Windsor and Maidenhead licenses 746 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 109 hackney carriages and 637 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.
At this size the operator is often still on the phones, so anything that removes a keystroke from taking a booking pays for itself immediately.
1,162 driver licences are in force against those 746 vehicles, or 1.56 drivers per vehicle. Vehicles are plainly being shared across shifts, which makes clean shift handover and per-driver accounting matter more than raw fleet size.
Windsor and Maidenhead licenses 4.82 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 84 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.
Windsor and Maidenhead requires a licensed private hire operator to record 9 of the 12 booking details the DfT surveys: 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 and vehicle registration.
That is a demanding regime: most of the fields the DfT surveys are mandatory here.
Not required here: passenger name, name of the booker and dispatcher name.
On vehicles, hackney carriages are held to a maximum vehicle age and private hire vehicles to a maximum vehicle age.
Windsor and Maidenhead 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.
In-vehicle CCTV is permitted but not required here, so it stays an operator decision rather than a licence condition.
Daily roadworthiness checks are a condition in Windsor and Maidenhead, so there is a per-vehicle, per-day record to produce on request.
Before a new driver in Windsor and Maidenhead 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 and safeguarding training covering child sexual exploitation and county lines is required.
Windsor and Maidenhead 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.
11.3 per cent of the licensed fleet in Windsor and Maidenhead is wheelchair accessible — 79 hackney carriages and 5 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.
Windsor and Maidenhead publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
Windsor and Maidenhead departs from the majority answer on 3 of the surveyed licensing policies.
Requires daily PHV roadworthiness checks: "Yes" here, against "No" for 50 per cent of authorities.
Disability awareness training for hackney drivers: "No" here, against "Yes" for 64 per cent of authorities.
Disability awareness training for PHV drivers: "No" here, against "Yes" for 62 per cent of authorities.
