The riskiest vehicles on most fleets are the ones the company does not own.

Nobody ordered these vehicles, nobody services them, and in most organisations nobody knows how many there are. What they have in common is that the driving is being done on your behalf, and that is where the duty of care attaches — not to the ownership of the keys.

Insurance is the specific exposure, and it is a narrower point than it first appears. An ordinary private motor policy covers social, domestic and pleasure use, and usually commuting. Business use is a separate thing that has to be on the policy, and an employee driving to a customer site without it is uninsured for that journey. This is the kind of fact that surfaces after a collision rather than before one.

Evidencing it is a documents problem, and documents problems fail in a particular way: the certificate arrives once, goes into a folder, expires twelve months later, and nobody notices because nothing happened. The driver uploads their certificate, a manager reviews it and marks it verified, the expiry is recorded against the driver, and the chase starts before it lapses rather than after. The chasing is the part that normally does not happen, because in most organisations it is nobody's job.

MOT and tax are the same shape. On a company vehicle somebody owns that date. On a car the company has never seen, the first anyone hears of an expired MOT is usually at the roadside.