# About o-licence — what this site is and is not

> Where the data comes from, how often it is refreshed, what is deliberately left out, and who publishes this site.

## About this site

A search layer over one public register. Not the register itself, and not a substitute for it.

### The source

Everything here comes from one dataset: Traffic Commissioners: goods and public service vehicle
operator licence records , published by the Driver and Vehicle Standards
Agency on data.gov.uk under the UK Open Government Licence. It is eight
regional CSV files, refreshed weekly.

The dataset was first published on **2014-09-12**. There is
nothing new about the data — what did not exist is a way to search it. The
official file is a download, not a lookup: to answer “is this licence in
normal standing?” you have to know which of the eight regional files to
open, and then find one row among tens of thousands.

This copy was collected on **2026-08-18** and holds
69,173 licences.

### What this site is not

- **Not the official register.** It does not replace consulting
DVSA or the Office of the Traffic Commissioner, and a restriction can be lifted
the week after our collection.
- **Not a quality mark.** Holding a licence is the minimum legal
requirement to operate goods vehicles. It says nothing about whether an
operator is any good.
- **Not affiliated** with DVSA, the Traffic Commissioners or the
Department for Transport.
- **Not a broker.** Where this site invites you to describe
something you need moved, it passes the requirement on. It does not quote, hold
prices, or take a booking.

### What is deliberately left out

The source publishes, on every one of its 179,876 rows, the names of
**transport managers and directors** as natural persons. This site
removes both at the point the file is read, before anything is written to a
database. They appear on no page, in no search index, and in no dataset we
deliver. Street addresses are dropped in the same pass: the geography here goes
no finer than the postcode area.

Neither omission is a technical limitation we might relax later. Republishing
a searchable index of who directs which haulier would create something the
source does not make searchable, and that is a decision, not an accident.

### Coverage

Great Britain only. Northern Ireland runs a separate operator licensing
system, and its licences are not in this file. Of the 69,173 licences,
306 have an operating centre address from
which no valid postcode area could be read; they are searchable but appear on
no area page.

[Contact](/contact.md) · [Privacy](/privacy.md) · [Terms](/terms.md) · [Datasets](/data.md)

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Página: https://o-licence.pages.dev/about/
Fonte: Traffic Commissioners: goods and public service vehicle operator licence records — Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency
Recolha: 2026-08-18