South Oxfordshire licenses 637 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 436 hackney carriages and 201 private hire vehicles.
Hackney carriages lead the licensed fleet, so a meaningful share of driver earnings never passes through a booking channel at all — it comes off ranks and street hails.
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.
835 driver licences are in force against those 637 vehicles, or 1.31 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
South Oxfordshire licenses 4.20 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 60 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 South East median is 2.22 per 1,000 residents.
South Oxfordshire requires a licensed private hire operator to record 11 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 and dispatcher name.
That is a demanding regime: most of the fields the DfT surveys are mandatory here.
Not required here: name of the booker.
On vehicles, hackney carriages are held to an emissions standard and private hire vehicles to an emissions standard.
South Oxfordshire 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 South Oxfordshire 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 Oxfordshire 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.
3.6 per cent of the licensed fleet in South Oxfordshire is wheelchair accessible — 9 hackney carriages and 14 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 Oxfordshire publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
South Oxfordshire departs from the majority answer on 3 of the surveyed licensing policies.
Requires daily hackney roadworthiness checks: "No" here, against "Yes" for 51 per cent of authorities.
Hackney English-standard requirement: "Written" here, against "Both" for 50 per cent of authorities.
PHV English-standard requirement: "Written" here, against "Both" for 51 per cent of authorities.
Yes. In the reporting year South Oxfordshire refused 0 operator licence applications, suspended 1 and revoked 0.
