Sevenoaks licenses 158 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 77 hackney carriages and 81 private hire vehicles.
The fleet splits fairly evenly between the two trades. That is the awkward middle: drivers move between rank work and booked jobs during a shift, so availability is genuinely uncertain unless something tracks it.
A licensed fleet this small is usually owner-run, and the pressing problem is not allocation but coverage: who answers the phone when the person who normally does is driving.
272 driver licences are in force against those 158 vehicles, or 1.72 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.
Sevenoaks licenses 1.30 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 50 per cent below the national midpoint.
Licensed supply is well below the national midpoint. Where vehicles are this scarce a missed pick-up costs more, because the customer has few alternatives and long memories.
Against its own region the fleet is thinner than typical: the South East median is 2.22 per 1,000 residents.
The area is largely rural: long journeys, thin return loads, and a standing risk of sending a car twenty minutes out to earn a five-minute fare.
Sevenoaks requires a licensed private hire operator to record 10 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, vehicle registration and name of the booker.
That is a demanding regime: most of the fields the DfT surveys are mandatory here.
Not required here: driver licence number 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.
Sevenoaks 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.
Before a new driver in Sevenoaks 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.
Sevenoaks 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.
8.2 per cent of the licensed fleet in Sevenoaks is wheelchair accessible — 1 hackney carriages and 12 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.
Sevenoaks publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
Sevenoaks departs from the majority answer on 1 of the surveyed licensing policies.
Requires daily hackney roadworthiness checks: "No" here, against "Yes" for 51 per cent of authorities.
Yes. In the reporting year Sevenoaks refused 3 operator licence applications, suspended 0 and revoked 1.
