Who drives the cars, who answers the telephone, and the checks each of them has been through before either happens.
Firstline Executive is a chauffeur operator based in London, licensed by Transport for London to accept private hire bookings. The fleet is Mercedes — S-Class and E-Class saloons, the electric EQS and the V-Class people carrier — with a long-wheelbase Range Rover for country work and bad weather. The work is airport arrivals and departures at the six airports that serve London, corporate accounts, weddings, events and film, and cars hired by the hour or by the day.
Bookings come in two ways: through the booking form on this site, which prices the actual route before anything is confirmed, or by telephone to the control room. Both end up in the same place, on the same board, in front of the same controllers.
The telephone is answered at every hour of every day, bank holidays included, and the person answering it is a controller — somebody who can see the bookings and move a car — rather than a message service taking details to pass on in the morning.
Every booking a client has committed to goes on a dispatch board, and a controller allocates a driver to it by hand. There is no automatic assignment to whichever driver is closest: the controller chooses, knowing the car the job needs, the client and the rest of that driver's day. Work without a driver sits at the top of the board until somebody covers it. Once it is covered, the client is sent the chauffeur's name, photograph and registration the evening before, and the chauffeur updates the job on the day as it runs, which is how the controller knows a car has arrived without having to ask.
Corporate accounts are each looked after by a named controller who keeps the account's preferences on file, so that a regular passenger is not asked the same questions on every booking.
In London it is an offence to run a private hire business without an operator licence from Transport for London, and TfL has to be satisfied that the holder is fit and proper before it grants one. A licensed operator may only take bookings in advance — a private hire car cannot be hailed in the street — and must record each booking before the journey starts. It may only send drivers and vehicles that are themselves licensed for private hire.
The operator licence, the company's registration number and the registered office are printed at the foot of this page from the same record the footer and the terms are built from. Each can be checked against the public register it belongs to.
Every driver doing private hire work in London needs a private hire driver licence from TfL, still widely called a PCO licence after the Public Carriage Office that used to issue it. To get one, an applicant has to pass a topographical assessment of London — planning routes across the city from a map — an English language assessment in speaking and listening, and an assessment of safety, equality and regulatory understanding, and has to satisfy TfL that they are of good character.
Good character is established partly through an enhanced check by the Disclosure and Barring Service, the government body that holds criminal records for employment and licensing purposes in England and Wales. An enhanced check is the most thorough level the DBS issues: it shows spent and unspent convictions and cautions, subject to the rules on filtering old minor offences, and it can include information the local police consider relevant. A driver cannot hold a PCO licence without having passed one.
The Security Industry Authority is the regulator that licenses people working in private security in the UK — door supervisors, security guards and close protection officers among them. Before the SIA issues a licence it checks the applicant's identity, takes five years of address history for a criminal record check, requires overseas record checks for anybody who has lived abroad for six months or more in that time, and requires a recognised qualification for the particular role.
Our chauffeurs are SIA-vetted, which is a standard held on top of the PCO licence rather than in place of it. The two checks overlap in their criminal record element but not in their purpose: TfL is asking whether somebody is fit to drive the public, the SIA whether they are fit to be trusted with somebody's security. Chauffeurs trained in close protection are available on request for the movements that need one.
You will not find a years-in-business figure, a punctuality percentage or a count of cars on this site. A number nobody can show the working for is not a reason to book anybody, and we would rather print none than one that a public record could contradict. What is here is what can be checked: the licence, the company record, the standard each chauffeur has met, and the fares, which the booking form calculates on your own route before you commit to anything.