There is no such thing as the private hire licence. There are three, they are issued under different sections of different statutes, they cost different amounts, and they are granted to different legal persons.
Before anything else, work out which one you are after:
- A private hire driver licence (s.51 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976, or TfL’s PCO licence in London) — permits you to drive passengers for hire. This is what most people mean when they say “getting my private hire licence”.
- A private hire vehicle licence (s.48) — plates a specific car. Granted to the vehicle’s proprietor.
- A private hire operator licence (s.55) — permits a business to invite and accept bookings. This one has nothing to do with driving.
This article is about the third. If you want to drive for an existing firm, you need the first and can stop reading. If you want to take bookings from the public — under your own name, your own brand, your own phone number — the operator licence is the one that makes that lawful, and it is the one people discover late.
The rest applies to England and Wales outside London. Scotland runs under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982; London is TfL under the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998.
What the operator licence actually authorises
Section 46(1)(d) of the 1976 Act puts it bluntly: “no person shall in a controlled district operate any vehicle as a private hire vehicle without having a current licence under section 55 of this Act”.
“Operate” here means taking the booking. Not driving, not owning the car — accepting the job. That is why a firm with twenty owner-drivers on its circuit still needs an operator licence in its own name, and why a single owner-driver working directly for the public needs all three licences at once. If a customer rings you, you are operating.
Section 55(1) sets the test. The council must grant the licence if satisfied:
(a) that the applicant is a fit and proper person to hold an operator’s licence; and (b) if the applicant is an individual, that the applicant is not disqualified by reason of the applicant’s immigration status from operating a private hire vehicle.
And on duration:
every licence granted under this section shall remain in force for five years or for such lesser period, specified in the licence, as the district council think appropriate in the circumstances of the case.
Note the shape of that first provision. The council must grant it if the test is met — this is not a discretionary favour. But “fit and proper” is undefined in the statute, which means it is defined in your council’s published policy. Read that policy before you apply, not after you are refused. Most authorities publish a convictions policy setting out what offence, how long ago, results in what outcome. Refusals and imposed conditions carry a right of appeal to the magistrates’ court.
How to get one, in the order it actually happens
1. Choose your licensing authority first. This is the decision with the longest tail. Your operator licence, your vehicle licences and your drivers’ licences must all come from the same authority — s.46(1)(e) makes it an offence for a licensed operator to operate a vehicle whose s.48 or s.51 licence is not in force in that district. You cannot mix. Fee schedules, vehicle age limits and conditions vary enormously between neighbouring councils, and you are choosing for five years. I went through the wider start-up sequence and two councils’ real fee schedules in starting a taxi business in the UK.
2. Establish the operating centre. You are applying in respect of premises. Some authorities ask about planning permission for the address, particularly if it is residential and particularly if drivers will wait there. This is a common source of delay and it is worth a phone call to planning before you submit anything.
3. Assemble the personal checks. Expect a basic DBS as a minimum for the applicant and, in many districts, for anyone who will take bookings or dispatch. Companies apply as the company, but the council will look at directors.
4. Submit, pay, and wait considerably longer than you planned. Applications are typically advertised or referred to committee where there is any history. Budget months, not weeks, and do not commit to a vehicle purchase or a lease on the strength of a submitted application.
5. Read the conditions attached to the grant. They are the actual rulebook — see below.
What it costs, and why the range is so wide
There is no national fee. Councils set their own, and the spread is startling for a document with identical legal effect.
Buckinghamshire Council bands it by fleet size. Five-year operator licences: £645 for an owner-operator with one vehicle, £1,265 under 10 vehicles, £2,096 under 50, £3,294 over 50. It also offers one-year licences at £515, £644, £770 and £865 across the same bands.
Warwick District Council, on fees effective 2 January 2026, charges a flat £1,491 for a new five-year operator licence and £1,406 to renew, regardless of size.
So a one-car operator pays £645 in one district and £1,491 in another. A fifty-car firm pays £3,294 in the first and still £1,491 in the second. Neither is wrong; they are different cost-recovery models, and which one favours you depends entirely on your size.
The one-year option deserves a thought rather than a reflex. Per year it is poor value — £515 against £645 for five years. But if you are genuinely unsure the business survives eighteen months, £515 to keep your options open is cheaper than £645 you write off. Check your own authority’s current schedule; most revise in April.
