Why employers must regularly check their drivers’ licences
Because a licence is a photograph of a position that changes, and the position changes without anyone telling you.
A driver hands over their licence on their first day. It is correct. Three years later they hold nine points, their photocard expired eight months ago, and their entitlement to tow was never there in the first place. Nothing in that sequence involves anybody behaving badly. It is what happens to a fact that nobody rechecks.
The legal duty
Two pieces of legislation do most of the work here.
The Road Traffic Act 1988 requires a driver to hold a valid licence with the correct entitlement for the vehicle they are driving. Causing or permitting someone to drive without one is an offence for the person who permitted it, which is where an employer’s exposure begins.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 obliges an employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of employees and of others affected by the work. Driving on the employer’s behalf is work, and this is the duty that does not care whether the vehicle is a company car, a hired van or the employee’s own vehicle.
Neither imposes a checking schedule. What they impose is a position you have to be able to defend, and an employer who has never looked has no defence available.
What a check is looking for
Six things, and they fail in different ways.
Licence validity. Whether the licence is current, and whether the photocard behind it has expired. Photocards need renewing every ten years regardless of the entitlement, and a driver whose card has lapsed is committing an offence without necessarily knowing it.
Entitlement. Whether the driver holds the category for the vehicle. This is the one people assume is fine, and it is usually wrong in a narrow and specific way — a driver with category B who has never held C1, asked to take a 5-tonne van; a minibus driver whose D1 entitlement is coded not for hire or reward, carrying paying passengers.
Endorsements and penalty points. Points arrive between checks and are not volunteered. A driver on nine points is one offence from a totting-up disqualification, and there is no mechanism by which an employer learns that unless they look.
Disqualification. The one that matters most and shows up least. A disqualified driver at the wheel of your vehicle is uninsured, and that is true whether or not anyone knew.
Driver CPC. Professional lorry, bus and coach drivers must hold a current Driver Certificate of Professional Competence, carried as a Driver Qualification Card. It expires on its own five-year cycle and appears nowhere on a licence check.
Tachograph card. HGV and PSV drivers need a valid driver card, with an expiry of its own. Like the CPC, nothing about the licence tells you its state.
There is a seventh worth adding, because it is cheap to check and often wrong: the address on the licence. Drivers are required to keep it current, and a stale address is both an offence in itself and a reliable sign that nobody has looked at this licence in a long time.
Keeping the evidence
The check is half the job. The record of it is the other half, and it is the half that tends to be missing.
For each check, keep the date it was run, what came back — entitlements, endorsements, points, expiry dates — and what was done about anything that needed doing. A check that found six points and prompted no action, recorded as such, is a defensible position. The same check with no note attached is not.
Common practice is to retain these records for at least three years, and to be able to produce them on request for DVSA or the Health and Safety Executive. The reason to be able to produce them quickly is that the request usually arrives after something has happened.
Why once a year is the wrong cadence
Annual checking is the default almost everywhere, and it has an odd property: it applies exactly the same attention to your safest driver and your riskiest one.
A driver with a clean licence for fifteen years is unlikely to become a problem in the next twelve months. A driver who picked up six points last spring is in a different position, and an annual cycle means the next thing that happens to them is invisible for up to a year. The risk is not evenly distributed, but the checking is.
Frequency that follows the points closes the mismatch without anyone having to decide who the risky drivers are. It also costs less than checking everybody monthly, which is the usual alternative proposal.
What this looks like at scale
The arithmetic is what changes the problem. Fifty drivers on a quarterly cycle is two hundred checks a year — before you add the high-risk drivers who ought to be looked at monthly, and before any of the chasing that each check involves.
A more realistic shape: twenty HGV drivers and ten van drivers. The van drivers quarterly, three of the HGV drivers monthly because they are carrying points, the rest quarterly, and CPC and tachograph card expiry tracked across all twenty. Done by hand that is a standing commitment for somebody, every week, forever. It is not difficult work. It is simply work that never finishes, and it competes with work that has deadlines.
What it costs to find out afterwards
After an incident, the question is never whether you had a policy. It is what you knew about that driver, when you knew it, and whether you can show it.
That is a different question from the one a policy answers, and the honest position for a great many organisations is that they could not answer it — not through negligence, but because the evidence was spread across email, a spreadsheet and somebody’s memory.
What a check covers in full, or what it costs. The free trial runs thirty days, needs no credit card and covers up to five drivers — enough to take real drivers of yours through the whole cycle. If you would rather be shown round first, book a demo.