The Department for Transport's vehicle statistics team has released to me a dataset of counts for licensed vehicles in the UK at the end of 2023, for Census 2011 Output Areas.

The data was released with permission to re-use it as open data under the Open Government Licence.

You can download the CSV file containing the data, along with the DfT correpondence:

OA11_VEH_2023Q4 data and docs [20240523].zip (8.5 MB zipped).

DfT provided the data in response to a request I made under the Freedom of Information Act and the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations. This was a repeat of the request I made last year for the same dataset as at the end of 2022.

The vehicle counts are broken down by body type, keepership, and licence status.

The data is compatible with DfT's published table df_VEH0125, which is at LSOA level, but there is no suppression of small numbers in the OA dataset.

The data is in the following format:

OA11CDBodyTypeKeepershipLicenceStatus2023 Q4
E00000001CarsCompanyLicensed4
E00000001CarsPrivateLicensed52
E00000001CarsPrivateSORN3
E00000001Light goods vehiclesCompanyLicensed1
E00000001MotorcyclesPrivateLicensed2
E00000001MotorcyclesPrivateSORN3

Please note that the location of the vehicle is based on the DVLA Registered Keeper Address, which is not necessarily that of the owner or driver of the vehicle.

If you want to analyse this data in GIS, Output Area boundaries are available from ONS.

As the DfT dataset uses the Output Area list from the 2011 Census, some of the vehicle counts are not directly comparable to OA outputs from the 2021 Census for England and Wales. ONS provides a best-fit lookup file between the 2011 and 2021 OA lists.

Thanks to DfT's vehicle statistics team for supplying this data on behalf of DVLA.