Your drivers are at the wheel more hours a week than almost anyone else you deal with.

Private hire and taxi drivers accumulate risk at a rate ordinary fleet drivers simply do not, through sheer exposure: far more hours, far more miles, a great deal of it at night and in heavy traffic. Points arrive faster, and the distance between a clean record and a disqualification gets covered more quickly than an annual check cycle is able to see.

The licensing authority does check, and that is very often taken as covering it. It does not. A council checks at the point of granting or renewing a private hire driver's licence, which may be one, two or three years apart depending on the authority. Everything that happens in between is invisible to that process, and a driver is under no obligation to volunteer it to you in the meantime.

That makes this the clearest case anywhere for checking by risk rather than by calendar. A driver on nine points does not need the same cycle as a driver on none, and the one who picked up three last month is the one you want to hear about this week rather than at renewal. The critical-change alert is the part that earns its place: a new disqualification is the difference between a driver you stand down this morning and a driver still accepting bookings this afternoon.