Blog
Guidance for people running transport operations
Practical writing on Operator Licences, Driver CPC and drivers' hours, from the team building FleetOptix.
What counts as a compliant operating centre?
An operating centre isn't just wherever vehicles happen to park overnight — it has to be specified on the licence and suitable for the fleet actually based there.
What happens if a driver's CPC lapses mid-assignment?
A driver with a lapsed CPC can't legally continue driving professionally — discovering this mid-shift is a far worse position than catching it weeks in advance.
The most common tachograph infringements, and why they keep happening
Most infringements aren't drivers deliberately pushing limits — they're small, technical breaches of ordering and frequency rules that are genuinely easy to get wrong under normal working pressure.
End-of-shift driver debriefs: turning a five-minute conversation into compliance data
A quick chat at the end of a shift catches things a form doesn't always draw out — but only if what's said actually gets written down somewhere it can be acted on later.
Tracking driver endorsements without waiting for a licence check to find them
A six-monthly check will eventually catch a new endorsement — but by then, a driver could have been operating with a licence status the operator no longer has an accurate picture of for months.
Vehicle off-road (VOR) tracking: why a defect log is only half the job
A defect logged and a vehicle actually taken off the road aren't automatically the same thing — the gap between the two is where a genuinely unroadworthy vehicle sometimes keeps running.
What a daily vehicle check actually needs to record
A walk-round check that finds nothing is only a useful record if it shows what was actually checked — not just a signature confirming a check happened.
Preparing for a DVSA maintenance investigation
A maintenance investigation isn't a surprise inspection of the yard — it's a records exercise, and the operators who come out of it well are the ones whose paperwork already tells a consistent story.