In 2022 the state said self-driving would fix a driver shortage. It has been quoting that number ever since.

In August 2022 two secretaries of state put their names to a command paper on self-driving vehicles and laid it before Parliament. It was called Connected and Automated Mobility 2025. In its foreword they wrote that human drivers would share the roads with self-driving vehicles for many years to come, and that it was therefore vital to manage the changes by introducing the right rules, training and support at the right time.

Rules, training and support. At the right time.

On Wednesday, Transport for London granted private hire vehicle licences to Wayve's self-driving cars. Up to fifteen of them, on a one-year trial, according to the chair of the London Assembly transport committee. Every one carries a trained, TfL-licensed private hire driver, sitting in a car that is driving itself, ready to take the wheel.

The rules arrived, and I want to be fair about that, because they arrived properly. The Automated Vehicles Act reached the statute book in 2024. There is an authorisation process. There is a category of company that carries legal responsibility for a vehicle when nobody is driving it. There is an operator licensing regime for vehicles with no user in charge, an in-use regulator, and a road safety investigation branch. Four years of drafting and consultation and scrutiny, and the machinery works well enough that a car which drives itself now holds a London private hire licence.

The training and support did not arrive.

I know that because on the day the licence was granted, a union asked for it. GMB's regional organiser Matthew Wright set out five questions, and the first was how drivers will be supported to reskill and redeploy if their jobs go. In June, GMB's congress in Blackpool had already called on the government to legislate to protect taxi and private hire drivers from job losses caused by driverless vehicles.

A union asking in 2026 for the thing the state itself called vital in 2022.

One more thing has kept me at this all day. The figure the government reaches for whenever self-driving and jobs are mentioned in the same sentence is 38,000, alongside 42 billion pounds by 2035. The Transport Secretary used it in June last year. It sits in the Industrial Strategy. It turned up again in funding announcements this April.

It comes from that same 2022 command paper. And in the chapter explaining why any of this matters, the paper says these technologies must benefit society by solving labour challenges rather than adding to them. The labour challenge it names is the shortage of lorry drivers.

The number was built in a country that did not have enough drivers. It is being quoted into a week when a union is asking what becomes of the ones we have.

Edmund has that number's history below. Leah has what was licensed, which is a good deal smaller than the coverage suggests and worth knowing precisely. Jonah has the strangest job in Britain this week.

Let me also say what I am not saying. Fifteen cars is fifteen cars. There are 105,607 licensed private hire drivers in London and 15,978 licensed taxi drivers. Nothing that happened on Wednesday took anybody's job, the trials are supervised, and the caution around them looks to me like regulators doing their work properly rather than dragging their feet.

What I am saying is that the transition now has a date on it, and the plan for the people inside it is a sentence written four years ago that nobody has turned into anything.

The Playbook.

If you drive for a living in London, the number to watch is not fifteen. It is whether the requirement to keep a human in the seat carries a review point. That clause is the whole of your notice period, and nobody has published its length.

And the question worth putting to a minister, a candidate or an operator between now and next August: the 2022 paper promised rules, training and support. Two of the three are missing. When?

— M.

*This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.*