Checking that any employees driving vehicles for your organisation are eligible to drive is a fundamental aspect of fleet compliance.
Not to mention it’s a moral duty to ensure that your drivers and other road users are as safe as they can possibly be.
There are serious consequences – both financial and possibly life-changing – to allowing a driver behind the wheel of a company vehicle if they’re not safe or eligible to do so.
The only way you can be sure if a driver is eligible to drive is to check their driving licence status.
Unfortunately, some fleet managers are not aware of the legal obligations surrounding licence checking.
While some are simply too busy dealing with the day-to-day ‘firefighting’ of running a busy fleet to check their drivers’ licences on a regular enough basis.
Then there are some fleet managers who find excuses or run into problems trying to check their employees’ licences.
In this article we consider some of the pros and cons of checking your drivers’ licences to highlight these issues – as well as explaining how the right software and systems solves any cons.
Pros of Checking Drivers’ Licences
As a fleet manager or employer, it’s essential that you check your drivers’ licences. Here are three key reasons to illustrate why:
You Mitigate the Risk of Financial Penalties
The bottom line is that it’s a criminal offence to allow anyone to drive a company vehicle without a valid driving licence.
The only way you can be sure that a driver has a valid licence is to check it yourself. Asking an employee if they are eligible to drive is not enough: mistakes happen, and unfortunately some people are not honest.
If a driver is found to be driving without a valid licence, there can be some serious consequences for you as an employer, your organisation, and the driver.
Improve Safety for Other Road Users
As an employer, you have a duty of care under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to ensure your employees – and those around them – are as safe as possible.
This means checking that your drivers are fit for driving. Not just checking their eligibility to drive, but also that they’re physically and mentally competent.
It’s Quick and Efficient With the Right Software
Two of the biggest pain points for fleet managers is that checking licences is time consuming, and therefore expensive.
Using the Gov.uk service to check one-off licences is time-consuming. There are alternative methods that are a lot quicker, however, such as using FleetCheck LicenceAssured.
Using LicenceAssured, once a driver has given you permission to pull their licence details from DVLA you can do so at your leisure for up to 3 years.
You can set reminders using the FleetCheck management system, automatically perform annual checks, and keep a closer eye on high risk drivers.
Cons of Checking Drivers’ Licences
While there is no real excuse for not checking your drivers are eligible to drive company vehicles, there are some cons that prohibit or can make the process a lot more difficult for some fleet managers.
These are:
It’s Time Consuming
A lot of fleet managers think that using Gov.uk to check their drivers’ licences is the only way they can do so – but there are better alternatives.
Using Gov.uk is a painfully slow experience, so we developed FleetCheck LicenceAssured to solve this headache for fleet managers and speed up the process.
Using LicenceAssured you can check licences in bulk in a matter of minutes, set reminders so you never forget to check a licence, and most importantly, not have to worry about the compliance and GDPR side of things.
General Uncertainty Around Compliance
A lot of fleet managers are blissfully ignorant about the importance of checking their drivers’ licences, and therefore the risks involved with not checking them.
If that’s you and you’re reading this, you should book a demo of FleetCheck LicenceAssured as a member of our sales team and explain exactly how easy it can be to check your drivers’ licences and mitigate the liability you’re currently exposing your organisation to.
There are also a large number of fleet managers who know they should be checking their drivers’ licences, but simply do not have the time or resources to do it.
If this describes you, then you’re in no better a position than the fleet managers who are unaware of their legal obligations to carry out checks.