Driver Licence Checking

Employers are required to check that everyone who drives for the company (whether in a company or a grey fleet vehicle) has a valid driving licence to do so.

An honest belief that your employee holds a valid licence is not a defence to ‘causing or permitting’ an unlicensed person to drive. Failures to check driving licences place you at risk of prosecution under Health and Safety legislation, the Corporate Manslaughter Act and the Road Traffic Act 1988. 

Businesses must therefore adopt a robust system to ensure licence checks are made on recruitment and at regular intervals thereafter, and to ensure audit trails document a record of the check. 

The regular checking of licence documents and records by your internal staff can be onerous. The process can be extremely labour intensive, time consuming and can give rise to mistakes by failing to identify revoked, disqualified, provisional and expired licences. 

Our Service

Our Driver and Vehicle Compliance Service has been developed in partnership with Licence Bureau, the country’s leading provider of secure driver licence checks, to help to minimise the administrative burden and risks associated with checking whether your drivers are safe and legally compliant to operate your vehicles. 

How Does it Work?

Our service allows for online licence checks of all your drivers to be performed swiftly and accurately against current records, which are constantly and automatically re-checked for you. 

The online system proactively allows users to define their own risk-based criteria and allows access to daily driver reports, providing information on items such as licence status, category detail, details of disqualifications, expiry alerts and more.

Advantages and Benefits

• Reassurance – checks are done in accordance with the Data Protection Act
• Reduced disruption – employees only need to be contacted once every three years in order to gain their consent for electronic checking to be carried out
• Reduced risk of misinterpreted information, dishonesty and fraud – help avoid costly mistakes
• Reduced risk of prosecution – Electronic checks are carried out directly against live DVLA data and reduce the risk of unlicensed drivers being missed
• Save time – internal resources need not be employed to collect data, undertake checks and update audit records. An electronic and paper-less system reduces the number of administrative tasks attached to the checking process
• User friendly – access to a unique and pro-active online portal allows users to tailor risk criteria to the demands and needs of the business