Sefton licenses 20 private hire cars per 1,000 people, four times the England rate, while hackney cabs fell to 193. Councillors noted the report on 20 October.
Sefton Council now licenses 5,724 private hire vehicles. That is 20 for every 1,000 people in the borough, four times the rate for England as a whole.
The number of drivers grew faster still. Sefton held 6,698 private hire driver licences on 2 April 2026, up from 5,502 a year earlier, a rise of 1,196 or 22 per cent.
Over the same year the borough’s hackney carriage fleet, the cabs you can hail or pick up from a rank, shrank from 218 to 193.
The figures are in the council’s taxi licensing annual report for 2025/26. It went to the Overview and Scrutiny Committee (Regulatory, Compliance and Corporate Services) at Southport Town Hall on Tuesday 20 October (Sefton Council, Taxi Licensing Annual Report 2025/26).
Updated 27 October: the draft minutes show the committee simply noted the report, with no recommendation. Councillors asked about the 25 revocations and 5 suspensions, drivers licensed by other councils working in Sefton, drivers refusing assistance dogs, the cost of a private hire licence and autonomous vehicles. The minutes do not record the answers, or any explanation of the growth in private hire numbers (Sefton Council, draft minutes, 20 October 2026).
A year of licences in Sefton
The report gives a count of every licence type at the start of each month. These are the first and last of them.
| Licence | 3 April 2025 | 2 April 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private hire drivers | 5,502 | 6,698 | +1,196 (+22%) |
| Private hire vehicles | 4,879 | 5,724 | +845 (+17%) |
| Private hire operators | 110 | 110 | none |
| Hackney carriage drivers | 249 | 232 | -17 (-7%) |
| Hackney carriage vehicles | 218 | 193 | -25 (-11%) |
The driver count went up at every monthly count of the year. The vehicle count dipped in spring 2025, then rose every month from July. Across all types, the council says it held 12,957 live licences on 1 April 2026, against 10,958 a year before.
The workload rose with it. The One Stop Shop processed 9,146 new, renewed and transferred vehicle licences, 1,639 more than in 2024/25. It processed 6,212 new and renewed driver licences, up 1,003.
The report does not say where Sefton’s private hire drivers work, or why the number has grown so quickly.
How Sefton compares
The Department for Transport publishes the same count for every licensing authority. Its figures for 1 April 2026 match the council’s (DfT, taxi and private hire vehicle statistics, table TAXI0104).
Sefton licenses more private hire vehicles than any other authority in the North West. It has more than twice as many as Liverpool, which licenses 2,736, and nearly twice as many as Manchester, with 3,072.
Measured against population, the DfT’s figures are (DfT, table TAXI0105a):
- Knowsley: 30.2 private hire vehicles per 1,000 people
- Sefton: 20.0 per 1,000
- Liverpool: 5.4 per 1,000
- England: 4.9 per 1,000
The highest rate in England is far beyond any of these. Wolverhampton licenses 37,967 private hire vehicles, or 135 per 1,000 people.
Hackney carriages run the other way. Sefton has 0.7 per 1,000 people, below the England rate of 0.9 and well below Liverpool’s 2.6. The DfT’s earlier table for April 2023 put Sefton’s hackney fleet at 245, so it has lost about a fifth of its cabs in three years. Of the 193 left, 92 are wheelchair accessible.
The national trend is the same shape. The DfT says England had 52,300 licensed taxis in April 2026, down 7 per cent on 2024. Private hire vehicles rose 13 per cent to 290,000 (DfT statistics release, 2026).
Refusals, revocations and roadside checks
Every applicant has to pass an enhanced DBS check, a Group II medical and a knowledge test, which must be taken without an interpreter. The test results for the year were:
- 4,105 tests booked
- 993 applicants did not turn up, 24 per cent of bookings
- 1,307 failed, or had the test made void
- 1,805 passed
The council puts the pass rate at about 58 per cent. That is the share of those who sat the test, not of everyone who booked.
A panel of officers reviews applications that break the council’s policy. It considered 238 cases from new applicants. The report says 150 were granted and 91 refused, mainly for drug and violence convictions. Those two figures add up to 241, three more than the case total, and the report does not explain the difference.
The same panel looked at 50 complaints about existing licence holders. They led to 25 licences being revoked and 5 suspended. The report lists the usual reasons for revocation:
- possessing or supplying drugs
- violence
- sexual offences
- driving offences, including drink and drug driving
- refusing to carry an assistance dog
The enforcement team carried out 1,622 vehicle inspections. It issued 317 advisory defect notices, mostly for bodywork, and 563 stop notices for bodywork condition and breaches of conditions such as missing door signs or plate defects.
Two prosecutions are pending. One concerns an unlicensed driver. The other is a private hire driver who refused to take a passenger with an assistance dog.
The report says the cost of the service is wholly recovered from the council’s ring-fenced taxi licensing account.
What it means for you
- A private hire car has to be booked. Only a hackney carriage can be hailed in the street or taken from a rank, and there are 193 in the whole borough, 25 fewer than a year ago.
- Check the plate and the badge. Every licensed vehicle carries a council plate, and every driver a badge. If something is wrong, or a driver refuses an assistance dog, Sefton’s taxi licensing team is the place to report it. The council dealt with 777 requests for service last year.
- Read the record. The committee met on 20 October and noted the report; the papers and draft minutes are on the council’s meeting page.
The same agenda carries the council’s October budget update. It forecasts a £7.689 million overspend for 2026/27 as at the end of August, the position behind the spending measures agreed by Cabinet on 1 October.
For more on getting about, see our Southport roadworks and travel page and Southport train times.
Have your say