Derby licenses 850 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 144 hackney carriages and 706 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.
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.
934 driver licences are in force against those 850 vehicles, or 1.10 drivers per vehicle. Some vehicles run more than one driver, so shift patterns bear on availability as much as the plate count does.
Derby licenses 3.23 taxis and private hire vehicles per 1,000 residents, against a median of 2.62 across the 292 authorities in the same return — 23 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 East Midlands median is 2.13 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.
Derby 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 no age or emissions standard restrictions.
Derby 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 Derby, so there is a per-vehicle, per-day record to produce on request.
Before a new driver in Derby can be sent a job, background screening is enhanced dbs and barred list checks, a topographical or navigational assessment must be passed, safeguarding training covering child sexual exploitation and county lines is required and disability awareness training is mandatory.
Derby 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.
17.1 per cent of the licensed fleet in Derby is wheelchair accessible — 144 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.
Derby publishes a list of designated wheelchair-accessible vehicles, which brings its drivers within section 165 of the Equality Act 2010.
Derby departs from the majority answer on 4 of the surveyed licensing policies.
Requires daily PHV roadworthiness checks: "Yes" here, against "No" for 50 per cent of authorities.
Hackney topographical assessment: "Both" here, against "Topological" for 65 per cent of authorities.
Hackney English-standard requirement: "No" here, against "Both" for 50 per cent of authorities.
PHV English-standard requirement: "No" here, against "Both" for 51 per cent of authorities.
Yes. In the reporting year Derby refused 0 operator licence applications, suspended 0 and revoked 1.
