The Importance of Driver Licence Checks

Published on August 18th, 2022 | by Sophie West

Research from the AA shows that 1 in 650 drivers are driving while disqualified, and 1 in 300 have a revoked or expiring license*. This could therefore mean without regular license checks you may be exposed to additional risk, and not be compliant with your duty of care responsibilities.

There are many different categories to driving licences and a key part of running a fleet of any type – car, van, truck, minibus or 4×4 – is making sure that your employees drive legally with a valid driving licence. There are variations arising that may impose on an employee’s validity to drive such as; country of origin and vehicle classification. These checks are not only necessary for company vehicles but for any vehicle an employee drives during working hours.

Regular driver licence checks should form part of any health and safety policy at a company where employees drive on business.

What’s your responsibility as an employer?

As an employer, it is your duty of care to ensure that professional drivers, company car scheme ‘opt out’ drivers, grey fleet and pool car users are appropriately licensed and insured to drive. This ensures that in the event of an incident, risks for the employee and employer are mitigated and compliance improved.

Conducting a driver licence check and gaining validation can bring a number of benefits to your business, including:

• Reduced risk of misinterpreted information, fraud and dishonesty,
• Confidence that your drivers are appropriately licensed and insured,
• Avoidance of potential fines under corporate manslaughter and health and safety legislation.

What are the issues of not checking an employees driving licence?

Asking drivers for their licence for your organisation to check isn’t enough as an RAC insurance survey found that 25% of motorists surveyed who already had penalty points did not inform their employer when they received them. By not declaring penalty points can make an employees insurance policy worthless if they were involved in an accident, and if they were driving on company insurance could invalidate any claim.

Make sure you have a well managed driver licence check policy

Ensuring you have a robust and well-managed policy, with a signed and dated copy of the employees licence on record may protect the company and its managers/directors, should the worst happen.

Best practice suggests that driving licence checks are carried out on an annual basis. To help with administering this process, we offer to carry out driver licence checks on your behalf.  Depending on the risk factors it may be of benefit to your company to check all employees licences on a 6month period.

Agility can also carry out ‘ad hoc’ checks based on requests from yourselves along with checks to be used at the employment stage to verify that applicants are qualified for the job. To find out more contact us or call our team on 01527 571605.