UK Taxi / PHV Regulatory Decision Layer / guide
How to pre-check Taxi and PHV licensing requirements before applying
A Taxi or private-hire licensing question starts with the authority that will decide it. Before an application or driver/fleet onboarding step, organise the authority and the basic facts that affect the preflight. This is informational preflight support, not licensing-authority approval or legal advice.
Why authority-specific requirements matter
Taxi and PHV licensing is not one national checklist. An applicant, operator, adviser, or software workflow needs to know which authority is being checked and which part of the licensing journey is in scope. A single-authority preflight is different from comparing several authorities before choosing where to license.
Basic facts to prepare
- select one supported licensing authority;
- provide the applicant’s age when known;
- provide completed years holding the driving licence when known;
- record whether a Pass Plus certificate is held when relevant;
- keep vehicle, operator, and comparison questions separate from this narrow driver/applicant preflight.
Unknown facts should remain unknown. Supplying a guessed value can make a preflight look more definite without making the underlying case stronger.
Why coverage must be explicit
A useful licensing preflight should reject an unsupported authority rather than silently substitute another one. The current workflow exposes the existing supported-authority list and checks the selected authority before engine execution. It does not expand coverage or infer approval.
Preserve REVIEW and UNKNOWN
Official-source freshness and rule dependencies can affect whether a decision is safe to use. A current evidence conflict, missing fact, or stale source should remain REVIEW, UNKNOWN, or confirmation-required. Fail-closed behavior is more useful than a confident answer that hides the unresolved condition.
What the human preflight provides
The existing human-facing workflow accepts structured facts for one supported authority and first returns a bounded readiness explanation: whether the case is sufficiently specified, whether the authority is supported, and whether a blocker or review condition is indicated. A separate checkout-intent step can express interest in an evidence-linked report. No card details are collected and the human-report price is confirmed before payment.
Check licensing readiness
Use the existing Taxi/PHV preflight workflow for a supported authority and structured applicant facts.
Machine integrations continue to use the existing MCP/x402 routes. This guide does not change authorities, licensing rules, prices, or checkout-intent semantics.