Operator licence data now live: 8 new transport tests

The Traffic Commissioners' register of goods and public service vehicle operator licences is now Senserity's 33rd data source. We have loaded the full Great Britain register, 69,173 current licences held by 47,995 companies, and built eight automated tests on top of it. All eight are available on the free tier.

If you buy haulage, distribution, waste collection, coach travel, or anything else that moves on wheels, this register tells you things a credit check cannot. It also tells you them about companies you might not think of as transport businesses at all, because the biggest group of licence holders are firms that simply move their own goods.

Who needs an operator licence

Anyone running goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, or vehicles carrying passengers for hire, must hold a licence from the Traffic Commissioner for the traffic area they keep vehicles in. Great Britain is divided into eight such areas. Northern Ireland has its own regime under the Transport Regulation Unit and is not part of this register, so a company operating solely from Belfast is correctly absent rather than unlicensed.

A licence is granted on proof of three things: good repute, financial standing, and professional competence. That middle one matters for due diligence. An operator has already demonstrated to a regulator that it holds enough working capital for the fleet it runs, and the resulting authorisation is public. It is an independent check on operating scale that does not depend on anything the company tells you about itself.

What the register contains

Each licence record gives the licence number, the traffic area, the licence type, the current status, the operator's name and legal form, the number of vehicles and trailers authorised, the operating centres, the named transport manager if there is one, and the date the licence next falls due for continuation. The register also names directors and partners: 129,870 of them across the eight files.

Across the whole register, operators are authorised to run 691,470 vehicles. The largest single licence covers 2,853.

The licence number is the useful part. It is the operator's own public reference, so anyone disputing a finding can be pointed at the public register to check it themselves. Every Senserity finding on this data names the licences it is talking about.

Four things that trip people up

Reading this register well means knowing where it will mislead you.

The first is licence type. Roughly 46% of licences, 32,008 of them, are Restricted. A Restricted licence permits a business to carry its own goods only, not to carry goods for other people for hire or reward. Builders' merchants, farms, supermarkets and manufacturers hold them. If a supplier is offering you haulage services on a Restricted licence, it is working outside the terms of its own permission. A system that reports only "licensed" or "not licensed" hides that completely, which is why we always name the type.

The second is counting licences as a measure of size. An operator needs a separate licence for each traffic area it keeps vehicles in, so a national haulier with depots around the country holds several. One company on the register holds 318. That is a fact about geography, not about how many permissions the business struggled to obtain.

The third is the transport manager field. Just under half of all licences name no transport manager, which sounds alarming until you notice that every one of the 32,008 Restricted licences correctly names none, because Restricted licences do not require one. Only Standard licences do. Flag the absence across the whole register and you produce 32,571 false positives. Flag it only on Standard licences and you get 563 real ones.

The fourth is a data quality trap in the source. Alongside authorised vehicle numbers, the register carries a count of vehicles specified. About 11% of licences record zero specified against a non-zero authorisation, and 99.5% of those are perfectly valid, actively trading operators. It is a maintenance artefact in the licensing system rather than a fact about the business. We store the field and build nothing on it. Senserity only ever reports authorised capacity.

What the data shows

Three findings came out of the first full load, taken from the August 2026 snapshot.

118 companies hold a live operator licence while Companies House records them as dissolved. A dissolved company has no legal personality. It cannot hold a licence, employ drivers, insure vehicles, or be sued. What makes this interesting is the timing: every one of those 118 was dissolved within the previous six months, none longer. The Traffic Commissioners clearly do reconcile against Companies House, but with a lag of up to about half a year. That lag is a window in which a supplier's legal entity has gone while the public licence register still says otherwise, and it is only visible if you hold both registers and compare them.

A further 620 companies hold live licences while in some form of financial distress: 379 licences held by companies facing a proposal to strike off, 166 in liquidation, 56 in administration, and 29 in a voluntary arrangement. Financial standing is a condition of holding an operator licence, so these are cases where the licence itself may not survive, quite apart from the question of whether the company can keep delivering.

555 licences are curtailed or suspended. Both are sanctions a Traffic Commissioner imposes after a public inquiry into an operator's conduct, maintenance or financial standing. Curtailment cuts the number of vehicles allowed. Suspension stops the licence being used at all. Together they account for well under 1% of the register, which is exactly what makes them worth reporting when they appear.

The eight tests

OPS-078 reports whether a company holds a licence at all, with its type, authorised fleet and operating centres. It is the gate for the rest.

OPS-079 flags curtailment and suspension, scoring suspension harder because a suspended licence cannot lawfully be used.

OPS-080 flags Standard licences with no named transport manager, excluding Restricted licences for the reason above.

OPS-081 flags licences whose continuation date has passed while they still show as valid. This one is deliberately a warning rather than a failure. Of the 83 licences GB-wide in that state, 23 are more than five years past, and the oldest genuine one is over seven years past while still listed as valid. An operator does not run unlawfully for seven years without a Traffic Commissioner noticing, so a long gap almost certainly means a stale field in the licensing record rather than sustained non-compliance. The test says so rather than implying otherwise.

OPS-082 places authorised fleet size in a band against the national picture, and OPS-083 reports operating centres and traffic areas. Neither is scored as a risk. 13,803 licences cover more than one operating centre, so treating multi-site operation as a finding would fire on about a fifth of the register and mean nothing. They are there because scale and geographic spread are useful inputs to a continuity assessment, not because they are problems.

COM-118 and COM-119 are the cross-register checks: the dissolved and the financially distressed. These are the ones we would point to as the reason for holding this data alongside Companies House rather than in isolation.

What it does not cover

The register is Great Britain only. It is a weekly snapshot published on a Sunday evening, and Senserity loads it early on Monday, so a licence granted and surrendered between two publications leaves no trace.

It also contains some rough edges. 322 licences carry a placeholder company number, usually a string of zeros, and 307 of those belong to councils and other public bodies that genuinely have no Companies House number. We treat those as having no company number rather than as a bad one, because the alternative would be 322 licences that could never be linked to anything and would look like a matching failure forever. Three company numbers in the whole register cannot be normalised at all. One belongs to the National Trust and is a fragment of text where the number should be.

The register carries five DVSA test records too, one of them named TEST USER (SELF SERVICE) (12345) PLEASE IGNORE, which happens to hold the oldest overdue continuation date of the lot. All five use placeholder company numbers, so they never link to a company and never reach anyone's assessment.

What to do next

If you already have companies on your watchlist, the transport tests will run on the next scheduled assessment without you doing anything. Companies holding a licence will show an Operator Licensing section on the Compliance and Legal tab, and the same section appears in the PDF evidence report.

If you are looking at Senserity for the first time, all eight tests are on the free tier. Add a haulier, a waste contractor, or a builders' merchant and the licence data will be there alongside everything else.