St Albans licenses 303 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 187 hackney carriages and 116 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.
376 driver licences are in force against those 303 vehicles, or 1.24 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
St Albans licenses 2.04 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 22 per cent below the national midpoint.
Licensed supply is below the national midpoint, so peak demand routinely exceeds available vehicles. The operational win is honest quoting and declining work you cannot service, not more marketing spend.
Against its own region the fleet is thinner than typical: the East of England median is 2.52 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.
St Albans 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.
St Albans 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 St Albans, so there is a per-vehicle, per-day record to produce on request.
Before a new driver in St Albans 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.
St Albans 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.
25.4 per cent of the licensed fleet in St Albans is wheelchair accessible — 76 hackney carriages and 1 private hire vehicles.
That is a moderate accessible share: servable with notice, but not something to promise on demand at peak.
St Albans publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
St Albans 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.
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.
