Driving Licence Verification & Driving Licence Checking
If you do nothing else as an employer, you should at least establish that those driving on behalf of your organisation are entitled to drive in the first place. If an employee does not have a valid driving licence, you could be seen to be condoning his or her actions in the event of a serious incident.
It’s difficult enough to establish for certain that a familiar UK licence is valid just by looking at it, so when it comes to licences issued by other countries how are you going to be certain that they are both legal and applicable to the type of vehicle your employee will drive? The answer, in all honesty, is that you can’t, unless you carry out driving licence checking through the DVLA, something that Driving Risk Management can arrange for you.
There are currently nearly a million drivers only three points away from a ban. Would all your employees own up to being disqualified if they knew it would probably cost them their job? There are also thousands of drivers out there now who have neglected to renew the photo card part of their licences, also rendering them illegal. In addition, many people forget to update their addresses when they move, which is another way to invalidate a licence. The only way you can be sure you don’t get caught up in this potential problem is to carry out proper driving licence verification.
The only paperwork involved is the mandate document that the individual driver needs to sign to authorise the DVLA to initiate the driver licence checking. From that point on, all the reporting is electronic and you will receive a detailed summary of the licence status of all those you nominate. Any driver that is close to losing his or her licence can then be subject to driving licence checking more frequently from that point on. The number of points and nature of the offence is also a useful pointer to that individual’s attitude to risk and responsible driving in the workplace.