The problem is not checking licences. It is everything around it.
There is a free way to check a driver’s licence, and it works perfectly well for one driver, once. What follows is that process in full, why it stops scaling at about the fifth driver, and what is left to do when the parts that do not need a person stop needing one.
Checking a licence on gov.uk, step by step.
The government’s own service lets a driver share their licence information with someone else. It is free, and it is the route most organisations start with.
1. The driver generates a check code
They sign in to the gov.uk service with their licence number, National Insurance number and postcode, and generate a code. It grants one-off, temporary access to their record — and it is a task only they can do.
2. The driver sends you the code
By email, by text, read out over the phone. However it travels, it travels at the speed of somebody remembering to send it.
3. The driver signs a D906/ADD declaration
A check code shows you the record once. Ongoing permission to check it is a separate thing, and it is what the D906 declaration gives. This step is the one most often skipped and the one that matters most.
4. You enter the code on gov.uk
Along with the driver’s surname. Codes are case-sensitive and easily mistyped, and a wrong entry sends you back to the driver for another.
5. You read the record
Entitlements, endorsements, penalty points and expiry dates. Accurate at the moment you look at it, and never updated again.
6. You write it down somewhere
Because none of the above leaves you with a record. What you saw on screen is the evidence, and it exists only if somebody copies it into a file.
Five things that turn a ten-minute job into a standing one.
Check codes expire
They are deliberately short-lived. Miss the window and the driver has to generate another, which means going back to a person who has already done you one favour this week.
It depends on the driver being available
Every check needs something from the driver. They are driving, which is the point of them, and chasing codes and signatures is most of the actual work.
Nothing tracks itself
Who was checked, when, which codes are still valid, whose declaration has expired. Across fifty drivers on a quarterly cycle that is two hundred checks a year to keep straight by hand.
You get a snapshot, not a position
A check tells you about the day you ran it. What happens between checks is invisible, and the thing you most want to know about — a disqualification — happens between checks.
Paper declarations
Printing, signing, scanning, filing, and finding the document again three years later to discover it expired eight months ago. Most of the effort goes here, before a single record has been looked at.
Each of those stops being a task.
The declaration goes digital: the driver opens a link, confirms their own details and signs on their phone, and the three-year expiry becomes a date the system holds rather than one somebody is meant to remember. Because the mandate gives ongoing permission, check codes stop being part of the process at all — there is nothing for the driver to generate and nothing for anyone to retype.
After that, checks run on whatever cycle you set, more often for the drivers carrying more points. Tachograph and CPC card validity is tracked alongside the licence, which a gov.uk check does not cover. A change in status raises an alert rather than waiting to be noticed, and the evidence accumulates as a by-product of the checking instead of being a separate filing job.
What is left for a person is the part that genuinely needs one: chasing the few drivers who have not responded to an invitation, and deciding what to do about the alerts.
That work is yours. This is a self-managed platform — you run your own drivers through the portal, and there is no platform or administration fee precisely because nobody is doing that for you. It is a much smaller job than the one above, but it is not nobody’s job, and that is worth knowing now rather than in your second week.
From £1.99 per check.
- Driver licence check
- £1.99 per check
- Digital D906 authorisation
- £1.00 once every three years
- Business insurance validation
- £1.00 only when a document is verified
- Vehicle MOT & VED
- £1.00 once, when checked
- NI & foreign licence check
- £5.00 per manual check
No platform fee, no administration fee, free initial set-up and no tie-in contract. What each modifier means.
Or stop reading about it: the free trial runs thirty days, needs no credit card and covers up to five drivers — enough to send a real D906 invitation and watch a real check come back against a driver you actually employ.