Posted: Tuesday, 22 July 2014
UK law requires business owners and managers to take every step that is reasonably practical to ensure the safety of workers. For companies that own vehicles used in the course of daily operations, part of that responsibility is to ensure any employee using such vehicles is eligible to drive on UK roads. According to a recent article published by The Telegraph, manual licence checking via a photo card and its counterpart is not enough to meet the legal responsibility.
The Telegraph reports statistics from DVLA suggesting that some 22% of drivers have out-of-date licences. Some simply forget to renew their licences while others are deliberately violating the law. When drivers need to present licences in order to use company vehicles, some are going to great lengths to be deceptive.
It is apparently quite common for a driver with penalties to contact the DVLA to report a lost licence. They are sent a replacement licence with the accrued penalties. However, they show the old licence, which appears clean, to their employers. The only way to truly know the history of any given driver is to undertake electronic licence checking by way of the DVLA database. That is where Fleet Licence Check can help.
Our company offers licence-check services in addition to fleet claims management. We check licences through a direct and secure connection to the DVLA database, returning results directly to the client. It only takes a minimal amount of information for us to conduct checks on all your employees who drive company vehicles.
We cannot stress enough how important it is to carry out proper licence checks in order to meet one's legal responsibility. For example, let us assume you manually check the licence of a new worker before turning over the keys to the company vehicle. Let us also assume that the individual safely operates the vehicle for a few weeks or months, before an accident on a busy city street result in serious injuries or death. If it is discovered that the worker was ineligible to drive, you and your company could be held liable for not doing more to properly check the licence. That liability could result in civil penalties as well as criminal prosecution.
The risk of not checking licences electronically is not worth it when you consider the kind of damage your company and your reputation could sustain. Yes, it does cost money to use a service like ours. Nevertheless, in the long run, it is substantially less when compared to the potential cost of an accident involving an unqualified driver.
Fleet Licence Check has been in business handling motor claims since 1987. Our licence checking service currently involves approximately 20,000 annual checks for motor manufacturers in the UK. We also provide this service to small and midsized companies looking for bespoke solutions. For the best value, you can combine our motor claims and licence checking services into a single, comprehensive package covering all of your business needs.
Source: The Telegraph