Features

Licence checking is one job with a lot of edges. The DVLA answers for GB licences and not for anyone else's; a photocard expires ten years before the entitlement does; an HGV driver needs a CPC and a driver card that a licence check will never mention; and an employee in their own car is your risk whether or not you think of them as fleet. What follows is the whole of it.

Digital D906

The DVLA will only release a driver's record with that driver's consent, and the D906 is the form that gives it. On paper that means printing it, getting it signed, scanning it, filing it, and then doing the whole thing again in three years when it expires. Here the driver opens a link, checks their own details and authorises on their phone. The mandate is stored against them and you are told before it runs out, rather than after a check has already come back refused.

DVLA licence checks

A check reads the driving record itself: the categories the driver is entitled to, any endorsements and the points that came with them, disqualifications, and the photocard expiry date. That last one catches people out constantly, because a photocard expires every ten years while the entitlement behind it can run to seventy — the licence is out of date and the driver is not. None of this comes from a photograph of a licence someone was asked to email in.

CPC and tachograph card validation

An HGV or PSV driver needs more than a licence. The Driver CPC has to be in date, and the driver card for the tachograph has its own expiry, five years from issue and never on the same day as anything else. Neither appears on a licence check, which is precisely why they are the ones that lapse. Both are tracked beside the licence and warned on before they run out.

Grey fleet insurance

An employee driving their own car on your business is your exposure, and an ordinary private policy usually excludes it. Drivers upload their certificate; the business-use cover and the dates it runs between are recorded against the driver, and a manager reviews the document and marks it verified. From then on the driver is chased before it expires, which is the part that normally does not happen because in most organisations it is nobody's job.

Northern Ireland and foreign licences

The DVLA's service answers for GB licences. Ask it about a Northern Ireland licence or one issued anywhere else and it returns nothing at all — and the usual response to nothing is to move on and quietly record the driver as checked. Those licences are checked by hand instead, and the evidence is kept with the same timestamp and in the same place as every automated check, so they stop being a hole in the record that only shows up in an audit.

Vehicle MOT and VED

A properly licensed driver in an untaxed or un-MOT'd vehicle is still a failure, and it is the same conversation with the same insurer. MOT and tax expiry are tracked against the vehicle and shown alongside the driver, so one screen answers the only question that matters on the day: can this person legally drive this vehicle.

Risk-based check frequency

Checking everyone once a year checks your safest drivers too often and your riskiest nowhere near often enough. Frequency follows the points instead. A clean licence sits on the standard cycle; a driver picking up endorsements moves onto a shorter one automatically, without an administrator having to notice the change and remember to act on it.

Driver groups

Not every part of a fleet carries the same risk or answers to the same rules. Groups let the HGV drivers sit on one schedule, the grey fleet on another and the occasional van driver on a third, inside one system rather than three spreadsheets that disagree.

Critical-change alerts

Almost every check comes back the same as the last one, which is exactly why the one that does not gets missed. A new disqualification, a jump in points or an entitlement that has been withdrawn is raised as soon as a check finds it, instead of sitting in a report nobody opened until the quarterly review.

Bulk import and invitations

A fleet is onboarded from a spreadsheet: names, email addresses and licence numbers in, invitations out. Drivers authorise themselves, so an administrator's job becomes following up the handful who have not responded rather than typing in the hundreds who have.

Audit-ready evidence

Every check is stored with what was asked, what came back and when. That is the difference between telling DVSA you check licences and showing them. The same record answers an insurer at renewal and a solicitor after an incident, which are the two moments when not having it is expensive.