What Every UK Taxi Operator Has to Keep Track Of

Licensing enforcement rarely arrives as a dramatic event. It arrives as a routine request for records on a Tuesday, and the firms that struggle are not the reckless ones — they are the ones whose records live in three places, one of which is a filing cabinet and one of which is somebody's memory.

Driver records

For every driver working under your licence you need to hold, and be able to produce, current versions of:

The DVLA licence is the one most often left to the annual check. Points and disqualifications happen mid-year, and a driver is not always the first to volunteer them. Most councils expect operators to check periodically rather than annually — the DVLA's "check a driver's licence" service exists for exactly this.

Vehicle records

• Vehicle licence (plate) — issued by your council, usually annual, with the plate physically displayed.
• MOT — private-hire vehicles are commonly tested more often than the standard annual requirement; many councils require six-monthly testing, and some require it from first registration.
• Insurance — must be hire-and-reward cover. A driver quietly renewing on social, domestic and pleasure is a real and recurring problem, and the certificate is the only proof.
• Ownership / keeper details — where the vehicle is owned by the driver rather than the fleet.
• Accessibility designation — whether the vehicle is a wheelchair-accessible vehicle, which affects both licensing and how you may be required to handle accessible bookings.

Booking records

Private-hire operators are required to keep a record of every booking. The precise fields are set by your licensing authority, but the list below covers what is commonly required and is, in practice, what an investigator asks for:

1. When the booking was taken, and by whom.
2. The passenger's name and contact details.
3. Pickup point, destination and time of pickup.
4. The driver and vehicle assigned to the job.
5. The fare charged.
6. Whether the booking was subcontracted to another operator, and to whom.

Retention periods vary; twelve months is a common minimum and many councils require longer. Two things matter more than the exact number: the records must be contemporaneous — created at the time, not reconstructed afterwards — and they must be producible, meaning you can find a specific journey from six months ago without a day of searching.

Why this bites hardest in complaints

The realistic scenario is not an audit. It is a passenger complaint, or a police request about a specific journey on a specific night. If you can produce the booking, the assigned driver, the GPS trail and the timestamps within an hour, the matter usually ends there. If you cannot, the question stops being about the journey and starts being about your record-keeping.

The records people forget

• Subcontracted jobs. If you pass work to another operator, both of you generally need a record of it. This is the single most common gap.
• Lost property. Councils commonly require a log. It is also the cheapest goodwill you will ever generate.
• Complaints. What was alleged, what you did, what the outcome was. A documented complaint handled properly is a defence; an undocumented one is an allegation.
• Drivers who have left. Records for a driver who left last year still need to exist for the period they worked.
• Data protection records. You are the data controller for your passengers' details. That means a lawful basis for holding them, a retention policy, and a plan for a subject access request. Our own data processing agreement sets out the equivalent obligations on the software side.

Making the calendar do the work

Every item above is a date, and dates are the one thing software is unambiguously better at than people. The pattern that works:

1. Store the expiry date against the driver or vehicle, not in a spreadsheet.
2. Alert at 30 days and again at 7 — to a named person whose job it is, not to a shared inbox.
3. Make an expired document block the driver from going on shift, rather than merely warning about it. A warning nobody acts on is worse than nothing, because it creates a record showing you knew.
4. Review the whole expiry list once a month. Ten minutes, and it catches the ones where the alert went to somebody on holiday.

Cabica handles the storing, alerting and blocking on every plan including Starter, which is the part of the dispatch console operators tend to notice second and value first.

If something has already lapsed

Take the driver or vehicle off the road first, before working out how it happened. Then tell your licensing authority — proactively disclosing a lapse you found yourself is treated very differently from one they found. Document what you did and when.

Councils are, in the main, reasonable about honest administrative failures caught and reported quickly. They are considerably less reasonable about the same failure discovered during an inspection six weeks later.