Tunbridge Wells licenses 157 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 52 hackney carriages and 105 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 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.
264 driver licences are in force against those 157 vehicles, or 1.68 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.
Tunbridge Wells licenses 1.35 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 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.
A dense core with significant rural surroundings means two operations in one — quick town work, and long spurs that tie a vehicle up for the better part of an hour.
Tunbridge Wells 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 name and vehicle registration.
That is a demanding regime: most of the fields the DfT surveys are mandatory here.
Not required here: driver licence number, name of the booker 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.
Tunbridge Wells 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.
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 Tunbridge Wells 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.
Tunbridge Wells 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.
14 per cent of the licensed fleet in Tunbridge Wells is wheelchair accessible — 12 hackney carriages and 10 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.
Tunbridge Wells publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
Tunbridge Wells departs from the majority answer on 2 of the surveyed licensing policies.
Caps hackney carriage licence numbers: "Yes" here, against "No" for 74 per cent of authorities.
Requires daily hackney roadworthiness checks: "No" here, against "Yes" for 51 per cent of authorities.
Yes. In the reporting year Tunbridge Wells refused 6 operator licence applications, suspended 0 and revoked 7.
