Licensing & duties
What is a driver licence check?
A driver licence check verifies that a driver holds the correct entitlement for the vehicle, and that it is current and free of restrictions the operator needs to know about.
It needs doing at recruitment and repeating, because entitlements are lost between checks — through endorsements, medical revocation or simple expiry of a vocational entitlement.
Frequency is usually set by risk, with drivers carrying endorsements checked more often. What matters is that the interval is defined and adhered to rather than left to judgement.
Checking against the licensing authority's own records rather than a photocard is the only way to see the current position, since a card can be held after the entitlement has gone.
What goes wrong in practice
- Checked at recruitment and never again.
- Photocards inspected rather than records checked.
- Endorsements noticed but no change made to the check frequency for that driver.