Covering nights in a taxi office without a night controller

Nights are the shift nobody wants and every taxi firm has to cover. The calls are fewer, but they still come: the early airport runs, the pub crowd, the shift workers, the hospital. This guide sets out the options for night cover for taxi firms, what each one costs, and what still needs a person when the office is dark.

Why are nights so hard to cover in a taxi office?

Night calls are hard to cover because you pay for a whole shift to answer a handful of calls. A taxi night controller sits by the phone from 10pm to 6am. Some nights are busy until 2am and then dead. Some are quiet all night apart from a 4.30am airport run that somebody rang to book at midnight.

So owners end up choosing between two bad answers. Pay a wage for the quietest hours of the day, or let the phone ring and lose the overnight taxi bookings to whoever answers. The third answer is the office phone diverted to the owner's mobile, by the bed.

There are better options now, but each one has a catch. The table sets them side by side.

What are your options for night cover?

There are five ways to handle the phones at night:

Most of the rest of this guide is about the middle three, because those are the real choices.

What does a night controller cost?

A night controller costs a full year's wages for the quietest hours, and more once you add holiday and pension. Here is a worked example. Every input is a public rate, and your own figures will be different.

Example: one seat, 10pm to 6am, every night of the year.

1. Hours to cover: 8 hours a night × 365 nights = 2,920 hours a year.
2. Wages at the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over, £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026: 2,920 × £12.71 = £37,113.20.
3. Holiday: workers get 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, so to cover all 52 weeks you pay for 52 ÷ 46.4 = 1.1207 times the hours, about 12.07% more.
4. Pension: under automatic enrolment the employer pays at least 3% of qualifying earnings, which is pay between £6,240 and £50,270 a year.
5. Holiday and pension together add up to about 15%: £37,113.20 × 1.15 = £42,680 a year, or about £3,557 a month.

That example leaves out employer National Insurance, which is 15% of pay above £5,000 a year per employee in 2026 to 2027. If you can claim the Employment Allowance of up to £10,500, it may cover that. It also uses the legal minimum wage, and an experienced controller who knows your patch at 3am can cost more. So treat £42,680 as a floor, not an estimate.

In practice 2,920 hours is more than one person. Someone has to cover holidays, sickness and nights off. The night-work rules matter too. GOV.UK says a night worker must not work more than an average of 8 hours in a 24-hour period, usually averaged over 17 weeks, and that employers must offer a free health assessment before someone starts night work and regularly after that.

A controller also takes bookings, so the Department for Transport's statutory standards expect them on your register of booking and dispatch staff, with a basic DBS check seen. A basic check costs £20 on GOV.UK.

Can you take night calls yourself?

You can, but it costs you sleep instead of money. Divert all calls from the office line to your mobile when you leave. On a standard BT business line that's \21\ followed by the number and #, and #21# cancels it in the morning.

The trouble is that it never stops. A call at 1am and another at 4am wreck the night, and you still have to run the firm the next day. It works for a week while you sort out something better, or for a firm small enough that night calls are rare.

Does an answering service work for a taxi firm at night?

An answering service can work at night if its people book the job, not just take a message. A message that says "Mrs Jones wants a car at 5am, ring her back" is only useful if somebody reads it before 5am.

Ask any answering service these questions before you sign:

• Do your staff book the job into my system, or send me a message?
• Do they quote from my price list?
• How do they reach my on-call person for something urgent?
• What checks have your staff had, and can you show me?

That last question matters. The DfT standards say operators may outsource booking and dispatch but can't pass on the duty to protect children and vulnerable adults, and should be able to show that the company they outsource to applies comparable protections. If you're asked to show your council, the answer has to be on paper.

Can an AI phone agent cover nights?

An AI phone agent can take the bookings at night, which is the main job of the night phone. You divert all calls to the agent when the office closes. It answers in your firm's name, asks the booking questions, quotes your fixed fares, saves the job and sends the passenger a confirmation. In the morning you have a list of bookings, not a list of missed calls.

Dispatch AI does this as one of its set-ups: night calls answered without hiring a night controller. You choose the hours, it works by a call divert on your own line, and each agent takes up to 10 calls at once. Our guide to how an AI phone agent books a job walks through a call from start to finish, and you can test it yourself on the Dispatch AI demo line.

An agent doesn't remove the need for a person on call. It takes the bookings. It doesn't sort out a driver's flat tyre.

What still needs a person at night?

Some night calls need a person whatever answers the booking line. Keep a named person on call, with a mobile, for these:

1. Drivers. A breakdown, an incident, a passenger who won't get out of the car.
2. Upset passengers. A car that hasn't turned up for the 5am airport run needs someone who can send another one.
3. Safeguarding. A child travelling alone, or a vulnerable adult in trouble. That duty stays with you, as our guide to safeguarding for taxi firms explains.
4. London's voice contact rule. TfL requires operators to make a person available for passengers to speak to during operating hours and while a journey is under way, and tells operators to think about how they'll do that at night and at weekends.

Whatever answers the night phone, set it up so it never refuses an assistance dog. Under section 170 of the Equality Act 2010, a private hire operator commits an offence by refusing a booking because a disabled passenger will have an assistance dog with them.

How do you set up night cover in one evening?

You can have night cover running in one evening:

1. Pick the hours. Write down when the office stops answering and when it starts again.
2. Choose who answers. You, an answering service or a phone agent, using the table in this guide.
3. Check your night prices. The early airport runs and the late runs home need fares on your price list, so whoever answers can quote them.
4. Set the divert. An all-calls divert at closing time, cancelled when the office opens. Our guide to taxi call overflow explains the codes and timings.
5. Name the on-call person and give whoever answers their number.
6. Ring your own line at 2am from another phone and book a job.
7. Read the night's bookings every morning for the first fortnight, and fix anything that went wrong.