King's Speech 2026: Draft Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Bill

Draft Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Bill

● Taxi and private hire vehicle (PHV) laws are outdated. The Government will
make everyday journeys safer, fairer and easier. It will strengthen public
safety, remove barriers for disabled passengers, and reflect how people travel
today, including the use of booking apps. By supporting a growing, innovative
sector while making streets safer, especially for women and girls, the Bill will
deliver taxi and private hire services people can trust.
● This growing, nationally operating sector is regulated through an outdated and
fragmented framework, leading to inconsistent standards, safeguarding risks,
and ineffective enforcement. National standards will help, but further
legislative measures are needed to align licensing with journeys, enable
information sharing, and ensure resources are matched to risk and activity.
The draft Bill provides the necessary framework to address these systemic
issues.

What does the Bill do?

● These reforms will look to modernise taxi and PHV laws. The draft Bill will be
put forward for pre-legislative scrutiny, which will allow the Government to
seek expert views from a range of stakeholders and create the strongest
legislation possible.
● The Bill will:

○ Modernise taxi and private hire law for the way people travel
today, replacing a patchwork of outdated, Victorian-era rules with a
single, consistent framework across England that passengers and
drivers can trust.
○ Be the final step to delivering on the commitment to legislate in
response to Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based
Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. It will: fix a fragmented system
that has not always protected passengers as it should; strengthen
public safety and accountability by setting clear requirements for
obtaining and holding licenses; and improve the efficiency of licensing
and the use of strong, consistent enforcement powers, with funding for
enforcement matched to where services are delivered. Baroness
Casey was clear that inconsistent taxi and PHV licensing creates
vulnerabilities that can be exploited by grooming gangs. Reforming the

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 system is essential to strengthen the safeguarding response and
disrupt any potential exploitation.
○ Give regulators stronger enforcement powers so swift and effective
action can be taken when drivers or operators breach their licence
conditions, helping to drive up standards and tackle poor or unsafe
practice.
○ Improve transparency and information-sharing nationwide by
mandating use of a national database of all licensed vehicles, drivers
and PHV operators, so licensing authorities can better protect the
public and passengers can have greater confidence in the system.
○ Deliver more accessible services for disabled passengers, by
strengthening existing protections and removing barriers to travel
helping ensure people who rely most on taxis and PHV are not left
behind.
○ Provide a consistent customer experience wherever people travel,
so passengers can expect safe, reliable and properly regulated
services whether they’re travelling locally or long distances across local
authority boundaries.

○ Support a thriving, professional sector by creating clearer rules to
enable fair competition, while supporting the wider economy – from the
night-time economy to shift workers and local businesses.

● These measures will create a modern, joined-up taxi and PHV system where
people are confident in their safety and experience wherever they travel, and
where the powers, data and accountability sit in the right place to act when
standards fall short.

Territorial extent and application

● The draft Bill will extend to England and Wales and apply to England only.

Key facts

● The taxi and PHV sector is large and growing. As of 1 April 2024, there
were 313,000 licensed vehicles and 381,100 licensed drivers in England,
continuing a long-term upward trend, according to Government statistics
published in 2024.
● Regulation outside London remains rooted in legislation dating back to
the Town Police Clauses Act 1847, designed for locally operating,
horse-drawn vehicles. Incremental reform has produced a complex system
underpinned by case law and different regimes across Plymouth, London and

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 the rest of England, which is poorly suited to a market characterised by digital
technology and cross-border working.
● Licensing standards and practices vary widely between authorities,
including in decision-making, fees, conditions, and enforcement activity. While
National standards are expected to improve baseline consistency and reduce
incentives for drivers and operators to license away from where they intend to
work, taken alone they are unlikely to resolve the full problem. Without a
closer match between where licences are issued and where journeys take
place, enforcement activity and resources remain misaligned, limiting
effectiveness and undermining public confidence.
● Weaknesses in regulation disproportionately affect groups with fewer
transport alternatives, increasing equality and safety risks. According to the
same Government statistics, this includes children travelling from home to
school, with 8 per cent of journeys by taxi and PHV in 2024 being for
education, with many used for SEND provision.
● Taxis and PHVs are disproportionately used by disabled people, women,
lower-income households and those without access to a car. People with
mobility difficulties make almost 70 per cent more taxi or PHV trips per year
compared to those without; women make around 25 per cent more taxi or
PHV trips than men. People without a car make almost four times as many
taxi or PHV trips, and households in the lowest income quintile make around
50 per cent more taxi or PHV trips than higher-income households.
● Major safeguarding reviews, including those led by Baroness Casey,
have identified taxi and PHV licensing as vulnerable to exploitation
where oversight is inconsistent and information is not effectively shared. While
enhanced criminal record checks and guidance have improved individual
vetting, they do not address wider structural issues, such as effective
cross-border enforcement, where more powers might be needed and barriers
to intelligence sharing.

● 52 per cent of all taxi and public hire vehicle journeys support economic
activity, education or essential services, underscoring the importance of
effective regulation. When licensing, enforcement powers and resources sit
with authorities that are not hosting the majority of activity, enforcement
capacity is diluted and intervention is harder.

● Safeguarding reviews consistently show that information silos reduce
the ability to identify and respond to risk. Current legislation does not
mandate information sharing. Work is underway to expand existing
databases, but for it to be effective its use needs to be mandatory to support
proportionate, lawful information sharing across authorities, operators and the
public.

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● The Law Commission said “The outdated legislative framework has become
too extensive in some respects, imposing unnecessary burdens on business
and artificially restricting the range of services available to consumers; and
insufficiently comprehensive in other ways, undermining the fundamental goal
of protecting the travelling public.”
● The Local Government Association “has long called for the urgent
introduction of a comprehensive Taxi and PHV Licensing Reform Bill to
replace the current outdated legislation and make the licensing system for
taxis and PHVs fit for the 21st century.”

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