The Challenge
Following Local Government Reorganisation (LGR), Somerset Council brought together five former district licensing teams into one unified service. Each area had its own processes, stock systems, and product suppliers, creating inconsistencies and inefficiencies across the new authority.
Managing multiple plate designs, print setups, and delivery routes was time-consuming and prone to duplication, placing additional strain on resources during an already demanding transition period.
The council needed a single, streamlined solution that could centralise their licensing fulfilment, reduce administration, and deliver a consistent service to drivers across the county.
The Solution
To support their new centralised model, Somerset Council implemented MOGO’s Direct Fulfilment service. This fully managed solution allows licensing teams to place orders through a secure online portal, with MOGO handling the complete process, from artwork and printing to packaging and tracked delivery direct to drivers.
By moving to Direct Fulfilment, Somerset eliminated the need for in-house stock management, manual plate production, and multiple supplier relationships. The result is a unified, efficient process that supports the council’s LGR objectives, reduces administrative time, and ensures consistent quality and turnaround times for drivers across all districts.
The Onboarding Experience
The Council’s honest assessment of the onboarding process was that the delays were almost always on their end. Procurement sign-offs, internal approvals, decisions that needed to go up a chain before anything could move forward. On MOGO’s side, things moved as quickly as the Council allowed them to.
The platform itself (used to manage orders and print templates) was described as user-friendly and uncomplicated. Setting up accounts for team members was straightforward. The system didn’t require specialist knowledge or a lengthy training period to get to grips with.
Where things got more interesting was in the mid-onboarding adjustments. When the team realised that one area’s badge format used alphanumeric references, they expected it to be a problem. It wasn’t. MOGO turned it around quickly, no fuss, no pushback. The template was updated, the issue was closed.
That responsiveness mattered more than it might seem. In a project managing five different sets of requirements simultaneously, the ability to catch and correct a detail mid-process (without it derailing anything) is exactly what keeps things moving.
The Impact:
The most significant operational change has been flexibility. Officers no longer need to be in the office to process and issue badges. Work that previously required a physical presence, and therefore had to be batched, often resulting in a once-a-week production run, can now be handled from wherever the team is working. Applications are processed, orders are placed, and the fulfilment side is handled without the Council having to schedule around it.
The knock-on for drivers has been noticeable. Where there were previously gaps between granting a licence and issuing the badge (sometimes a few days, depending on the weekly production schedule) those gaps have largely closed. Drivers are getting through the process faster, and the team is fielding fewer chaser calls as a result.
There’s also a less obvious efficiency gain worth noting. Because fees are calculated partly on the time it takes to administer a licence, a faster internal process translates directly into better value for the customer.
The team is spending less time per licence, which feeds through to how fees are structured and what drivers actually pay.
More broadly, reducing the administrative load on taxi licensing, which accounts for around a third of the team’s workload, has freed up attention for other areas. In a team carrying multiple competing responsibilities, that matters. Less time spent chasing badges means more time spent on everything else.
In Summary
Somerset came to this with a genuinely complicated brief, five councils’ worth of licensing history, different formats, different expectations, all needing to come together into a single working process.
The result has been an operation that runs faster, gives officers more flexibility, and delivers a better experience for drivers. That’s not a small thing when you’re managing a team stretched across multiple regulatory areas.
Let's Work Together
Have a question or want to learn more? Our team is here to help you find the right fulfilment model for your council.
Not every LGR story starts on vesting day. Some of the most useful groundwork happens well before it.
Mole Valley and Tandridge District Councils share a licensing resource, with officers covering both authorities from two offices around 30 to 45 minutes apart. It works day to day, but covering leave, sickness and the December, January and March renewal peaks was genuinely difficult, because plate production and licence issuing were tied to specific people in specific places.
They moved to Direct Fulfilment and went live in under a week. Because the system is centrally hosted, any authorised officer can log in and process a renewal or issue a plate regardless of which office they're usually based in. Cover no longer depends on one person picking up another's workload from scratch.
Both authorities are now heading into the new East Surrey authority, and that shared, location-independent way of working is a considerably easier starting point than two separate in-house setups with their own equipment, stock and processes to reconcile.
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