The conditions are the real obligation
The licence is the easy part. What follows it is a set of duties that run for five years, and the one that bites is record-keeping.
Section 56(2) requires an operator to keep a record of “such particulars of every booking of a private hire vehicle invited or accepted by him” as the council prescribes by condition, entered “before the commencement of each journey”, and produced “on request to any authorised officer of the council or to any constable for inspection”. Section 56(3) does the same for vehicle particulars. Failing either without reasonable excuse is an offence under s.56(5).
Two phrases carry all the weight. Before the commencement of each journey means the record is made when the booking is taken, not reconstructed at the weekend. On request means with no notice at all.
The Department for Transport’s statutory standards add that booking records “should be retained for a minimum of 6 months”, that operators should keep a register of all staff who take bookings or dispatch vehicles with sight of a basic DBS check for each, and that licensed drivers should evidence continuous registration with the DBS update service so the authority can check for new information every six months.
What your council prescribes in its conditions is more specific than the statute, and it is what you will actually be inspected against. What councils typically require, condition by condition is worth reading before you design how you take bookings, because the failure mode is not a missing system — it is the WhatsApp job and the returning customer’s phone call that never made it into the record.
Sub-contracting: the provision most operators do not know they have
Section 55A permits something a lot of operators believe is prohibited:
A person licensed under section 55 who has in a controlled district accepted a booking for a private hire vehicle may arrange for another person to provide a vehicle to carry out the booking…
You may pass the job to another operator licensed in the same district, to an operator licensed in a different controlled district, to a London PHV operator at an operating centre in London, or to an operator accepting the booking in Scotland. And critically:
It is immaterial for the purposes of subsection (1) whether or not sub-contracting is permitted by the contract between the person licensed under section 55 who accepted the booking and the person who made the booking.
That is the legal basis on which most airport and corporate work gets covered when your own cars are committed. It is lawful, it is explicit, and it is how a five-car firm services a national account without buying twenty vehicles. The commercial question — whether it earns you anything after you have paid the supplier — is a separate one, and I worked through the arithmetic in outsourcing rides without losing your margin.
You still hold the booking record for the job you accepted. Sub-contracting moves the vehicle, not the paperwork.
Two exemptions people claim wrongly
Weddings and funerals. Section 75 disapplies Part II of the Act from vehicles used “in connection with a wedding”, and from vehicles used in connection with funerals or “wholly or mainly, by a person carrying on the business of a funeral director, for the purpose of funerals”. This is genuine and narrow. It does not extend to airport runs in a smart car, and it does not turn a chauffeur business into an unlicensed one because some of the work is weddings.
The 24-hour contract. Section 75 also provides that a private hire vehicle need not display plates, discs or notices while used “under a contract for the hire of the vehicle for a period of not less than 24 hours”. Executive and chauffeur operators lean on this, and it is real — but read what it exempts. It removes the requirement to display a plate. It does not remove the requirement to hold vehicle, driver and operator licences. Those still apply in full. Confusing the display exemption with a licensing exemption is the single most expensive misreading in the executive end of this trade.
Nor is “chauffeur” a category the 1976 Act recognises. If the vehicle is pre-booked, carries passengers for hire and is not exempt, it is private hire — however the invoice is worded. That distinction, and what it means for how the work is actually run, is the subject of why generic dispatch tools break executive work.
Where the five years actually go wrong
Almost nobody loses an operator licence at grant. They lose it, or get conditions imposed, at renewal — and for the same handful of reasons every time.
Records that could not be produced on the day an officer asked. A driver who kept working three weeks past the expiry of a licence nobody was tracking. Bookings taken at an address that was never the licensed operating centre. A change of director never notified. None of these are sophisticated failures; they are all administrative, and they all trace back to the same thing — the compliance calendar living in somebody’s head rather than anywhere it can be checked.
If you take one operational habit from this: on the day your operator licence is granted, write down every expiry date it depends on — each driver licence, each vehicle plate, each insurance renewal, each MOT and inspection — with a reminder ninety days out. It costs an hour. It is the difference between renewing routinely and explaining yourself to a committee.
General information as of August 2026, not legal advice. Licence conditions, fees and policies are set by individual licensing authorities and vary considerably — confirm the requirements that apply to you with your own authority before acting.
