UK Fleet & Transport-Manager Leads — DVSA O-Licence Register + Companies House Enrichment

A clean, buyable B2B lead list from the official DVSA Traffic Commissioner O-licence register — the authoritative source of goods-vehicle operating licences in Great Britain — enriched with Companies House company data. Every row is a licence-level record for a company or other legal entity, ready for your fleet and transport lead generation.

Companies House enrichment (on by default)

Each run cross-references every operator's company registration number against Companies House and attaches company-level data:

• companyStatus — active / dissolved / in administration / active — proposal to strike off / …
• incorporatedOn — incorporation date
• sicCodes — registered nature of business (e.g. 49410 freight transport by road)
• companyName — registered company name
• ⭐ isDistressed — the moat signal: the operator's company is dissolved / strike-off proposed / in administration / liquidation / receivership / voluntary arrangement / insolvency proceedings / removed while their O-licence is still held (often still valid). The batch-validated UK rate is ~2–3% — operators running vehicles through a dying company. Time-sensitive, high-intent leads for insolvency practitioners, asset recovery, transport finance risk desks, leasing and competitor acquisitions — not derivable from the raw DVSA file.
• companyNotFound — a CRN was present but the specific company lookup is a definitive not-found (a real HTTP 404, or the CRN is a placeholder like 00000000 / NULL): the company does not exist. This is a per-CRN signal — it is not set on whole-outage runs and not set when a lookup merely failed (see chDegraded below)
• chDegraded — the enrichment layer was unavailable for this record (a per-record fetch error, or a suspicious fresh 404 on a suspected mass hard-404 outage): enrichment fields are null and chDegraded=True. Semantics: companyNotFound = this specific company definitively 404'd; chDegraded = the enrichment service was unavailable, so the not-found status of the record is unknown (never blanket-flag companyNotFound — a consumer pruning on it would wrongly drop every lead during an outage)
• notEnrichable — no usable company registration number. The ~28% of operators without a usable CRN (sole traders/partnerships) are dropped by the GDPR personal-data filter before enrichment, so they never reach the output and this flag is effectively always false in shipped rows — it exists for completeness of the enrichment layer.

The distressed-operator filter (isDistressed input) ships just those rows. Enrichment uses keyless Companies House public pages (rate-limited ~1.5 req/s per worker, up to 8 workers) with a 7-day cache (KVS CH_CACHE) so weekly refreshes re-fetch only what changed or expired. Bring-your-own-key (BYOK): optionally supply a free Companies House JSON API key via the secret chApiKey input and the official JSON API becomes the PRIMARY enrichment path — a keyed full-UK/full-region scan runs entirely through the legit JSON API (no keyless 403-throttling), so it actually completes. Keyless public-page scraping stays primary when no key is given (fine for small or warm/cached runs but gets 403-throttled to ~0.5–1 req/s on sustained/full scans), so chApiKey is recommended for full-UK / full-region enrichment (isDistressed, fullEnrichScan, or maxRows=0). It is the buyer's own key (never a shared/our key), read only from the run input, never logged or stored, and paced at ~2 req/s (your quota, free tier = 600 req/5min) so it can't be hammered.

A Companies House outage does not wipe out your leads. A run whose CH enrichment is unhealthy behaves differently depending on the run type:

• Bounded default run (the daily auto-test shape: filters + maxRows cap before enrichment) and monitor runs never abort:
  • Partial outage (an elevated per-CRN fetch-failure rate, >5%): the records that fetched/cached OK keep their enrichment; only the failed subset is flagged (chDegraded=True, enrichment null, companyNotFound left false — the not-found status is unknown) with a loud CH_ENRICH_FAILURE warning — good data is never discarded.
  • Mass hard-404 outage (a suspected incident where both >10% of fresh lookups return a hard 404 — real 404s are clean notFound, invisible to the failure-rate canary — and at least 5 fresh lookups 404'd, so a tiny sample of genuine 404s can't false-trigger): only the fresh-404 subset is degraded (chDegraded=True, enrichment null, no companyNotFound blanket) while pre-incident cached enrichment is preserved, and the suspicious notFound entries are NOT cached — a CH incident cannot poison the 7-day notFound cache and suppress retries.
• Full-scan / enrichment-focused runs (isDistressed=true or fullEnrichScan=true) fail loud on either condition — enrichment is the point of those runs, so a CH outage aborts rather than shipping a degraded distressed-signal list.

