If you’ve ever jumped in a cab and assumed the driver had been properly vetted, this story might give you pause. A Freedom of Information request by the Guardian has uncovered some deeply troubling figures about taxi licensing in Wolverhampton — and the implications stretch far beyond the West Midlands.
The numbers
Wolverhampton City Council granted taxi and private hire licences to 438 people with criminal records in a single year. Breaking that down, 158 of those had convictions for violent offences, 61 for drug-related offences, 36 for drink offences, and four for sexual offences. Sixteen drivers held convictions across more than one of those categories.
To understand why Wolverhampton is at the centre of this story, you need to know the scale of its licensing operation. Between April 2023 and March 2024, the city issued more than 42,000 driver licences. For context, Birmingham and Bradford — the next largest licensing authorities — each issued around 7,000 during the same period. Wolverhampton’s output is in a different league entirely, which is why it’s become known in the trade as the UK’s “taxi capital.”
Here’s the part that should really concern passengers
Under current laws, a driver licensed in Wolverhampton can work anywhere in the country — through apps like Uber and Bolt — regardless of where they actually live. And the vast majority of these drivers don’t live in Wolverhampton at all. According to the data, 96% of those holding Wolverhampton-issued licences were based outside the city boundaries during the period covered by the FOI request. That means thousands of drivers — some with serious criminal histories — are operating across towns and cities all over England, under licences issued by a single West Midlands council.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham described the figures as truly shocking, saying they lay bare the fundamental issue with how private hire licensing is managed in this country.
What does Wolverhampton say?
To be fair to the council, its chief executive Tim Johnson pushed back. He insisted that safeguarding is a top priority and that every application is scrutinised thoroughly against local and national policies — and that thousands of applications are rejected every year. He also pointed out that Wolverhampton is the only council in the country carrying out daily DBS checks on all drivers and proactively sharing data about convictions of its licensed drivers. That’s not nothing.
But the Department for Transport’s own guidance says…
This is where things get uncomfortable for the council. The Department for Transport’s guidance is clear that anyone convicted of a sexual offence should never be granted a taxi licence. For violent offences, the guidance states that applicants should normally wait at least ten years after completing their sentence before being considered. Whether all 438 of the licences granted met those thresholds is not fully clear from the data — but the headline figures alone have raised serious questions.
Both Uber and Bolt confirmed that licensing decisions rest entirely with local councils and that criminal conviction details are not passed on to the platforms. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which has been pushing for consistent safeguarding standards in taxi licensing since 2014, renewed calls for drivers to be classified as a regulated activity — which would require more rigorous background checks across the board.
The bigger picture
This story sits right alongside the cross-border hiring debate covered here on DM News recently. The same broken system that allows licence shopping — where drivers seek out councils with the most permissive standards — is the one producing these figures. When a single council can issue six times more licences than the next largest authority, and most of those drivers then go and work elsewhere in the country, it stops being a local issue very quickly.
Reform is coming, the government says. But for now, passengers have very little way of knowing what background checks the driver who just picked them up has actually been through.
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Sources
PHTM — Over 150 Violent Offenders Granted Licences from the UK’s Taxi Capital
GB News — Wolverhampton: More Than 150 Violent Criminals and Sex Offenders Handed Taxi Licences
