Reason why so many taxis in Liverpool and Merseyside have Wolverhampton plates

More often than not, the most attention we pay to a taxi is when you hear a car outside and ask if it’s for you, despite having watched from the window for 20 minutes and tracked it all the way from your pick up point. You check the sticker on the car, cross reference the number plate against the app or the text you’ve had to confirm and the journey begins.

Perhaps the more eagle-eyed traveller may notice the plate on the back of the car denoting where the vehicle is licensed. You would expect it to be from an area within the Liverpool City Region given our councils are responsible for ensuring drivers and companies are properly registered.

There seems to be a new player in town, however. Among the increase of app-based companies like Ola, Uber and the likes moving on to city streets, an influx of drivers appear to be bringing vehicles registered not at the Cunard Building but almost 100 miles away in Wolverhampton. In Liverpool, it’s a six step process to get a new taxi licence, with a requirement to renew once it expires. Why then, the sudden influx from the West Midlands? It seems this isn’t a new phenomenon.

A Freedom of Information request revealed earlier this year how 96% of Wolverhampton taxi and private hire drivers licensed in the last year, live outside of the council authority area, including here on Merseyside. The local authority even had to take on new staff to deal with the amount of requests it received – registering around a third of all drivers across England last year.

City of Wolverhampton Council said it cannot reject legitimate requests for licences when they are received but did not encourage drivers from out of town. What is the reason for this sudden burst of plates registered in a WV postcode area?

Seemingly – time and money. In 2022, Sefton-based Delta Taxis was signposting its drivers to Wolverhampton to have their applications processed quicker. However, the local authority has previously denied that it was “quicker and easier” to go through the West Midlands.

The cost to secure a taxi licence in Liverpool via the local authority currently stands at more than £300 for three years, while the same terms can be secured 100 miles away for a third of the price. The amount of non city region drivers hasn’t gone unnoticed by customers either.

A number of users took to Reddit to ask why they were seeing plates here in the city region and as far as York and Manchester. Before the general election earlier this summer, Louise Haigh, transport secretary, appeared to support measures to cut back on cross-border applications in a bid to ensure passenger and driver standards were maintained. For now though, your lift to town may have made a longer journey than you may think, so when the office says it’s “around the corner” maybe look down the M6.