Trade plate drivers arrive in numbers, work a fortnight and move on.

Vehicle delivery is a licence checking problem shaped almost entirely by turnover. Most fleets check a stable list of people over and over; a movement business checks a list that is constantly changing, where a large share of drivers are self-employed or supplied by an agency and may do three jobs and never be seen again.

That inverts the usual difficulty. The repeat check is the easy part. The onboarding is the bottleneck, and every hour it takes is an hour a vehicle sits waiting to be moved. When checks are slow, what actually happens is that the first job goes out before the check comes back — and nobody writes that down anywhere.

So the work has to be done in bulk. A batch of drivers imported from whatever the agency sent over, invitations out to all of them at once, drivers authorising themselves on their own phones, and a clear view of who has responded and who has not. What is left for an administrator is chasing a handful of stragglers, which is a task that can actually be finished, rather than typing in the hundreds who already complied.

And because these drivers are moving other people's vehicles, frequently valuable ones, the record of having checked is precisely what the vehicle's owner and their insurer will ask you for.