Abolition of Drivers Licence Counterpart – Delayed

The abolition of the paper counterpart of the photocard driving licence is just a matter of months away. Another target of the Government’s ‘red tape challenge’, it will eventually be consigned to the history books, like the tax disc before it, deemed surplus to requirements in a digital age.

However, the paper counterpart’s demise presents fleets with a duty-of-care quandary; how will they check employees are legally entitled to drive?

Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is developing an online platform to provide fleets, who currently rely on checking the paper counterpart, with a viable solution.

Called Share My Driving Record (SMDR), it is in the final phase of testing with fleets feeding back to the DVLA on how it might be improved before it goes live.

“By accessing our SMDR service, individual drivers will be able to generate a PDF document,” says a DVLA spokesman.

“This will include a unique access code which third parties can use to verify the details on the document.

“Third parties can choose to accept the PDF or they may verify its information by visiting www.gov.uk and entering the access code and last eight digits of the driving licence number.”

The authentication code will be time bound to ensure that the information is current at the time of issuing the PDF document.

The third party will be presented with a limited view of the driver’s entitlement and endorsement information direct from DVLA’s driver database.

DVLA has confirmed that its online driver licence service will ‘initially’ be free to fleets, but it has abandoned its original plan to abolish the paper counterpart on January 1, 2015.

“The driving licence counterpart will be abolished in early 2015,” says the spokesman.

“An appropriate date is currently under consideration and will be announced in due course.”

The eight million drivers who have only a paper licence will see no change – DVLA has “no plans” to recall these. In this case points will still be added to the paper licence.

However, the 33 million with both photocard and paper counterpart will be able to discard the counterpart – it will have no legal status; all updates will occur online.

The clock is ticking and fleets will have to get to grips with the new platform to complete in-house checks or outsource the checking of licences to a third-party provider.

Please contact us at Autoprocurement Ltd if you would like to find out about our Driver Check service. 

Why licence checking matters

More than one in every 200 company car, van and truck drivers does not hold a valid licence to legally drive their company vehicle, according to Licence Bureau checks.

While there is no specific legislation that requires an employer to check an employee’s driving licence, it is an offence if a company allows an employee to drive a vehicle for work without a valid licence.

The Health and Safety Executive’s guide Driving at Work says employers should satisfy themselves that drivers are competent and capable, and asks the question: do you check the validity of the driving licence on recruitment and periodically?

Dave Ashford, KBC Logistics transport and compliance manager, received a visit from the police after previously checking driving licences and counterparts every six months.

One of KBC’s drivers had been involved in an accident in his private car and the Essex-based haulier was subsequently notified that the driver was disqualified.

The driver’s licence had been manually checked in November 2012, but Ashford was not aware he had been subsequently disqualified in March 2013. Fortunately the driver was being used on shunting duties and not driving a truck on public roads.

Ashford could have faced notable penalties for both himself and the company if the accident had happened at the wheel of a KBC truck.

Ashford says: “Even though on this occasion I had fulfilled my obligation, it was a scary prospect to think that this could have been any one of my operational drivers. It identified a flaw in my systems.”

Fleets need to be sure the details provided are accurate, a licence hasn’t been revoked or endorsed without the employer realising it and what limitations there may be on its use.

Licence Bureau analysed more than a quarter of a million licence checks it made during 2013 and discovered an initial failure rate of around one in 200.

Provisional licence holders accounted for the top two spots, with revoked, expired and disqualified making up the top five.

At the licence recheck stage, the potential rate of failure fall to just over one per 500 and the reasons are very different from initial checks. Drivers with expired licences are top of the list followed by disqualified drivers.

Without a licence recheck, both these issues would not have been picked up by the employer, potentially causing huge duty-of-care issues as those categories of driver aren’t insured in the event of an accident.

The provisional licence issue disappears at the recheck stage as these drivers have been immediately dealt with after the initial check.

It also appears to be a growing problem. Richard Brown, managing director of Licence Check, says: “In October 2014 alone, we have seen the highest number of unlicensed, disqualified and/or revoked drivers through our service.”

Author – Gareth Roberts, Courtesy of Fleet News