Thanet licenses 587 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 100 hackney carriages and 487 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.
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.
625 driver licences are in force against those 587 vehicles, or 1.06 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
Thanet licenses 4.17 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 59 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.
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.
Thanet requires a licensed private hire operator to record 8 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 and driver licence number.
That is a middling regime — some fields are mandatory, the rest are left to the operator's judgement.
Not required here: driver name, vehicle registration, name of the booker and dispatcher name.
On vehicles, hackney carriages are held to no age or emissions standard restrictions and private hire vehicles to no age or emissions standard restrictions.
Thanet 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.
Daily roadworthiness checks are a condition in Thanet, so there is a per-vehicle, per-day record to produce on request.
Before a new driver in Thanet 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.
6.1 per cent of the licensed fleet in Thanet is wheelchair accessible — 3 hackney carriages and 33 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.
Thanet publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
Thanet 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 PHV roadworthiness checks: "Yes" here, against "No" for 50 per cent of authorities.