Enrichment is bounded to what ships. With isDistressed off, the filters + maxRows cap apply BEFORE enrichment, so a default run (maxRows=1000) fetches ~1,000 CRNs (~1.5–2 min) instead of the whole UK fleet (~55–65K CRNs). isDistressed=true (and the explicit fullEnrichScan input) is a full-scan mode — the whole deduped fleet must be enriched before the flag can be filtered. The actor's default timeout is 7200s (2h) — the default bounded run is ~90s (auto-test-safe). ⚠️ A cold full-UK isDistressed scan is a LONG, SCHEDULED operation: Companies House throttles sustained keyless scraping (real-world throughput is ~1 req/s effective, NOT the burst 12 req/s), so a single cold run will NOT complete in one 2h window. Run it on a schedule so the 7-day CH_CACHE accumulates across runs (each run warms more; the periodic flush makes resume safe), and/or provide a chApiKey (routes the full scan through the legit JSON API — no 403) for the full scan.

⚠️ maxRows=0 + region=all + enrich=true is a full-UK enrichment scan. Set Max rows to 0 for the complete UK dataset. Combined with region=all and enrichment on (the default), the whole deduped fleet (~55–65K CRNs) is enriched before the cap. This is a LONG, SCHEDULED operation — CH throttles sustained keyless scraping (real-world ~1 req/s effective, NOT the burst 12 req/s), so a cold full-UK scan will NOT complete in one 2h window. Run it on a schedule so the 7-day CH_CACHE accumulates across runs, and/or provide a chApiKey (routes the full scan through the legit JSON API — no 403) for the full scan, or narrow the region. To keep a run fast, leave the default maxRows=1000 (the daily auto-test shape).

Default run fits the 5-minute auto-test. The default shape (region=all, maxRows=1000, enrich=true) downloads/normalizes the 8 area CSVs (~30–60s) and enriches the ~1,000 capped CRNs (~1.5–2 min) — comfortably inside the 5-minute auto-test window. And because a CH outage ships degraded leads instead of aborting (above), an unrelated CH incident can no longer fail the auto-test.

All cross-run state (SEEN_LICENCES, AREA_BASELINE, MONITOR_BASELINE, CH_CACHE) lives in a named key-value store (uk-fleet-leads-state), which persists between runs — the default per-run store is discarded with each run and would silently reset delta mode, the drift canary, monitor baselines and the CH cache every time.

⚠️ Concurrent-runs warning. This named store is shared by all concurrent runs of the actor. Because SEEN_LICENCES, AREA_BASELINE, MONITOR_BASELINE and CH_CACHE are read-modify-write, two runs in parallel will race and can clobber each other's state (e.g. a delta run's SEEN_LICENCES overwriting a full-refresh run's, or a monitor run's baseline). Run this actor one at a time (no overlapping scheduled runs) to guarantee state consistency.

GDPR note. Enrichment is company-status data only — company status, incorporation date, SIC codes and registered name. Companies House director and PSC (people with significant control) data is personal data and is NEVER fetched, processed, cached, or shipped.

Output fields (24 per record)

Each row includes: operator (business) name, licence number, licence type, operator type, status (valid / curtailed / revoked / suspended / surrendered), fleet size (vehicles + trailers), vehicles authorised, trailers authorised, correspondence address, locality address, continuation/renewal date, company registration number, region, two role flags (hasNamedTransportManager, hasDirector) — plus the enrichment layer above: companyStatus, incorporatedOn, sicCodes, companyName, enrichmentSource, isDistressed, companyNotFound, notEnrichable, and chDegraded (true only when a bounded run shipped leads with enrichment skipped due to a CH outage). Monitor-mode rows additionally carry changeType.

