It is now recognised and widely accepted standard practice for companies in the UK who require or allow their employees to drive in the course of their employment to check the employee’s driving licence to confirm its validity and ensure that the licence entitlement is correct for the vehicle being used. This driving licence check and validation needs to be part of a regular checking routine that forms part of a driver management policy founded on driver risk profiles and the Company’s activities. As a general rule, those drivers with more points on their licence should be checked more frequently to ensure that they remain entitled to drive. Failure to perform this most basic of checks will be seen as a breach of the duty of care owed to other employees and road users as well as a breach of the statutory obligation under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. With increased fines running into millions of pounds and the possibility of key managers and directors being imprisoned for flagrant cases under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, there is really no excuse or justification not to perform this check – particularly given the availability of services such as LICENCECHECK to validate and manage drivers, and the DVLA’s own service.

---

The LICENCECHECK service is a secure hosted service that allows companies to implement effective and cost efficient driving licence checking and validation of employee licences. But the service is much more than a simple method of driving licence verification. It also provides fleet managers and administrators with the tools and reports to manage their drivers by risk profile or driver type such that re-checks are carried out regularly and contemporaneously as part of an automated process. The service will flag up warnings, pending expirations and will automatically re-check following expiration dates to ensure that the driver continues to be lawfully entitled to drive a vehicle. LICENCECHECK will also manage the consent process so that employers will have the right to carry out an online driving licence check, as frequently as required, over the 3 year period for which the consent remains effective.

---

LICENCECHECK uses a secure link to the DVLA’s Access to Driver Data service. Since the abolition of the paper counterpart in 2015, this represents the only definitive source of driver history and licence entitlement. Our service works in real-time and is intended to be available to subscribers on a 24/7/365 basis. A request from LICENCECHECK to the DVLA online service will typically return the results to the secure client account in less than 15 seconds. The details returned to the service will incorporate any changes made to the driver record within the previous 24 hours by the DVLA. An “Immediate Actions” screen will warn employers of any expirations, disqualifications or revocations that have been returned by the service following a request to the DVLA for that particular driver. So Companies are in a position to take prompt action to take the driver off the road until the situation is resolved. The LICENCECHECK Support Team will also telephone clients where a licence has been reported as revoked or a driver disqualified as an additional security measure. The Support Team will also investigate and help resolve those cases where a request to the DVLA fails to return a result because the driver record has been suppressed.

For those companies employing vocational drivers, LICENCECHECK provides additional functionality by allowing CPC, Tacho Card, ADR, MiDAS and medical information and expiration dates to be manually entered into the driver record. Once the details have been included, they will be reported to managers in the same way as the other licence data.

For a free no obligation quotation to provide online driving licence checks and management services, contact us on the telephone number or fill in the quick quote form on the website.