South Cambridgeshire licenses 1,503 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 2 hackney carriages and 1,501 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.
1,878 driver licences are in force against those 1,503 vehicles, or 1.25 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
South Cambridgeshire licenses 9.07 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 246 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 East of England median is 2.52 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.
South Cambridgeshire 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 an emissions standard and private hire vehicles to an emissions standard.
South Cambridgeshire 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.
Before a new driver in South Cambridgeshire 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.
South Cambridgeshire 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.
0.8 per cent of the licensed fleet in South Cambridgeshire is wheelchair accessible — 1 hackney carriages and 11 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.
South Cambridgeshire publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
South Cambridgeshire departs from the majority answer on 7 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 hackney roadworthiness checks: "No" here, against "Yes" for 51 per cent of authorities.
Hackney English-standard requirement: "Oral" here, against "Both" for 50 per cent of authorities.
PHV English-standard requirement: "Oral" here, against "Both" for 51 per cent of authorities.
Hackney safeguarding training: "CSA/CSE only" here, against "Both" for 72 per cent of authorities.
