Walsall licenses 1,355 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 67 hackney carriages and 1,288 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.
1,643 driver licences are in force against those 1,355 vehicles, or 1.21 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
Walsall licenses 4.74 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 80 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 West Midlands median is 2.27 per 1,000 residents.
Walsall requires a licensed private hire operator to record 5 of the 12 booking details the DfT surveys: passenger name, pick-up time, 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: time the booking was made, date the booking was made, pick-up date, driver name, vehicle registration, name of the booker and dispatcher name.
On vehicles, hackney carriages are held to a maximum vehicle age and private hire vehicles to a maximum vehicle age.
Walsall 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 Walsall 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.
Walsall 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.
10.6 per cent of the licensed fleet in Walsall is wheelchair accessible — 67 hackney carriages and 77 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.
Walsall publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
Walsall departs from the majority answer on 2 of the surveyed licensing policies.
Requires daily hackney roadworthiness checks: "No" here, against "Yes" for 51 per cent of authorities.
PHV topographical assessment: "No" here, against "Topological" for 52 per cent of authorities.
