Enforcement & standards
What is a prohibition notice?
A prohibition notice is an order issued by a DVSA examiner or the police preventing a vehicle being used until a defect is put right. It may take effect immediately or be delayed to allow the vehicle to be moved.
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<img src="https://fleetoptix.co.uk/glossary/prohibition-notice/diagram.svg" alt="prohibition notice — diagram from FleetOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://fleetoptix.co.uk/glossary/prohibition-notice">What is a prohibition notice?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://fleetoptix.co.uk">FleetOptix</a>
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</figure>A prohibition is a roadside judgement on the operator's system as much as on the vehicle. An immediate prohibition for something a walkaround check should have caught says more about the check than about the fault.
Prohibitions are recorded against the operator and feed the compliance score used to target enforcement, so the consequence outlasts the repair.
Clearing one requires the defect to be rectified and the vehicle presented for the prohibition to be lifted. Until then the vehicle is not available, which is usually the more immediate operational problem.
What goes wrong in practice
- A prohibition treated as a repair job rather than as evidence that a check failed, so nothing upstream changes.
- No internal review of how the defect passed the daily check and the last inspection.
- Prohibitions not tracked as a set, so a pattern across the fleet is never seen.