Straight answers, including the ones that are still “not yet”

Yes, for any route with a published fare. Those fares are a fixed list — a saloon to Stansted is £81.50, which is £80 for the journey plus the £1.50 booking fee that applies to every booking whichever way you pay. That total is what you are quoted and what you are charged, and there is no card fee, no surge and no fuel surcharge.

Because there is no published fare for that combination yet, and this site will not display a number it cannot honour. Rather than estimating from a per-mile rate, the booking form routes those journeys to the office and somebody prices the real route.

The published fares do not vary by time of day or date. If that ever changes it will change on the price list, in public, and not as a line added at the end of a journey.

Per vehicle. Four people in a saloon pay the saloon fare between them, which is what makes booking the right size vehicle worth doing properly.

Only ones named before you book: child seat at £4.50, extra large bag at £2.50, extra cabin bag at £2.50. The child seat is charged per seat. The bag charges apply only above the number of bags included with the vehicle you choose, and never to a wheelchair, a mobility aid or an assistance dog. Nothing is added on the doorstep.

Card. The exact options are shown before you confirm anything, and no fee is added for using one. Business accounts are invoiced instead.

A receipt, yes — ask the office and it will be sent. Whether a VAT invoice can be issued depends on the firm's VAT position, which is being confirmed; the office will tell you exactly what it can provide.

Count your large cases, not just your passengers. A saloon seats 4 but takes 2 large cases; an estate or MPV seats 6 and takes 4; a minibus seats 8. It is almost always the luggage that decides.

No. We book a category — saloon, estate or MPV, minibus — because the specific car that runs your job depends on what is licensed, tested and available on the day. Promising a particular model would be a promise we could not keep.

The driver can only take what the vehicle safely holds, and an overloaded boot is a licensing matter as well as a safety one. If you are near a limit, book the next size up — it costs less than a second vehicle at short notice.

Availability is still being confirmed, so it is not advertised as a certainty here. There is a child seat charge on the price list, so ask the office when you book and you will get a straight answer for your date.

Usually, but tell the office when you book so the right vehicle is sent. Bulky items take the space of a large case, and that changes which category you need.

Private hire. Every journey must be pre-booked through the office; we cannot be hailed in the street or picked up from a rank. It is why a booking record exists for every journey we run.

Every driver holds a council-issued private hire driver licence and every vehicle a private hire vehicle licence. Beyond that, this system refuses to assign a job to a driver whose badge or DVLA licence, or a vehicle whose plate, MOT or insurance, expires before the date of that journey.

Since 2008, from Colchester.

It will be published on this site once confirmed with Colchester City Council. It is not shown as a placeholder in the meantime, because a wrong licence number on a taxi website is worse than none — and the previous site published a company registration number belonging to an unrelated business that was dissolved in 2016.

There is a complaints page setting out how to raise something and what happens next, including how to escalate to the licensing authority if we do not resolve it.