the national midpoint.
Supply is comfortably above the national midpoint, so operators tend to compete on reliability and account work rather than on simply having a vehicle free.
Against its own region the fleet is denser than typical: the Yorkshire and the Humber median is 3.47 per 1,000 residents.
Demand across a minor conurbation is steady, with contract and account work providing the base and evenings providing the peak.
Rotherham requires a licensed private hire operator to record 9 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 licence number and name of the booker.
That is a demanding regime: most of the fields the DfT surveys are mandatory here.
Not required here: driver name, vehicle registration and dispatcher name.
On vehicles, hackney carriages are held to both age and emissions standard and private hire vehicles to both age and emissions standard.
Rotherham does not cap hackney carriage licence numbers, so the fleet can grow with demand. What limits growth is the cost of meeting the standards, not waiting for a plate to come free.
Daily roadworthiness checks are a condition in Rotherham, so there is a per-vehicle, per-day record to produce on request.
Before a new driver in Rotherham can be sent a job, background screening is enhanced dbs and barred list checks, a topographical or navigational assessment must be passed, drivers must meet a minimum spoken and written English standard, safeguarding training covering child sexual exploitation and county lines is required and disability awareness training is mandatory.
Rotherham 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.
1.2 per cent of the licensed fleet in Rotherham is wheelchair accessible — 4 hackney carriages and 8 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.
Rotherham publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
Rotherham departs from the majority answer on 3 of the surveyed licensing policies.
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.
