Before London had a single robotaxi, it had a fifteen-year-old, still-unsolved problem: too many minicabs chasing too little work. TfL’s own Commissioner has admitted it. Two successive Mayors have asked Parliament to fix it. Neither has succeeded. Now TfL has shown, in licensing 15 robotaxis under a hard cap, that limiting vehicle numbers is legally possible after all — just never for the 94,258 human-driven ones already on the road.
“Too much supply” — TfL’s own words
At a London Assembly Transport Committee session this year, TfL Commissioner Andy Lord confirmed the scale of London’s private hire fleet and, in the same breath, admitted the problem it creates: “we don’t have any powers to cap the number of private hire vehicles. It would require primary legislation change.” Pressed further, he was direct about the consequence: “At the end of the day, there will only be so much demand available, and if you’ve got too much supply, that starts to have a direct impact on their earnings and their ability to get a sustainable living.”
That is TfL’s own chief executive, on the record, confirming that London’s PHV market currently has more vehicles than there is work to sustain them — and that TfL has no legal tool to do anything about it. Nobody at TfL has ever published a figure for what the right number would be. Lord’s statement acknowledges the imbalance without ever quantifying it, which means London currently operates without either a demand target or a supply cap — only a regulator’s admission that the two are out of balance.
Fifteen years of the same warning
This is not a new complaint. London’s licensed PHV driver numbers have been tracked, and have grown roughly in a straight line, for over a decade and a half:
| Year | Licensed PHV drivers |
| 2009/10 | 59,191 |
| 2011/12 | 64,063 |
| 2013/14 | 65,656 |
| 2014/15 | 78,690 |
| 2015/16 | 88,149 (growing ~2,000/month) |
| 2019 | 118,000 |
| 2026 (current) | 94,258 licensed vehicles (TfL, via FOI) |
In 2016, then-Mayor Boris Johnson said plainly: “Londoners have embraced new technology… but we can’t continue to have more than 13,000 private hire drivers in central London and growing given the congestion that results,” and committed to pressing central government for capping legislation. That legislation never came. A decade later, the current Mayor’s administration is asking for the same power TfL’s Commissioner says it still doesn’t have. This is a solidly bipartisan, cross-mayoral failure to close a legislative gap — not a problem either TfL or any single Mayor created, and not one either has been able to fix alone.
The black cab trade collapsed in parallel
While PHV numbers climbed, London’s licensed taxi trade shrank by more than a third. Licensed taxis fell from 22,810 in 2013/14 to well under 15,000 a decade later — a 35% decline the Centre for London attributes partly to the cost of purchasing and operating a cab and the barriers of the Knowledge. The Transport Committee’s own 2019 report, Raising the Bar, concluded the taxi and private hire sector had been “changed irreversibly by the advent of the app-only companies.”
A separate, independently-sourced data point corroborates a pattern LDV has reported elsewhere: the number of licensed PHV operators — the companies, not the vehicles — fell from 3,038 in 2013/14 to 1,740 in 2023/24, even as the number of vehicles grew. Fewer companies, running more vehicles each. That is the same consolidation LDV’s reporting on Otto Car, Hertz, and WeFlex’s collapse into Otto Car has already documented from the fleet-supplier side — this confirms it from TfL’s own operator-licensing numbers, independently.
Then TfL capped 15 vehicles anyway
Which is what makes TfL’s approval of Uber and Wayve’s robotaxi trial so pointed. The licence permits a maximum of 15 vehicles, for a fixed one-year period — a hard numeric cap, on a private hire fleet, imposed by TfL. That is precisely the tool Andy Lord has said TfL does not have and would need primary legislation to acquire. TfL has not publicly explained why a cap was achievable here and nowhere else. The likely answer is that this specific cap derives from the government’s AV Trialling Code of Practice rather than ordinary PHV licensing law — a framework that is explicitly experimental and time-boxed in a way the wider market is not. If that is right, it means these 15 vehicles are being regulated as something meaningfully different from an ordinary PHV, even while TfL describes them as sitting in exactly that category.
What London’s drivers are entitled to ask
Caroline Russell AM, who took over as Chair of the Transport Committee in May’s annual reshuffle, said at the time that scrutinising self-driving vehicles on London’s streets was top of her agenda. That scrutiny now has a sharper, fairer question available to it than “is this technology safe” — a question this article’s own reporting makes possible: if a numeric cap on private hire vehicles is legally achievable for a 15-vehicle AV trial, what is the specific legal basis, and does government need to change primary legislation to apply the same tool to the other 94,258 vehicles already on London’s roads — the ones TfL’s own Commissioner has said already exceed demand?
LDV has separately asked TfL to clarify the legal basis for the 15-vehicle cap and will update this article, and our earlier reporting on the robotaxi licence, with any response.
This article draws on Taxi Point’s reporting of Andy Lord’s comments to the London Assembly Transport Committee (March 2026); the Mayor of London’s 2016 press statement on private hire driver growth; BBC reporting on London Assembly concerns about PHV oversupply; the London Assembly’s 2019 report “Raising the Bar”; TfL’s own submission on taxi and operator licensing decline; TfL’s response to LDV’s Freedom of Information request (July 2026); and multiple London local news outlets’ reporting on the Assembly’s May 2026 committee reshuffle. This article should be read alongside LDV’s earlier coverage of TfL’s 5 August robotaxi licence and the 15-vehicle cap.