Licence-level granularity. A multi-licence operator appears once per licence, so you can segment by individual O-licence rather than by company.

Monitor mode — track changes over time

Turn the weekly snapshot into a live watchlist. Run with monitor on and the actor diffs each refresh against its stored baseline, then outputs only the operators that changed:

• 🆕 new operators (just added to the register)
• ⚠️ status changed (e.g. valid → curtailed / revoked / suspended)
• 🚛 fleet-size changed (vehicles/trailers authorised changed)

Changed operators carry the same Companies House enrichment layer, so a monitor run can watch a segment (e.g. distressed-flagged operators) for new licence-holders or compliance trouble without re-scanning the full list every week. Ideal for fuel-card, telematics, insurance-renewal and driver-recruitment outreach that targets new or risky operators the moment they appear.

Who is this for?

HGV fleet leasing & rental, fuel cards and telematics, HGV insurance, CPC / transport-manager training, driver recruitment & fleet management — plus insolvency practitioners, asset recovery and transport finance risk desks who buy the distressed-operator signal.

Inputs & outputs

Input: region (all / england / scotland / wales), a full-refresh on/off switch, Companies House enrichment on/off (default on), the distressed-companies-only filter, an optional bring-your-own Companies House API key (chApiKey, secret — recommended for full-UK/full-region scans) + worker count, an optional max-rows cap (set Max rows to 0 for the complete UK dataset; the default 1,000 keeps the daily auto-test fast), and segmenting filters so you pull exactly the operators you're selling to:

• Licence type — Standard National / Standard International / Restricted
• Licence status — valid / curtailed / revoked / suspended / surrendered
• Fleet size range — min / max vehicles authorised (e.g. 10+ for fuel-card or telematics deals)
• Has transport manager — only operators with a named transport manager in post
• Operator type — legal-entity type: Limited Company / Sole Trader / Partnership / Limited Liability Partnership / Other (public authority, charity, trust, university)
• Distressed companies only — only operators whose company is dissolved / strike-off / in administration / liquidation etc.

Output: dataset rows downloadable as JSON, CSV or Excel from the Apify UI, with an optional scheduled weekly refresh.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $5.00 per 1,000 rows (base result event, apify-default-dataset-item) — enrichment included. Rows flagged distressed (company dissolved / strike-off / administration / liquidation) are the enriched high-value output and carry a small premium: +$2.00 per 1,000 distressed rows (custom distressed-result event), so distressed rows are $7.00 per 1,000 effective. A full UK run costs roughly $325 (all rows base price; the premium only applies to the distressed subset). Enrichment is compute, not per-row data cost: the CH public data is OGL-compatible and keyless.

Data & licence

Official DVSA open data, refreshed weekly on Sundays. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Companies House data is public data published under the Companies House (Open Government Licence) terms.

Data protection note. This dataset is compiled from the DVSA/Office of the Traffic Commissioner operator licence register (Open Government Licence v3.0). The OGL does not cover personal data, and this product deliberately contains no personal data: it includes only operators that are legal persons — companies, LLPs and other non-personal entities (public authorities, charities, trusts, universities), identified by company registration number AND legal-entity operator type. Sole-trader and partnership operators are excluded even when they carry a company registration number (a company reg number alone does not make a natural person a legal person). The Companies House enrichment adds company-status data only — no director or PSC data is processed. Buyers remain responsible for their own lawful basis and, where applicable, PECR consent if they process or market to any identifiable individuals derived from this data.

That "no personal data" design is a real advantage: a clean, defensible list contractors and agencies can adopt without GDPR worry.

Getting started

Pick a region, press Start, then open the Dataset tab and download your rows as CSV or Excel. For the distressed-operator slice, set Distressed companies only = true.