(Was doing this on the rank last night, and intended rechecking the figures - can't be bothered now, but sure they're in the right ball park anyway.)
Was looking at the latest DfT stats, and Wolverhampton PH operator licences totalled 297 on 1 April 2023
If you look at discrete cities with a similar population (ignoring the likes of the Greater Manc authorities, which are part of a bigger metropolitan area, which might distort the figures, and also ignoring Plymouth, which has its own legislation, thus there may be differences which might influence the numbers), the operator licence numbers are as follows:
Hull - 112
Rotherham - 72
Derby - 160
Stoke - 131
Southampton - 66
Actually quite surprised some of those numbers are so high, but obviously Wolverhampton with almost 300 dwarfs the lot. Which, obviously, is because of the operator licences required to support cross-border working. A Blackpool operator, say, gets an operator's licence in Wolverhampton, and can then used Wolverhampton-plated cars
And if you look at some towns and cities with even bigger populations than that lot, the number of operators licences is well below even most of those above:
B&H - 55
Sunderland - 21
Milton Keynes - 108
So the numbers are pretty inconsistent for towns and cities with broadly similar population to Wolverhampton (all the above c.250,000 to 290,000 people). But, again, Wolves way above any of them...
And maybe the best comparator is Coventry, which has c.350,000 people compared to c.270,000 people in Wolves, in they're both in the same part of the country. Coventry only has 32 operators licences
And the c.300 Wolves operator licenses was when they had about 22,000 PHVs. I'd guess that's around 30,000 now, looking around at the figures, so wouldn't be surprised if Wolves had 400 operator licences now
Another interesting thing I noticed when looking at the old stats is that there were 22,345 PHVs, but 30,463 PH badges. So that's 1.36 PHDs per PHV. Which I think is quite a high ratio by PHV standards
Anyway, for what it's worth I took the population figures from this Wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_E ... population